[908] Mirror Mirror

 “Right, but which truth are you going with?”

I feel like it's been a while since I've written. I'll lump this in with my blog from yesterday. At once, I've thought I've had so little to say and it wouldn't be worth it, and yet my entire world is still happening, still chugging in some kind of direction. Things still annoy me, and there is always some level of existential crisis to constantly unpack.

You never are really allowed to stop talking. That is, it's always very noisy. There's TV, news media, YouTube personalities, best-selling authors, and that nagging so-and-so in your life. Your kids never shut up. Your brain, plagued by anxiety or otherwise, reminding you or hinting at all of the things you're not giving the requisite attention to. It's an unconscious conversation with yourself at all times, manifesting as distracted or hurried moves in the world meant to assert or pacify.

Adam Curtis's latest documentary “Can't Get You Out Of My Head” just taught me Valium was trying to quell the emptiness in 1971. The Sackler's then kept on sacking. Today, I have endless discussions to nowhere with people addicted to opiates, trying to reorient their behavior into something “healthy” or “productive,” or in their words, “normal.” Curtis's documentaries are a meditation on the infinite amount of forces and ideologies permeating every thought we have. Coincidentally, I just saw the movie “The Sound of Metal” that ends on a scene where the main character shuts off his cochlear implants to finally take in a moment of stillness.

It bears remembering at all times that you will die. I think when death is fresh in your mind, you get more deliberate, more patient, and find more meaning. Your example is one you choose to set more than the one you are incidentally setting through circumstance. When you can own your death you can begin a life project you feel motivated to be responsible for. Death is hardly something people take a significant amount of time trying to define. Death is the thing to be protected from, reacted to. It's not something to bear proudly or exalted by anyone but mythological heroes who, in one form or another, get put right back through the human anxiety machine and are reborn or otherwise immortalized.

I think I understand power as a complex way of denying death. Whether you rise through the ranks of a particular organization or terrorize your household, you haven't sorted through your powerlessness in the face of death. You'll never terrorize to the degree you feel terrorized. You'll never control more than the law of entropy. You can lead the dance of your conversation and observation about death or things breaking apart, but you're going to trip. I think as with most ironically held desires, you get power when you don't want it or pursue paradoxical ends given the contexts in which it is sought. Who is more powerful, the dictator, or revolutionary? To me, both are undermined by the power of ideology, thus I feel the most powerful in my understanding of the broader context or nature of the human mind. It's on me to not let that become its own pathological ideology.

Thus a habit of persistent scrutiny and healthy doubt must be employed. An active discussion about balancing forces must take place. Without them, we become defaulted to the sea of indifferent and incidental forces of infinitely fluctuating power. If you believe nothing else about your place in existence, it's that you have the ability to speak to, examine, and shift what you think and feel. Perhaps you do it for the sake of the shifting. Perhaps you have grand designs to help others shift in different or easier ways than the current culture paradigms allow for. Regardless of your aim, it behooves you to understand the nature of the game and forces you are up against. Ignoring them is how the disillusioned fringe become the next tyrants.

So much of my effort is in pursuit of the privilege to be left alone. I don't want to fight. I don't want to have my brain hijacked by the chaos of people unable or unwilling to sip let alone gulp responsibility for how their miserable consciousness is manifesting in the world. I comfortably eschew your decision-making whilst still respect how little I believe there's much of a “you” there deciding to do anything. I tie that struggle to the practical options I wish to give myself in the world I'm bound to. Oh, you want fascism? I can probably buy my way out of its worst consequences. You're just super stoked to keep denying history and racism? Bet I don't use my future wealth to back minority-owned businesses or support immigration causes.

I think of my obligation to the world or myself as a form of asymmetrical warfare. I'm not gonna storm the capital like an insurrectionist dipshit. I want to create diffuse loci of power. I want to be off-grid. I want to be multi-lingual and counter-cultural in a perpetually subversive manner. I want to take the diffuse and abstract and meet it with an intentional greater abstraction driven by a tempered wisdom and playfulness about what it is I'm really after or how it might get there. I know I can't “control” in the colloquial sense. But I can acknowledge my identity, my mark, and witness my environment get shaped around my ideals. That's as close to peace as I'm going to find. That's how I get to die in my world on my terms.

