[870] Maybe Tomorow

What do I really want?

There are days in which I feel I want to do everything, be everything, and experiment. At the same time, there still remains a sense of longing for something else. At least, something is missing from whatever it is I'm engaging in.

What's missing?

It might be described as “flow.” It might be the quiet contentedness of stumbling into something where you can lose yourself. It might be finally believing that you see yourself on a trajectory, individuated to the point where your behavior isn't motivated by fashioning or protecting a “brand,” but can stand as vital to the whole on its own.

I talk a lot about things that I would like. I'd like more space. I'd like all the stuff on Amazon lists. I'd like to learn or read or play video games and not feel like my time is, by default, guiltily handicapped by something else. I've worked to free myself from “classic” obligations, but they still rhyme with the problems of the time. My debt is the kind people with student loans almost get angry at me for referencing. My house and person could stand to be insured. My interpersonal squabbles don't make or break me and escalate to the degree I can be persuaded to keep stoking feelings that struggle to remain compelling for long.

I suppose I want to be left alone. I remember playing a strategy game in college well into the night. I had to design a route for these invading bug creatures to get killed before getting to the other side. My RA came by, made a smart-ass comment about how my design didn't seem to be working, and then went to bed. This was a popular game at the time and there were several videos of the “right” design that would allow you to utilize the tools to kill the bugs and juggle them between two exits. I don't know if I would have discovered that method by myself. My RA's smart-ass comment all but assured I never would.

I take a certain amount of pride in being able to figure things out in a “creative” way. The ways I get to express that are limited. Recently, it has manifested in the different sized things I've been able to transport fairly safely with my truck. You won't find a Youtube video describing the hillbilly methods I've employed. I believe, in a foundational way, that there are many ways to explore something, create something, and “fix” things that are immediately handicapped when you assume the “right” way exists and there's nothing more to be done but follow the instructions.

There are certainly things where I don't want the wiggle room. I'm still reasonably scared of doing electrical work. Give me those instructions all day. When it comes to installing my roof on the little room addition I've been building, my neighbor who has been in roofing for 35 years shit all over everything I did. It was in service to him wishing to help me, but he's an old “deep south gentleman,” so in between the “fuck this” and “that shit ain't worth nuthin” he relayed information I had come across frequently online and in instruction manuals about the “right” way. I proceeded to hit the store, buy massively overpriced wood, and now, pretty annoyed, eye the wood on my security camera resentful of the obligation to unload it when I never even really wanted it.

My neighbor's best intentions for how much effort I might waste or how many headaches related to leaks I might face had zero to do with the process that was interested in exploring different ways to get what I wanted. I wanted to keep the whole ethic alive, not merely build a roof or room extension. I want to be in debt in service to that ethic, not the fact that I'm able to use my credit card.

I think people find this hard to understand. If I waited to have the money to do things “right,” I wouldn't have anything. My shed with its aesthetically abominable insulation would be marred by the insistence I make it prettier. I'd never get things remotely organized because the proper place hadn't been established. Why bother building a garden when the soil is only suited for a specific kind of tree or weed? Why pour a driveway that's just going to get eaten by constantly shifting soil? Why build a fire pit if you don't know exactly the dimensions and can ensure your most judgy friends will want to share a picture of it online?

I've gained considerably more “flow” to my life in working in service to that underlying ethic than I ever have doing things the “right” way. I still feel marginally traumatized by purchasing a car I didn't really want with debt I extra didn't want so I could “fit in” to the “professional” world like the rest of the “adults.” I'm almost certain it was less than an accident that I managed to total it. I barely blinked at the debt I bought my truck with, and the amount of utility I've gotten from it can hardly be described, gas or repairs be damned.

