[901] Set Phasers Too

I feel I'm in a different phase. I don't yet know what I mean by this.

First, I can look at writing. Writing has been this tool to help me calm down, ease headaches, or violently puke ideas that no one was around to listen to me drone about smashed. Now, I feel more like a redundant chronicler. I'm not so much discovering new insights into my thought process or reasons for doing things. I'm watching and living the consequences of so many conclusions I've drawn over time. I rarely know when to stop blogs anymore. There's not so much a central “issue” I'm examining from all sides, because little carries the kind of emotional depth or suggestive trauma anymore. I'm matter-of-factly speaking.

I find this unsettling because I'm still an idiot. I work within the confines of my knowledge and access, and they are infinitely small for as abundantly they may make me feel as though I'm correct and doing the right things. I imagined myself testifying to the behavior of this particularly aggressive, lying, and spiteful mom; “Your honor, I can't diagnose nor have evidence of her drug use, but every song is made with the same 7 notes.”

On my drives home, I'm thinking about things that I believe would lend themselves to a blog. I get home, I either forget, or they feel diminished. That mom from above, for example, is nothing special. I've met her before I ever met her. I've made up my mind what kind of professional attitude and series of excuses I can lend to depersonalizing her behavior. I can bemoan the impropriety of her CASA praying with the family, thus advising the court they're A-OK, in spite of track marks you can see from the moon and her very-likely intoxicated/withdrawal state for the last visit. We can move right on past her former DCS ongoing case-manager being placement of her children, because that was a year ago, so no issues, right?

I'm already home in the thought that in order to address what seem like particular egregious details in any one person's character or series of professionals' judgment, I need my own kind of thing. I need to be a kind of advocate and accountability marker that does not exist in my orbit, or at least in great enough quantities. This is a posture I've taken to my voice and work broadly. It's the decision I come to any time I find myself under the growing myopia of grievances left perpetually unaddressed. I need to own, destroy, or somehow put outside of my thoughts. Acceptance or forgiveness are off the table.

The weather is improving. I'm again looking at the land as a series of things I could theoretically do at any moment. The ground is soggy, but that's not too big a deal. There's wood begging to be nailed together. There's money waiting to be spent on details. I have another client whose whole family lives on about twice the amount of space we have. 5 houses, relatives with independent businesses. It's got little street lights, enviable garages, large equipment, and it's a class of people who make sure to buy another basketball in case the one they have isn't pumped enough or the tip is lost from one of the several air compressors neatly tucked on a wall shelf. They're living a version of what I want, superficially, as at least one of their members couldn't avoid methamphetamine.

I've met a few of those late 40s or 50-something guys who talk like their accumulated wealth or extremely specific hobby or job is just another take-it-in-stride kind of thing. Just enough grey in the beard and hair, slim and going to the gym just enough. One day, you buy an ATV, the next, the garage to house all of your toys you take out maybe a couple times a year. It's natural, right? Keep your head down, do your work, save and budget, you can be an ATV dad. Then, one day, you'll maybe have the privilege of getting old enough to be a great-granddad who tells his granddaughter's visit supervisor about how you played tag growing up in the small town a half hour away.

I return to the idea of already being home. Tonight, after consciously saying I've zero interest in rushing to get paperwork turned in on time, I've pushed right on through with my day, drove the opposite direction of home to get pizza, came home and started my show, and now, more than half the way through the pizza and show, have taken the time to write. I still have to get my notes in. I've got plenty of extra time in the morning in which I can sleep in. I remember the version of me that would be exceptionally anxious to get things done NOW, and he's still there, but more careful about using it in service to “better” things. It's wholly subjective, but I'm not going to work myself up in service to people or organizations I don't respect. This blog, TV show, and pizza are more important than your deadline. Significantly more.

My general posture towards the “professional working world” has been so degraded. It's one thing to read a polished business book about how alleged titans of industry work, think, or organize. It's another to have it hit just how goddamn fucking stupid everyone is piggy-backing off their privileged space in time, reinforcing entitlement with ego loops, and regurgitating convenient truisms to maintain a kind of stasis. Say you get in at the ground-floor of some company. Hang on long enough to get a little more power. You adopt the company-speak and demeanor that weathers every possible conflict. Did you do anything? You were there. You stayed. But just like playing a board game, you didn't craft the pieces nor invent the game, nor expect yourself to think about whether or not the game could or should be improved. But, damn, doesn't it feel great and “adult” when you tell people your title? Fucking rotten posers.

I suppose my interest in this next phase is pretty simple. I don't know what happens after all of the things I already know are going to happen do. I knew I'd get this home base into a livable, expandable state. I'm living here, not alone huffing drywall dust after having trudged through wet grass. I knew this kind of environment is going to appeal to my kind of person, and she arrived. This is not meant to be some “master of the universe” kind of statement divorcing her from her agency. It just means bros find frat houses, and no one finds that remarkable. I know that each of the pieces of this spot costs money, you get money from keeping a job or few, and if you show up and do math, you get more shit. All perfectly foreseen, if not the amount of money it might take to keep things fixed. This is often where that grey-enough guy I meet starts to lose me. Domestication takes over. Regular drinks at the Cheddars becomes the highlight of the week.

I still want the kind of thing only I can create. I want the light shining between lines of a blog to illuminate something I can hardly imagine. Just like I keep searching in writing for what's really on my mind or for a way to combine all of the flourishes into something digestible. What could you call my 900 blogs? Simply, writing? Everything I've ever tried to say? A path to personal enlightenment? An ego-maniacal diary of someone who never learned how to just smoke weed and shut the fuck up? It doesn't matter, and that seems like the point. Your approximation, wholesale disregard, or somehow obsessive fan-boying don't matter. I found the will to move here, build here, write here, through writing about who I was or still am. I accepted, deeply, my power to own or destroy, and anything I couldn't put outside of my mind, I put on paper. Maybe that's a blur of old friendships no one wishes to own in how they were destroyed. Maybe that's echos of dreams better learned from than pursued.

It will probably be pushing midnight before I bother with this program for inputting my notes. I'll be over-tired as the itis kicks in from all of the pizza. Tomorrow, I'll try during staffing to stifle my enthusiasm for my drift away from this latest blip on my work-experience radar indicating again how just barely anything works. I'll weave into my next gig, pull in more money, glance at my cameras and see the garden shed installed, perhaps renters at the end of the drive, and I'll be out of debt, or not. It's still the realm of all things I'd be perfectly reasonable in expecting to happen, but it is changing. The phase shift by its very nature is unknowable until it's happening, and that's why I'm seeking it out.