My clients tell me often how their drug use did not make anything better. “It masked or numbed what I was feeling, but...” Same story every single time. Same truism, cliché, almost rehearsed lines. The response? Do the drug again. The mind's agency has been subverted. The compulsion capitulated to. The forces their brains formed around win again and again. They'll say, “Well everyone's addicted to something.” I can agree, but arguably in a deeper way than they're even speaking to, as they're employing the saying from an excuse-ridden place. It's dismissing their agency and responsibility verses acknowledging how someone else's addiction might mirror our own and then asking ourselves what to do about it.

I discover my responsibility every time I ask the question. It's no small feat to take it upon yourself to ask the question. It's any wonder how you build the resilience to keep asking every day or every moment. It's terrifying work on its face. It's the killing of ceaseless presumptions and pretensions that would otherwise occupy the space for the question. It's a space people are happy to fill in for you when you're not paying attention.

At some point, I think it was in early high school, it sunk in that my eyes were permanently nailed open. Whether I understood what I was watching or not, I had to keep looking and feeling and coping with it. I had to make peace or I would drive myself insane. I had to write. I had to read and question. I had to argue. I had to stand for the slivers of hope and peace I could cut out of otherwise ceaseless angst and pain. So I started writing. I started anchoring my experience in a sea of words that more often seem to make considerably more sense to me than anyone else. I observe myself trying and organizing and turning consciousness into a reflection. It makes me feel better and like I can begin moving again in the world; like I have a stake and ability to change and grow with as opposed to suffer from. It wasn't magic. I didn't start believing in mythical beings who granted me special privileges. I just paid more attention. In doing so, it becomes pretty fucking clear what other people are ignoring, and what, if anything, I can responsibly do about it.

[907] Worn

 Bloody hell, I've made it home. This is one where the title came first.

I have many goals. They run all at once, they are more or less affordable, and they require things of me that speak to different aspects of my being that I care about. I like to build and create things. A specific tool I might be able to afford. The set of tools to really build what I wish to rarely are. I want to be basically in shape, and yet mostly use my gym membership for the shower. Well, better look for the free bricks, pallets, posts, or some other dirty job that gets me lifting, walking, and otherwise developing muscles that mostly make an appearance in the warmer months. I want to practice some degree of sustainability or “green” building, so it behooves me to ensure the money I'm spending works in concert with that kind of ideal.

Today was a “hit multiple levels of your goals” day. Pallets, for “free,” from a place not too far, but just far enough, and who is going to have them in perpetuity each week. I make the pitch to be the go-to so that I'm not playing Cannonball Run trying to rush in to first position. The guy takes me up on it. Great! Right? What are all the goals and layers to begin with?

I have the tools; the truck, the trailer, ratchets, gloves, my redirecting sweat band, and glasses. Each tool a micro-goal spanning many years and the waiting games of paychecks.

I have the time; I consider my time the most important thing, and now I get to be using it in service to my highest ideals. I don't have to rush because I asked for my time to be respected, and it was granted.

I have momentum; it's been a busy set of weekends, and doing labor gets considerably easier when you're physically and mentally prepared to continue to do labor. This will more than count for a workout.

This is about as sustainable as you can get, turning “trash” into cool creative things, utilizing all your home tools.

I like to demonstrate that I mean what I say. I don't take selfies for the sake of selfies. I show you pallets and fence and hopefully translate the enthusiasm I have for this whole thing into, if nothing else, demonstrable proof that it is possible, fun, worth it, and what you should have been doing when you lied to me about what you wished to be doing back in college.

There's a hiccup. I'm not actually rich enough for all of my goals. I'm hood-rich. I'm first-world poor. Everything I do, at all times, comes with a hope and a prayer that no one gets severely injured or too many things break at once. You have to be a little cavalier in your estimation of the danger or investment of what it's going to take to get the job done.

Take my trailer. It was “affordable” in that, given I did not immediately rush out to replace at least two tires nor needed to bother with re-welding or fixing a loose board, I could pay the guy $200 up front, and he was willing to let me pay the remaining $600 when I got paid on Friday. I'm not the guy who can just show up to the trailer store, buy a car trailer for 3K or more, and drive away ready to get to work, no no. The trailer serves me well in hauling the tires, having a heavy jointer loaded onto it, and I certainly noticed one tire appeared to be oddly wearing down, but I had a spare at the ready.

