[871] Ring

I’m in facebook jail. It’s my fourth or fifth offense. I’ve deigned to call Nazi cunts what they are, been reported for bullying, and for 3 days I won’t be able to tell my 4 followers on facebook about it. As usual, I’m struck by the irony. A fascist parade made its way through my small town the other day. The cousin-fucks flooded their yards with camera phones, honked their horns, and no doubt billowed exhaust. Ravenous screaming for death and dictatorship, that’s free speech. Calling Nazi cunts, Nazi cunts, hey, behave yourself mister, or SILENCE!

It’s been several years in which I’ve felt as though I live in The Upside Down; well before Stranger Things was even a thing. Evidence is laughed off. Journalists only have opinions. Nobel institutions become breeding grounds of insecurity and mental purity. Children (our great hope!) are now in their 20s still unironically talking about “adulting” when they figure out who to call to fix their TV. You can chart the decline from nearly any point you choose in the latter half of the 20th century. 

We don’t learn anymore. We don’t dream. We can’t imagine things getting fixed, or balanced, so it all has to burn. Not just burn though, burn while we celebrate how wet the fire is. Burn because, “Fuck you! That’s why!” Burn because people, almost by design, have no capacity for taking responsibility for themselves, and the ones that do have no means of foisting greater responsibility on the rest of the masses.

I sat through another new job training today. I noticed that it was less excruciating from my first “regular job” training and will be a quarter of the time it took to get “trained” for DCS. I couldn’t tell if I’d just gotten used to the pace and dramatically lowered my expectations. I wasn’t sure if I had calloused, or died. I can notice pretty concretely when my hands have gotten used to the idea of moving bricks. I can’t tell what’s going on with my soul when I’m no longer on the verge of ripping my eyes out as I see the information on screen while simultaneously listening to someone sound out “w w w dot” for a wholly inadequate insurance company.

I need to develop a short-term psychological plan. I need to ask myself every morning, in earnest, “Can I do one more day of this?” If the answer is yes, I need to let whatever other thoughts about how else I should be spending my time go. If the answer is no, I need to put in my two weeks. I need to do this so I don’t get the mission creep of psychological abuse from allowing the nature of the job takeover. I need to do it because I like looking good from exercising each day, and getting busy, home late, and fat eating last-minute meals is going to compound negative emotions. I need to learn how to sit and save again for a big, perhaps life-altering buy so I can easily dismiss “affordable” toys and distractions.

I’m in a nicer hotel in a comfortable bed having just eaten half a specialty pizza I’m going to get $15 reimbursed for. I’ve got my good book to continue reading. I don’t have to be up until 9am.

It is rare you’ll take a single slice of my day or life that finds something genuinely horrifying or really that bad. I still can’t seem to sort myself out. I want to believe that I’m a popcorn bag who has only been in the microwave a few seconds. Is that naive? I want to continue trusting that things can happen in big amazing ways overnight when preparedness meets opportunity, and no matter what I believe, I could as easily die on the highway as strike metaphorical oil. And in casting out those lines, I find myself only growing more ambivalent about death.

I never felt, and still don’t, that what I believed about myself or what I could accomplish was in the realm of “wishful thinking” or a “dream.” To this day, I look to set the aberrant example. Why be the top food delivery guy if not for the mythology I attempt to embody? Why go down in so many righteous fights for “things” to “make sense” and be “easy” while I swim in waters of tears and shit? Why do I pretend like I can create something that accounts for the wholly destructive force of people proud to die and take you with them? Why do I think my “infecting” or “inflicting” modes of being are going to break through? I’m in social work. I see daily that you can’t help those unwilling to help themselves.

Maybe a good portion of my ideas need to die. Not even because they’re wrong, but because they’re only so informed. They’ve formulated under different constraints that don’t play out when met with hopeless generation after hopeless generation. They don’t work when your neighbor is gearing up for the call to march up your lawn and shoot you. They don’t work when you can never pursue health, by default, because your money and time are always spent in service to an onslaught of immediate threats. Maybe it’ll only be good for a little while longer for those with just enough money to pretend like their number won’t be called. It may be called last, but it’s getting called.