[838] Need For Speed

I rarely do this (write at random? That's all I do...), but I've got some time before an appointment scheduled late and far away, and for whatever reason I'm a touch anxious.

I know this job isn't worth it. I know it's not worth my time tonight, waiting for an hour in the parking lot before I drive a half hour in the opposite direction of where I live. I know I have a project waiting for me at home I want to keep playing with that I won't really be able to without it being exponentially darker and colder. I know that I'm on another trek to waste my time in service to children who aren't in danger based on a call that we should never have gotten but for bad protocol at the probation offices. I feel less bad about this waste of time than I normally do, but I acknowledge it as explicitly a waste.

As well, I've been trying to find someone to go to this concert on Thursday. When I say things like "I don't have friends," I mean it took chance and rehearsal to get even a consistent bowling/trivia time set up. I don't have a "Yes, let's go" type person in my circle. So now I'm weirdly inviting the entire office to wing it at a band they haven't heard of at a bar that's less than ideal. The weird thing about it isn't my shopping around the ticket, it's that it's predicated mostly on my dislike for the idea of wasting money. I'd rather someone I don't really know or get along with have a mediocre time actually "doing the thing" verses have a ticket get burned? That's weird.

I've gotten a touch loose with my spending. That means I spent $200 on things I've been meaning to buy for months-years. The paycheck that will put me to within hundreds of being out of debt is submitted. I've picked up odd-jobs on Craigslist that might prove able to trickle in $60-$200 here and there. I'm feeling like I'm back in a kind of fervent swing that causes unnecessary tension and attempts to insert myself into situations that might prove more stimulating than whatever it is I'm currently looking at. That I'm even writing this blog right now is evidence of it.

I'm really starting to feel the potential life changing state of having things paid well in advance and being flatly indulgent. I'm feeling comfortable getting the tools and odds and ends to round out the kind of existence my Amazon wishlist has been flirting with. I'm getting a touch more callous and disingenuous in my commentary. It's a slow creep, but it's creeping. If there were some kind of cosmic balancing act regarding our individuated energy, it's clearly going to take more than 2 years of a job that epitomizes joyless slog to erase my underling impulse and drive.

I'm moving into the "taking" mindset. Nick P., so mythologized, doesn't haplessly beg for someone to accompany him to a show, he practically picks them up and takes them. This is the internal conflicting impulses. How to defer to a kind of "professional" tone and atmosphere, that dead-inside pleasantries of daily interaction, while your chest is raging to encourage the entire party to jam the fuck out. Do you know how often I dream about when I was called on stage at Warped? I need that insane attention and energy infused into whatever I'm doing.

I had the thought, which sorta prompted me bothering to write, that what we do isn't helping. We put "happily ever after" dialogue atop the broad picture of poverty or generally shit behavior. You got your kids returned? Cool. What horrors would we discover, on both ends, that spoke to why they were removed in the first place? Things that weren't fixed in 6 months of on and off therapy?

It made me think of the idea for "radical selfishness." There's a Jesus Freak guy in our office. Incredibly well-adjusted, personable, engaged with his families, nice as hell, but goddammit, he's a Jesus freak. The story about the strip club comes up. He's never been. What kind of booze are we going to give the homeless population at Shalom Center in order to get credible information? He doesn't drink. He says he drank all of the non-alcoholic beer at his bachelor party; I make the joke that's when his real dark side comes out and he pisses on the strippers. That's not a joke for Jesus land.

I still conceive of faith as a form of my so-named radical selfishness, but in its naive state. It's a prescribed story superimposed on the person underneath who might actually get off on pissing on strippers. There's the self-righteous do-gooder faith in this field from those who routinely think they can genuinely "always act in the best interest of the child." That they're the one acting is all they need; don't look too close.

But you still need to feel good about what you do. Or you need to couch what you do into the overall story about how you feel good about yourself. I feel good when I'm killing it. It doesn't really matter what I'm doing, I want to be the best, even when I think it would cost considerably more than it is worth to be so. (This was a big reason I stopped playing video games for a long time. Perfect scores and achievements be dammed when paired with an obsessive mind.) So I do the odd-job in the middle of the day for the extra $60. I schedule to meet someone in between wipes of my ass. That's above and beyond the call of duty. That's, until now, the story you tell yourself about yourself about the kind of person you are and how the "secret" to getting shit done isn't so secret.

I hadn't been clenching my jaw for what seemed like weeks. I had settled into something. I had figured a way of cycling through the vague anxiety and just powered through the day. The tension is coming back. That tension is "hope" for as much as I hate the word. That tension is acknowledging that potential inability to reign in the horse of jokes about pissing on strippers and the money to buy things in service to increasingly obnoxious attempts to show you what's going on in my mind. Part of me is just screaming non-stop from inside my chest.

I'm leaving for that appointment soon. It's going to be a late night. I'll probably stay up later than I should after making a meager attempt to assemble the first piece of my PVC tent idea. I'll think about showering and then figure I can just keep not standing close to people and pretend I'm going to get up early enough to go to Planet Fitness where it could last longer than 4 minutes. The mundane will hopefully keep winning (keeping me calm) until I've saved enough that were something to go critical it wouldn't register as a threat to my progress. Cross your fingers.