Consider my ratchets. Some are pretty old and one snapped. I just got a set of new mid-level ones in which one decides to scrape against a rough edge and render itself basically useless overnight. These suckers weren't cheap either, but my last pallet run needed reinforcements. They're not terribly long either, at least, not pallet wrangling long.

Gander at my gloves. I've got several sets of gloves, most “reinforced” with layers of gorilla tape where all the holes started to open up. Not these gloves though, just holes. Holes which made their presence known as I go to move my scalding hot truck box into a position more conducive to hauling pallets. Mind you, a truck box I only have to move because it's *just not quite* long enough to rest on the side walls of the truck.

I made a trip to Menards to get commercial ratchets...for $200.

In my fervor to keep making “progress” or “demonstrations” that I'm all of that which I say I am, there's often very little planning. I didn't have enough to drink. I didn't pause to ask the guy how many pallets there would be, and stupidly trusted a misleading picture. I said “the spare is there,” and didn't take too hard a look at the other tires.

Increasingly sun-burnt, thirsty, and approaching undue mental confusion, I get all of the pallets loaded up. I go on my merry way. I buy two over-priced smoothies on the way. I stop to add a strap. I drive the kind of slow that's reserved for a cheeky 80's comedy where I'm supposed to be waving at all of the confused and angry people speeding by. A pallet comes loose. Two semi-trucks let me know through frantic beeping. I play the world's least interesting game of Frogger in picking my moments to step into what's assuredly going to be my doom and wrestle with the pallet. Another car motions in a whirl telling me to look at my tires, bits of rubber dancing away with each bump over an unpaved section of road.

I'm home. I'm safe. I have a shit ton of pallets, or, work to do on them to make them a fence and other things. The trailer did it. The truck, shaking like the palsy, I suspect burned its last ounce of oil, and easily $50 in gas. By the numbers, I used my time in the most productive way I consider possible. Spent less than $300 to get what will be a lot of future fence. This is time saved in running to different locations for considerably less pallets. I get the harrowing story. I get one more notch in my “you're taking the wrong lesson from this” belt.

I still find it in me to envy the people with the bigger truck with the new equipment attached to it, doing their thing with considerably less cab shaking and muscle tension as they laser-focus on the rear-view mirrors (I assume). It's not that they take away my motivation or pride in what I'm doing. It's that I don't think they appreciate what they have. It's probably an unfair thought, but I picked these pallets up in one of, if not the, richest cities in Indiana. I drove them back to one of the poorest. So poor, it's on our goal sheet to figure out how to give them sanitary ways to shit.

I can't help but think that I stretch myself incredibly thin, and never had to. At least, by the numbers, all of the people I imagined I'd be doing things like this with all came from the same kind of backgrounds as me. We aren't poor poor. We have supportive families. We imbibed the apocalyptic narratives around climate change and are certainly now the exact age we should be actively batting to death the literal fascists...but that's a whole thing unto itself. What happens instead? I throw little parties for myself and garner the likes from the handful of people who consistently have given a fuck about what I'm about. It's good. It's gratifying. It ain't gonna save the world. We're all certainly smart enough to find ourselves preoccupied in whatever upper-middle class city we choose.

I wear a certain kind of badge in service to an authority I wish to maintain indefinitely. It gets the job done, in spite of everything. It' not a discussion about would've or could've. What if the pallet fell? Pallets don't fall off things that are better equipped? I made it not fall, and got it home. What if the tire blew? New tires don't pop? I gambled and won. I wish I never had to gamble. Nothing about the environments I'm stuck in suggests I'm ever doing anything less.

I'm already home. Before I go looking for the next “free” things, before I roll the dice, and before I need to unpack some situation seemingly so indicative of my state of being, I know why I went, stayed cool-enough, and got back. I know where those pallets are going. I know how to improve my next run. I know how and why I can afford it. I'm good with every good and bad thing you think the situation says about me. I wish I had a better handle on why I can't believe any of this effort is taking me anywhere but “away.”