[906] Noise

I suspect, at “bottom,” I'm as “even” or “ambivalent” about “anything” as every particle I'm made of. While I don't subscribe to the notion of a “mechanical” universe nor determinism, I don't think you must be particularly “intellectual” to surmise “power” or “something greater,” even in a simple explanation of complexity, that renders you pointless and obsolete by definition. Indeed, many find it quite a relief when they can “give up” and hand over the weight of the world to this disembodied power or larger narrative as to where they fit. There's great utility, psychological and practical, to organizing your mind into a framework well independent of scrutiny.

When you have problems, it's easy to keep yourself from questioning. In the moment, there's a fire, and you try to put the fire out, not read about how many fires get started in how many ways nor do you care if statistically fires in your area are from one thing over another. These are our automatic reflexes and muscle tensions. These are our compulsions and self-soothing behaviors. These are the embodied demonstrations and movements in the world indicating an actual problem as such, and something being done to it. Whether it's exacerbating, temporarily stopping, or genuinely healing is often discovered too late, if at all.

I can frame dozens of problems instantaneously. I don't have health insurance, nor been to the dentist or eye doctor in a couple-few years. I have “stuff” everywhere, disorganized, and curious if I'm ever going to get around to fixing or using it. My shoulders and jaw are tense. I don't eat that well. I'm ambivalent in many of my choices in spending money. I'm in positions of power and influence I don't respect nor draw motivation or inspiration from. My most important thing, time, I'm still not feeling better at finding more control of, even if I technically have more hours in the day in which I can use it relative to my previous jobs. I could only dig out pieces of a tick from my cat. My shitty car is costing me, continually, more than it is worth both in time, thought, and money. Is that twelve?

I want such stupidly “easy” things that I get acutely dejected when they seem so hard to pull off. Like, I just want to go bowling with my friends. My friends are busy, don't really like or care about bowling generally, and it's been many months, pandemic aside, since remote enthusiasm for the prospect of bowling has been voiced. Why the fuck can't I pull off bowling? I let thoughts like that compound and it becomes speculation as to what about me and my lack of focus or enthusiasm or competence lends itself to my car issues or house project delays. Why would I waste money on being “entertained” when I could be *working,* like once another room is built I won't be stuck with the exact same set of issues involving a general “lacking” sense underscoring whatever I do.

It's one thing for me to say I get what I set out to. It's another to have little or nothing to say about the next things in line. More stuff? Spending money is not an accomplishment. More knowledge? To what end? I perpetually have dozens of articles from months ago I'm not actively reading. There's always a little picking up or chores to do...yippee. Do things for others? Never will the idea of you being unable to help others if you can't help yourself ring louder. Compliments from clients or praise and thank yous when I'm counseling them through a crisis mean nothing to me. My concept of what I'm capable of and its inevitable consequences has been overflowing for a while.

I managed to get the rest of the tick body removed from the cat.

[905] Kick The Habit

I'm fucking frustrated. I have no real problems, so I get to hyper-focus on the little things that disrupt my perfect circumstances. I'm looking, again, for another car. Cars are generally several thousand dollars. Every last fuck online has zero concept of how modern banking works and the ability to pay with a credit card. They're smug about their cash insistence. They're short and offer opinions on how scammy it sounds to expect them to have a bank account.

It's invariably deeper than that. It's the “easy” things going awry generally that keep me pissed off. At work, I'm a “counselor” for drug addicts. As a center, we don't have the “easy” things in place to provide even the basic structure and routine we're implicitly expected to demonstrate for a class of people who struggle with holding accountable routines. The vast majority don't have the “basics” in place, before pick-your-dumpster-fire scenario enters their life. Whether it's basics in terms of budgeting or peek behind the curtain of consequences of “critical thinking.” A good portion of my day is insisting we practice breathing.

A theme for the last few weeks has been presenting itself. Those that are “good” or “better” are routinely attacked. It's not some righteous battle where the lesser fools insist on humility and a comprehensive accounting. It's the sea of resentment that must be actively combated in order for anything worthwhile to last or register in the first place. Having a goal makes you a target. Being able opens you up to an endless attack, not even just from the outside. You get to undermine yourself and find every damning assessment and insecurity more compelling than any step forward.

In the many years I've internalized a sense of my being and described the kind of world I feel like I'm obligated to creating, I still haven't learned how to square that with how infinitely destructive I view the context which I'm working within. I try to bring a little life and access to information to my door? Cue the shit-talking nurse about what is or is not supposed to be on doors. Just...because? (I put pictures of books on my door and offer them as free downloads at work. The gossip train clued me into that apparently rubbing someone the wrong way.)

