[856] Charge

 I'm such a pill.

For as frivolous, obscene, or earnestly ridiculous as I may be, I take things seriously. Whether it's a function of my quasi-compulsive thought processes, or some measure of earned wisdom, consequences are not lost on me. I know what can be achieved with the right amount of effort, resources, or perspective. I know something so obvious as the observable circumstances under which I grew up and in my engagement with this, insane, but practically magic form of existence manifested in the modern world.

Something I sincerely dislike is “it could always be worse.” I find this to be immensely abused to let yourself off the hook for behaving badly. Oh, you only drunkenly accosted 2 people instead of burned down the bar and crashed driving home? Use this to contrast your bad behavior in the relationships you keep or how you let yourself be abused at work. There's battered-woman lite at many levels.

To some degree, this makes sense. We're invested in each other. We're ignorant to how bad things can get, or we're perfectly aware of how much worse they were before. We make the very human leap to then assuming what we're currently doing is correct or actually better as opposed to a different kind of bad. Over time, I've had a significantly harder time persuading myself otherwise; damn near everything is life or death. The easy stuff is like picking what flavor ice cream. Everything else reverberates throughout space and time.

As such, even as I find more refined degrees of comfort, I'm still unnerved. My focus is the next battle. My task is to distinguish being a millionaire trying to be a billionaire, from being a peasant with a rod verses a knight with a sword or king with a legion. You can pursue endlessly extravagant gradients of personal satisfaction, or you can wake up to your responsibility to the (sort of) universal task of moving “consciousness” into a direction that is worthwhile, sustainable, and aware - willing to take responsibility.

I've only been a wage slave. That isn't to say I haven't done jobs under the table or opened my own business. It means I've been at the mercy of forces that superseded my economic interests in the direct path of my efforts to capitalize. My rent was exploitative. I've literally lent my body to “science,” code named “your future medical debt and/or addiction.” I've known since I was a teenager that I was never going to get where I truly wanted to be working for someone else. I knew my effort wouldn't even lend itself to a minimum of what society previously agreed upon as a tenable wage.

I'm ready to be disappointed again. I'm ready to go door-to-door. I'm ready to hopefully lose (not that much) money in service to putting myself out there as someone who knows what he's worth, and is going to keep looking until he finds a way to sustain himself. I'm ready to just sit and learn new things until I'm certified in random things so maybe I just work from home. I'm ready to stop pretending there is any iteration of “big corporation” or its analogue that is going to comport with my moral underpinning or sense of futile indignity.

I talk a lot about trying to get a “floor.” I haven't specifically defined that floor, but I've rarely allowed myself to feel as though there is one under me at all. I have a floor though. I have land. I have a house. I have bills that are affordable with even the most transitory of lifestyle and odd-jobery. It is built into my being to read, learn, try, and find what I obsess over. It is my floor to get questions answered, garner attention, retain and promote enthusiasm, and engage with areas of life that people consider “too much.”

I've been humbled, I suppose, in getting older, and “breaking” by getting “normal jobs.” I'd had like 15, never longer than my first at like 2 years and 3 months. I've lasted in places where I convinced myself it was about the “culture” or “people like me.” The reality is that they aren't like me. They're, often, going to be either in the same job or one like it the rest of their lives. They, perhaps dream, but don't beat themselves up to the point of fighting with their supervisors, organizing their life beyond paycheck to paycheck, or dreaming they're going to potentially shift the course of history.

This is the rarefied ego and air. For all of the worthwhile, hard-working, sincere, and funny people in the world, overwhelmingly (and who would blame them) they are trying to get by. I'm not. I still want the world, even if I've been camera shy and busied my plate with the perturbations of southern Indiana poverty.

As with pretty much everything, I'm over-complicating things. Just like I learned how useless my “business plan” was when opening the coffee shop. There's thinking about a way to do things, and there's doing them. Did I have a good enough plan or time estimation in going into the shed tear down? Fuck no. Where's the shed? Torn down. Where are 1500 bricks listed for free? Where am I but here getting microscopically indignant and parsing out my plans to make it simple and return to the child that knocked on doors to mow lawns and sell candy?

There's a very disingenuous part of me that doubts my sincerity. I don't know how to explain it. No matter how hard I work. No matter how long it takes me to continually show you what I do with my best and worst ideas, I still think I'm entirely full of shit. At least, part of me does. It says, “Just keep the easy-enough job.” It says, “Hundreds of people are going to look at you like an idiot, and you're going to come home with $0 to $20 for a task that should've cost $100.” It would criticize the font on my flier. It acts like I can't stop, add, change, subtract, or do whatever is most prominently in front of me. It's obsessive runoff.

I find myself so often saying to myself, “If I died tomorrow.” It's like a catch phrase at this point. What was I doing today? A job. Preparing to argue why I won't be working overtime and rehearsing the speech no one is interested in hearing about labor rights and expectations. Is that what I want to be doing with my time? No. On balance, would the time I spent doing that be any more or less wasted knocking on a door or handing out a flier? It's not like my expectations are high or would fall outside of, “You know, for every several hundred people you meet, 1 or 2 are okay.” That's what I'm working with. I can build a budget around that. I have the time to fail that often. I've stated several times how much I want to fail forward.

I just had the thought “nothing's stopping me.” That's a terrifying thing in and of itself. I'm not a perfectly good person. The more I get that sense about me, the more precarious my place in life and relationships become. I need to be able to entertain that thought in a more evolved and responsible way. Will I? I think I must, or I'll just spin and write blogs like this after my next gig-job fails under the same scrutiny.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm ready to “be all I can be.” I don't even know what that means. I see people abuse their reach, money, and every small ounce of power they get to ensure the world around them burns that much hotter. Worse than that, the one's who might or should have more power are often scapegoated, abused, and taken advantage of. I'm wary of power. I'm wary of my attitude once I get it, because I carry an insane amount of resentment and desire for revenge. The argument could be made for me kind of “idling” with my brick projects so I never get the chance to burn down the forest. You'd think my pretension would kick in and save me from myself. I am better than all that, after all...right?

I'll never hate myself more than if I don't try. I need tangible data to depersonalize it. I need to know, “it took me (x) hours to knock on [y] doors, I can cover so many towns over the course of so many weeks. A small investment in this tool expands my potential earnings along these lines and so on. I need to ensure I don't go about it like an obsessed person like I did in the past. I need to pace myself. I love that Allie is gardening, and the pace of what it takes to cultivate soil and an environment in tune with itself is one that has to embed in your expectations. The wheel is still turning, and maybe turning out the means and method in a way that comport with all of the troublesome impulses and pauses.

I really want to be an example. I want to be proof that you actually are as full of shit as I think you are about why you can't or won't do something, and I want to shove the remnants of the parts of me that sound like you so far away I practically forget what they feel or sound like. I can still always count on spite. The trick is not presenting the angry and impatient cunt to potential clients. Somehow, it can be done, and with so much less than I think it requires or at least as little as I've built into my basic mode of being. Wish me very specific luck related to monetary gains, as I pretty much have everything else I need.