[854] In The Beginning

 Let's try to get oriented.

That was my day so far after all, to be oriented. I took a “gig” at Boston Scientific assembling medical devices. It was pitched as 3 12 hour shifts, overtime if desired, and with many ways in which you can learn more and climb the ranks. About two hours into orientation, it was clear they are massively understaffed, still bitter about a billion dollar fine from 2006 (as though they don't have the money), and overtime will probably be more mandatory than “convenient extra money.”

Their orientation was similar to the pageantry of the “training” at DCS and Lifeline. Everyone pretend to read 15 pages of excessively detailed descriptions of what bins to throw things in and who to call if you happen upon a hazardous waste spill. Confirm you've read the updated policy! There will be a quiz! ::chuckle chuckle::. If you're big enough, it behooves you to have as much written down to avoid lawsuits and prove to the people giving you money and licenses that you're paying attention. Before I started regularly engaging with this working world, I didn't realize how all-encompassing the grand joke really was.

I'm reassured that there are collections of basically together people willing and capable of consistently following safe practices that allow for the tools that are going to crawl through my body and break-up plaque. Just like I was assured when I met a fairly robust group of people I would trust to oversee the process by which you do or do not lose your parental rights. At the same time, cracks show pretty quickly, and we can mark this as my first radar pings that I'm going to have to construct a context and narrative that keeps me idling at Boston in the same way I have for every job I've had previously.

While that nothing-burger is cooking, the land and our lives are moving at a better pace. We've cleared ¼ acre where 9 different gardening experiments can take place at once. Allie is testing and sampling the soil so we can experiment with brick building and deciding what to plant. I've got the bones of the new shed laid out and rearing to be set and attached. I've got plans for a fire pit installation that will not only serve as a giant display piece, but hopefully pool heater and oven. It will probably be a month or so, but I intend to get a home extension completed by the end of the year. Allie got an incredible job with the opportunity to transform Spencer and parlay or her contacts into things we can develop. We've got plans for years.

The contrast between my experience and what I gather from others' I can rarely find the words for. I reiterate my pace, my values, and my practice, and when enabled, I watch them manifest in a great relationship, the transformation of my environment, and the efficient consumption of my earnestly enjoyed indulgences. I see the “business world” versions of trying to get everyone on the same page of how to “best practice” and ensure the profits continue to roll in. Every single environment has that set of values, delineated in a thousand pages of policy, or signaled in the behavior of the “leadership” and their adherents.

This is when I start to consider how often I hear about Trump being the symptom and not the cause. This is why when I really let myself believe and let it sink in how depraved we must be on the whole, I can access the darkest thoughts about the impending doom or violence. Your values can be what you fight for, or they can be what you cobble together as leftovers from your ideals. They can be the doublespeak that gets you to kill yourself while claiming you've never felt so alive. They can be the simple lockstep to what you've never known otherwise. It's excessively easy to be bad or break things, and it gets exponentially worse when you can't acknowledge that you've been working in a bad or broken system from the start. Cue the racists perpetually curious for what all the fuss is about, or DCS panicked pull-cord dummy phrases about protecting children.

We're barely evolved to cope with our own lives, let alone the needs of billions and infinite permutations of advanced economies and culture clashes. Our heroes are often the most exploitative or poorly understood for their capriciousness and history. The justifying mechanism we use to keep us trapped in a parallel reality that maintains our mood or stress levels is the exact tool stuck crooked and forward creating a spiral begging to crash in service to our hypocrisy. He can't be serious! They surely well know otherwise. It won't get me! As they struggle to breath or hide their zombie bite. Things could always be worse. While they've never known what it is to feel better.

I think the kind of sacrifices I've made in the relationships I used to have are the exact kind people should be making in their own lives. I think you need to cut off and shit on your fascist or emotionally abusive family members. I think you need to compromise creature comforts and collaborate in circles that have better ideals and practical goals which can pragmatically affect or subvert the broken systems. I think when you find a pocket of sanity, you don't get to forget that, if you had to cut it from the cold dead hands of the world around you, the world around you is cold and dead and you have a lot of work so that it doesn't remain that way. I think you need to get into fights and feel your chest swell with the unknown and that it needs to scare you less than what you know already.