So infinitely petty, yet I find it so infinitely objectionable it gets to be a piece of my breakdown. I'm not curious of her motives. I'm not intrigued by her decision making. She's just another piece of compulsively shitting on things that are good, potentially useful, and indicative of an intention to give and try in spite of circumstances that are less than ideal.

It's been over a month since I made my case for the hiring bonus I'm absolutely owed. I know they don't care about me. I knew that coming in. So, I'm fighting. I'm reminding. I'm patiently biding my time, looking for other jobs at the same time, and trying to figure out just how much room I'm going to give myself in un-earned overtime and time spent watching Excel training videos to quell how sick it makes me to jump from one incidentally monetarily useful expenditure of my time to the next. It was 3 weeks before I was shouldering other counselors' work. I already know the path to being able to do even more.

I never seem to matter outside of the incredibly small bubbles I try to create for myself. In my bubble I build things. In my bubble there's buffers and a coherent through-line towards one or more coinciding ends. My bubble, which I was hell-bent on securing, if nothing else, costs about $300 a month to live in before I need to sacrifice “comforts.” I get exhausted leaving my bubble. Any city feels like a “big” one, with too many people doing too much nothing, and waiting to offer their ill-advised “thought” about what it is I wish to do or who I think I am.

You know you don't even need a license to be the level of counselor I am? Do you know what it feels like to create from a hodgepodge of psychology literature I've found useful insta-group discussion topics and activities that people are raving about to their licensed counselor who then asks me just what it is I'm doing that's so worthy of such enthusiasm? The bar feels too low. The suggestion is that our systems of educating and licensing are not doing the easy or bare-minimum things in how they're conveying information or why.

I doubt this transitions well, but I've never found “it could always be worse” thinking useful. Maybe it couldn't. Maybe it's as bad as it can be or has ever been, but no individual is going to have the ability to see so by definition. It's a hopeless kind of thinking. It roots you in the misery and simultaneously disengages your agency to do anything about it. It could always be worse? What's worse than you being a useless sack of shit throwing up your arms and resigning yourself to fate? That sounds like the worst to me. That sounds like you actually crave something worse to experience so you can let yourself off the hook for how pathetic you're currently behaving. No, there's nothing worse than absolving yourself of the fallout of inaction and inattention. The asshole that says “it could always be worse” is merely saying, “At least I don't feel responsible for it.”

I think at some level the tide is turning on the hapless victim complexes. Twitter still gets its way occasionally, but practically it's sinking in that none of our hands are really clean, and the exhilaration of religious fervor for any idea is its own kind of self-destructive addiction. “Addiction,” is a loaded word too, with very little needle movement on how we come to understand it culturally. I speak of addiction as “compulsion,” because the science tells me so. I don't call an addicted brain “degenerative.” I think abusing your compulsion in service to bad shit is what degenerates it. It's working just fine, with horribly inappropriate tools.

I still compulsively clench. I still compulsively hate. I still compulsively rack my brain for a moment's release from the thought that I'm miserably failing myself and future prospects by not either getting viciously efficient about money or ruthless in exploiting people. Mine would be the wide-eyed pure kind of evil pursuit though. I wouldn't compulsively try to tear things down. I'd be deliberately dismantling that which I don't respect enough to believe it deserves to exist. It'd be cartoonish villainy born from misguided pride and resentment more refined and justified than that of the unwashed masses. It would also be exhausting and counterproductive.

I know somewhere not-that-deep in my psyche I keep myself at a certain level of debt to trigger my “practical” sense that protects me from aggressively employing my other inclinations. I have many years under my belt that affirm my capacity to sit and save and survive on 1/10th of what I've been making the last 3 years. Sometimes when I say out loud how long I've spent doing certain jobs I find it hard to believe. 2 years at DCS? 1 year delivering food? 3 years piecing together this land into something I look forward to returning to each day? 14 years making errant appeals to get organized and budgeted into transcendent shared goals? 17 years writing about how to make sense of my place at any given point in space and time? I haven't gone anywhere, I've just continued to incorporate more tools. I've just watched myself do exactly as I told you I would.

Who cares? I don't lol. I care about so few, so little, and less every day. When that changes, the thought of having too much money, access, or responsibility won't feel like a matter-of-fact manifest destiny atop the bodies of the savage and unworthy. Maybe it would feel like I got a tool I could actually use in the right circumstance for the right job. Until then, just like the growing stockpile of expensive toys I can employ to build something – one day – I'll sit, and wait for the rain to clear, or the cost to go down, or until I find more someones it feels worth working in service to.