So maybe more than being left alone, I want to be free to explore. That involves having all of the basics taken care of. The parties in college happened because I didn't have to think about rent and never found school so difficult as to meaningfully distract from what I otherwise wished to be doing. Each gathering was an opportunity to refine the environment and explore where people were at. Today, I'm an arm's reach away from a year's worth of things to explore, but I don't feel free to. I don't know if that's even a fair position to hold, but it's what I feel. I'm probably not going to get done writing this and spend the next 8 hours playing one of the 20 PlayStation games I haven't even opened. I'm less than 2 hours from finishing Ishmael, and I suspect it'll be in 20 minute chunks at 2 in the morning that I get it done.

There are two statements:

“If it's worth doing, it's worth doing half-assed.”
“If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.”

The former I hadn't heard until recently. It was speaking about things like dishes or yard work. Wash 5, then see how big a problem the rest remain later. Mow the front yard, maybe the tomorrow the weather will lend itself to the back feeling easy.

The latter is one I've used to hamstring my efforts to do things bit by bit that I feel I would otherwise enjoy. I've talked about it with reference to music. I don't want to keep my fingers calloused on familiar chords when I was cleanly sweep-picking at 200+ BPM my sophomore year. I'm no longer exploring what I can do with a guitar, I'm antagonizing the memory and potential of my ability. I'm reading Jane Eyre when I shit, sometimes, but mostly playing Candy Crush. I tried to think about what distinguished the two. I'm not learning anything with Candy Crush and barely have to pay attention. I can do that for thousands of levels. Jane Eyre is like the world's longest vocabulary test, which thankfully I'm mostly familiar with, but nonetheless requires a level of attention I'm not always keen to give.

I have so much stuff. I feel like I acquired it like levels in Candy Crush. My life hasn't taken an ongoing earnest and focused effort to achieve. Biding my time, taking a shit, I acquire money which becomes stuff, which stares at me. It betrays any anxiety I might feel about debt. It affirms the short-term desire to alleviate feelings over the long-term holistic consequences. What if I had zero video games nor 35 unread books? Would I have an extra $500 or $1000 in my bank account right now? Unlikely.

I want to do meaningful things for people. I want to be provoked to act in a way that enables people to act better in service to themselves. I think people attempt to this in disingenuous ways every day. They'll blindly donate to something. They'll talk about how much they love their job. They'll reference their children. They talk endlessly about their noble dreams to live a certain kind of life if it weren't for this prickly thing called “life.”

But ensuring someone doesn't starve to death isn't quite the same as ensuring your child gets into the “right” school or pretending you're more than a middle-manager in a problematic work environment. Giving money to a research institute is different that subsidizing an in-name-only nonprofit or endowment. If and when your good intentions get hijacked by the wrong entities long enough, you get selfish and myopic. It becomes about the cigarette you need, and not the lung cancer you might get. It becomes about you and yours verses the rules that would govern a healthy human tribe.

We're taught to “capitalize.” If you have an edge, if you can make the money, if you can capture attention, if you can make it more efficient, do so, by default. Don't live in concert with your environment, own it. Don't learn to coexist, kill and shape so you can pretend that what was introduced to contend with wasn't worth fighting. I believe in both the negotiation and fight. I think the exercise of engaging in both is more important than a feeling of “conclusion” that you're no longer obligated to either.

At present, I have a great many things I want to discover about myself and what I'm capable of. I know there are people who will offer me a trailer to transport wood. Can my truck do it? It can, did, and now I have vital information the next time I don't have a trailer and a similar situation. I have saplings needing dug, a fire pit needing refined, a room needing a roof, a house needing tidied up, media to digest, and side-hustles to deconstruct. I can throw another $1000 on a credit card and sit in the middle of a home renovation project just long enough to not figure out what I need before I start my new job. That's not freedom.

At once, the world is superficially available to me, and yet it doesn't feel that way. Whether I zero in on my personal life or recall that my larger environment invites fascism, what I really want is to feel like I've escaped one set of burdens related to basic survival that conflict with another set of burdens to refine how I see, engage, or enable the rest of the world. I don't know how I move into the next or better space without being unapologetically selfish. Maybe it's a different word than “selfish” when you're trying to be something diametrically opposed to people who find themselves so broken as to be “undecided” or proud of Trump.

I'm gonna eat, clean, and unload the wood.