[853] Lock & Keeed

I messed up. I glanced at work emails as I started to wind down for the day, The Favourite paused and waiting. I recently switched supervisors, so I get revisions on submitted reports. Some things she said were reasonable, a good portion were not. I felt the need to correct what were obvious missteps in her perspective. As with most things I write in a “professional” setting, it was polite, but to the detailed point. I suspect a few more emails like that, and I’ll be reprimanded for insubordination.

After writing the email, I return to the movie, bed, and cuddling. I discovered my jaw clenched. I spent the better portion of the day in 90 degree weather, loading my truck with skids and pulling saplings. The sun beat down, I was sweating profusely. I got a little dizzy and wobbly hauling a heavy chain and hopping in and out of my truck. Never once did I clench my jaw.

The quick and superficial way would be to say “I hate my job.” I don’t. My job is incredibly easy. Talk to people, ask questions, fill out paperwork, and drive around the state. After a while, even if you’ve never heard or dealt with something before, you’ve heard and dealt with something similar. People are easy. They speak in predictable ways. They fuck up in similar fashion. If you’re paying attention, they all succumb to some underlying driving passion to fuck things up.

The problems of our poor or dumb clients are the simplest. Of course they’re maybe selling drugs, smoking a lot, or have one of a dozen things that would threaten the safety of their children going on. That’s built into the definitions of being dumb, in poverty, or both. The problems of our organization are legion, if not mythologies for our incredibly punitive behavior in the past, reinvigorated in each instant someone longs for the old days and wants to target you. The problems of the leadership are to play deaf, dumb, and blind to their complicity.

As such, you get an organization that isn’t very organized. You get individuals who concoct personal narratives about how much they care or love their job. Everything wrong gets swept under the blanket in the house they’ve built for themselves. Criticism is met with indifference. Change is impossible unless mindlessly dictated. No one is responsible. They have lines to sign and reports to approve, but they don’t have to be responsible, they have to whitewash their culpability.

This is what makes me clench my jaw. The spirit is not to inform and grow and drive towards a common aim. The spirit is to condemn, criticize, and target when you talk too much or find an opinion. The spirit isn’t to evolve to meet the needs, it’s to maintain the edifice and pageantry of “helping,” while aggressively enlisting the desperate and naive to carry out the whims of people unfamiliar with and uninterested in the job.

I’m so fucking tired of bitching about this place. I’m so fucking tired of wishing for an environment that makes sense. I’m tired of trying to expect from the world a degree of coherence that exists between me and like a dozen people. I’m tired of being driven mad in the middle of the night and dreading the next day. I’m tired of my heart and stomach retching respectively because I know it's not going to end and not going to get better.

I don’t even “just want a new job.” I want the same thing I always have. I want “security.” I want the freedom to read all day, without a second thought of the next bill. I want to get a week’s worth of land development done in a week, instead of when I can fit it on the weekends. I want to talk to people who respect what I’ve learned and how I operate, because it lends itself to all of us improving. I want to never have to clench my jaw again, because I’ve built an apparatus to work within that doesn’t fail for anything but good and/or wholly unknowable reasons.

I know why I’m failing at work. It’s the same reason the country flirts with fascism. The whole of our collective psyche is so devoid of personal responsibility, we’re merely mimicking the “boss” and “employee” dynamics like Trump plays “president.” No one is in charge of themselves, so they’re certainly not going to take charges from you about all it is they aren’t doing. They can’t listen, because they’re safe inside their own heads and assess, reciting the scripts that act as disinfectant for naughty expectations they might otherwise hold for themselves. There’s no direction. There’s no purpose. We’re all playing along, until you aren’t, and then you’re the enemy.

I’ve spent entirely too much time as the enemy. I never really wanted to fight to begin with. I wanted things to make sense. I argued religion not because I had a real opinion of religious people, but because the ones I spoke to were so incredibly full of shit, I saw the cascading consequences. I study philosophy or psychology to try and get a handle on how to navigate the world when people are gripped by varying degrees of bullshit. I try to figure out what spells I’m under that do not serve the “real” I’m always on about. This is a mechanism I can engage when I’m breaking down and losing myself to adrenaline, and it’s certainly something at play when it’s my job to parse out details in the story of a family’s life and whether or not children are safe.

Somewhere, I ask myself if I asked for this. I imagine a sort of “reincarnation room.” After you die, you return to this room (indeed, it’s the only “real” room) and just like in a video game, you select your character. You can program metrics, increase stats in something after you’ve leveled up during your life. You go in handicapped by things you royally fucked up. I wonder if I somehow landed on this being the best negotiation of my past lives up until this point. You don’t get to program a life without pain or sacrifice, but if you don’t hit the sweet spot, you’ll never get to ...the end?

Does it always have to be a fight? I remember my mom alleging this against me. With me, it was always a fight. She, completely devoid of introspection about the cause of the fight, and me, a child, were a solid recipe for a constant fight. Why would you trust an organization like DCS without a capacity to introspect? Why would you trust it if it behaved like a child? Why would you want it used as an aggressive tool to instill fear and punish or embarrass? What kind of sick fucks *enjoy* embedding themselves in people’s drama, and then pawn off their salivating on their resolve in the care of children? Do you want a cop itchy to shoot? Do you want a judge who loves punishment? It’s no wonder people treat us like law enforcement when we can fuck up your life in ways worse than they can.

I’m really trying. I’m trying not to spend on anything but gas and food. I’m trying to focus on my dozen projects that might cost gas and concrete. I’m trying to remember there’s a big bad world out there of potential directions that have nothing to do with this mid-sized county in a mid-sized state of over-sized individuals. I have so much to be grateful for. My world is always, excessively slowly, coming together. I continue to narrowly avoid catastrophic injury.

I just get 5 daily doses of being burned out and dragging my burned out corpse into burned out houses, reciting the same lines, piecing together things that we should never have allowed to become broken. I find myself explaining just how often it is we can’t do something as opposed to what we actually can or might one day. It’s embarrassing. It’s exhausting. It’s planting myself in the heart of an existential crisis about what to do for which I came up with solid answers many years ago; burn it down, take it over, or leave. It’s too disorganized to take over. Legitimately, the field changes every month or two, and you can’t keep the remotely useful players even on the board. I’m plotting to leave, in the abysmal job market. I still demand satisfaction, and something will need to burn. That tends to happen when I least plan or expect it to, so I’ll pay close attention to the times my jaw isn’t clenched, and something in me recognizes an opportunity.