[881] Whoooosh

I have an hour.

I've made some calls, changed supervisors, attempted to coordinate getting my car towed from my neighbor who used our morning conversation to pitch me on buying his plot. Now, I have an hour before I'm off to a home with Trump literally mounted above the TV and every propaganda sign running down along the sides.

I have an hour “to myself” or of “free time” in which I'm writing, because I feel like most of my “off” hours consist of hours like these. They are sandwiched. They consist of the mid-stream catch of thoughts, not the ones I managed to remember after I got home. There's still things to do today. I'm not shaking off the fog of just waking up, and I'm not worked into an exasperated tizzy trying to piece back some picture I can recognize.

One thing I've dramatically underappreciated about myself is how much I need something to look forward to. All of the chaos kicked up by the proverbial “shoulder shrug” I tend to get in response to my complaints, inquiries, or asserted goals is often mitigated when I know I've got something I genuinely want to do or know I'll have the time to approach correctly. I don't want to pack in 7 articles to read in this hour, even if I look forward to reading them. I'm not going to start toying with raising the corner of my little room, I'm liable to cut open my work clothes.

I differentiate “tasks” or chores from things I'm looking forward to doing. Paying attention is work, so even reading things I want to, it's a task or chore to remain remotely informed or in touch with some level of art or media appreciation. Getting my room built was what I looked forward to. Mitigating all of the details to not have it flooding are chores. Cuddling up to watch a movie Allie mentions is something to look forward to. Marathoning an arbitrary list from some ill-informed pseudo taste-maker is a chore.

Whether it's work or home, I like to create a flow. It's a psychological state of doing instead of thinking about the doing. I don't want to think about erroneous details on top of coping with whatever stress comes along with being around annoying people. I don't want to start a project on the land, only to be missing any means of addressing issues without a 2 hour foray into town. Flow only happens when you have the details accounted for. Do you know when you're going to input your notes? Then you don't have to think about when you're going to. Do you know you have an array of screw sizes and the drill bit heads on hand? The tools then lend themselves to experimental fixes when the first plan inevitably goes to shit.

Without flow, life looks like a series of stuck or stopping points with way too many words employed to describe what's going on. I'm writing to hopefully continue my flow. I'm searching for more things to look forward to as my dumbass species ensures we keep needing to lock things down. I have my plan for the rest of my evening. I've confirmed my usual supervised visit for tomorrow. I've got my supervision setup for the day after. I don't know what the hiccups will be, from prolonged unnecessary conversations to the weather or, god forbid more car trouble, but each of those can or should have ways of being mitigated.

Whether or not they can or should is the mess we get into on the whole. If you're stopped or stuck at needing basic necessities, obviously life feels much worse than it has to and you're looking for who to blame. Whether you actually parse out what's your responsibility or “the world's” is anyone's guess, but I'm solidly in the “you won't parse that out” camp. What I choose to hold up as worth looking forward to in light of that becomes an ongoing and difficult task. Can I help myself? Can I find the will and desire for increasingly minute pieces of a complicated puzzle? I still believe I need to escape the country and in the next thought consider what details I need to consider for a soffit. It makes my stomach knot.

These kinds of hours are a lot of directionless contemplation. Could I settle in to watch another episode? Should I do some light cleaning? There's different modes of thought and mental prep that make any option feel more or less appropriate. We're not like flipping switches triggering on “do the dishes” or flipping to “dig a hole” in an instant. I think this is an important point that I'm not sure I have enough words to elaborate on more, but here's a seed.

When I'm doing “yard work,” my habit is to start one thing, and find myself picking away at other little things. I might drag over a shelf, start stacking things on it, grab the rake, and decide I need to spread out an ash/dirt pile. While doing so, I'll cough, grab my wholly inadequate face mask, and while inside notice a misplaced box of screws. Those screws now need to be returned, and the table they're sitting on better arranged. I trip on the hose, pull the hose into a coil, and realize the head needs replaced, where one might exist on the “wrong” shelf, so I return to the new shelf I'm filling up to designate as a place for hose heads like “this” one. Add in little construction things and whether or not different equipment has been gassed and primed, and over the course of a few hours, I'll do a dozen things, and only planned to do 1 or 2. The area will look nice, and Allie will come home wondering why I have a sander in my hand and am going on about my plans for the fire pit.

It's a clusterfuck up there that generally translates toward the direction I want to go. It's a kind of natural selection applied to my thought process. I drift in the direction of my available resources, time, and oriented thoughts. I'm almost perfectly ambivalent about any one thing I might do until it serves a particular purpose. Why complete the fence until the neighbor is uncomfortably leering? Why spend the money in service to (x) without some relatively quick turn-around and satisfaction with regard to (y)? There's always "everything” to do, and I'm not “just doing” things to remain busy or distracted, I'm trying to get to that flow space. I'm trying to work in a manner that suggests purpose and foresight.

I think my personal exploration of my process speaks to the whole because we don't know nor are inclined toward one thing over the other. We have many catastrophes at once. Who's in charge? We celebrated and elected people who said “no one” on purpose, and worse, we'll break everything you might use to try. We based our potential flow on a giant mythology about who we are and the influence we have on the world. We transferred our agency and capacity for self-reflection onto that mythology. There's no flow but around the drain. There's not a framework that you can do a dozen-pieces-at-a-time kind of yard work style. There's no trust that the effort is going to translate to an appreciable amount of positive feeling or status. An election is not a switch that will flip all of that around.

Leadership is important. I think that premise alone has been degraded immensely. “Managing” something is not the same thing as leading it. People who attempt to manage me get burned severely. People who join in the leading mindset to proactively address something find me the easiest person on the planet to work with. I'm not a series of problems, but an agent of interpretative and creative problem solving. Whether or not you, I, or the environment we're in has the resources to address those problems meaningfully is the often shitty circumstances that say, “No.” You shrug your shoulders and stare blankly as a manager because no one directed you to do anything. You learn to accept what you must, while thinking otherwise as a leader. You're still trying when you lead, despite a level of implied victimization or martyrdom.

I want a kind of “total flow.” I want enough money to move on quickly. I want enough connections to know exactly who to call. I want enough plans that can be spoken to in big or little ways every day. I don't want to be digging myself out of constant panic. I don't want to get lost in petty personality battles or left to decide to what degree I'm willing to manipulate or entertain your complex. I want to wake up and get to work, not desperately cling to my agency in spare moments or hours. I don't want to stack an impersonal stream of information on top of my sense of futility in an attempt to suppress or suffocate the truth of the pain of my deepest despondency.

I have about 20 minutes. I'm going to take my borrowed car to a visit in my neighborhood. I'm going to demonstrate that I'm capable, safe, and worthy of ensuring a child gets to see her father. I'm not going to get paid “enough” to do it. I'm going to get home later than I want to. I haven't discovered what I'm looking forward to, except I'm pretty sure Allie plans to make breakfast for dinner, so things are probably alright.