We've gotten off so easy being able to pawn our responsibility onto internet versions of words and action. We're still practically begging minority groups to get a touch more violent and organized so we don't otherwise have to dip our feet into generalized horror. It's a shared horror to be sure, but those forced to engage with it have a perspective we can't tolerate. Or, we pretend we can't tolerate it because pick-your-favorite throwaway sentiment about our own mental insufficiency and life stress. I caught a Jordan Peterson quote about there always being a price to pay for anything you do. You can either introduce the cost into your being and build something within you and the world that remains vigilant and prepared, or you'll break under the weight of what went ignored.

Less abstractly, I can draw a direct line from the things I sacrificed to live on this land, and the benefits I've been seeking. I still can't take 20 minute hot showers with water that doesn't often smell like sulfur. But, I don't have a water bill, which adds up, especially if you want to water ¼ acre. I can also transport fresher water or build a filter or conceive of a half dozen other ways to fix the problem that will not only keep me pliable and creative, but better informed. There's bugs and Trump flags and I have to drive 20-45 minutes to remote civilization, but I don't have a homeowners association. I just dug a hole I'm working on how to swim in, satisfying a dream to have a pool since my mom filled ours in. My conversations are now about how to turn-out and take back the country. My property value has doubled since I've been here.

We can all get by. Probably, you'll always have some way to pay the rent or soft enough crash if you're in my socioeconomic circle. We're exactly the ones who need to be making bigger pushes and bigger sacrifices now. What didn't our parents do? I know for most of us it wasn't stay together, find themselves able to comfortably afford our schooling, and they weren't listening to the science. Aren't we playing the same games? I'm 4 years older than my dad when he had me, and I haven't had a single job longer than 2 ½ years. My generation is the one nut-kicked repeatedly with economic crises, pills galore, and debt exhaustion. Why aren't we all in little Hobbit huts around the land, saving, creating, and practicing the life our children will need to normalize in order to survive?

It's not getting better folks. It's getting so bad we're literally begging for The United States to adopt a dictatorship. Parallels to WWII and Rome are all over the place. We're dying, a lot, of preventable things, not just Covid-19, but of being fat and sad and sick as fuck. You don't have a retirement fund, and in the blink of an eye, you can't tell if this is written by philosophizing angst-ridden 16-year-old Nick P. or the “mature and methodical” yet still pretty hard to understand 32-year-old one, Steven Pinker be damned. What's it gonna take? Or are you already dead?

I know that we're always going to need more help, escape plans, and deliberately creative fixes to the problems happening now and how much worse they will manifest in the future. Ask yourself what you have that's going to outlast you. Tell me, at this pace, in this shit storm, are we going to limp each agonizing step until we consider it merciful to drop dead, or are we going to “radically” respond to the forecast and build the requisite shelter? Are we going to approach the world and each other with the spirit of shared sacrifice and long-term goals? Are we going to allow ourselves to believe we don't have to keep playing things by ear because we're demanding things to believe in and trust?

I suspect no. I can't and won't save you anymore than the people's behavior I'm responding to suggests anyone's going to save me. It's got to be a joint effort. It's gonna be more work than you're used to; it was certainly more than I anticipated to even flirt with having a floor. Write about the alternatives. Plot your future. Ask if it's enough, if the excuses are strong enough, if you'll feel “fixed” or confident, or if you'll just be getting by. Then ask what could be if we combined forces. Ask yourself if Nick P. who's meticulously bitched and complained and screamed and fought and engendered all the personal and professional baggage can see the light ahead, in spite of unremitting chaos, why can't I? I found help. We continue to do the actual work to render the chaos mute or manageable in how we organize. I can't do it alone and neither can you.