[909] What I Really Really Want

I'm persistently battling the discrepancy between capacity and desire. I have the, not unfortunate, history of a demonstrated capacity or competence. I have a furiously chaotic desire to do a great number of things in no particular order.

I want to occupy the space “in between.” In job searches, I get email notifications for “management” positions, no doubt at establishments I want nothing to do with. I buy in when I'm actually responsible for things that rise to the level of my capacity to be organized, “professional,” and focused on the goal at hand. I also felt a genuine mild enthusiasm at the prospect of helping set up the county fair, part-time. I'm not a “company man” looking to retire at some pseudo-noble profession. I'm not a vagabond trying to piece his way one side-hustle or precarious gig at a time.

I am self-directed or authored. I do seek to continually explore this in-between space and figure out a way to proceed that is not dictated to me from a job board. I comment often about how I have yet to go door-to-door in pursuit of some small business yard work or scrapping endeavor. I read recently a post from someone who said they were “small” in doing a few million a year in revenue, but still feeling dependent on the checks cashing sooner or the operation might be stymied. What's millions when it's on fire and you're thirsty?

I would much prefer a generalized “gig” approach to my life with the gigs lined up well in advance to know there's some amount of money coming in. The only project I can intensely focus on is that of my personal life and comfort, which incidentally I'll go to extremely uncomfortable lengths to establish. Many variables remain unsecured, namely, long-term insurance across domains, and income that comes independent of my huge time or gas or otherwise investment.

I have a fair amount I wish to sustain and protect now. I have tools, including vehicles, I'd like to keep repaired and working. The things to watch, practice, and play are always ready and waiting. I can live lifetimes of “what ifs” as I lounge about the house and sporadically search for remote routes of income. The curious thing, you're always in debt in a society like ours. You always owe somebody, and the impending doom of consequences stokes your “motivation” to keep putting yourself out there for the next whip. The imagined alternative ways of living seem like a worse punishment, and there certainly does not seem to be any genuine “revolution” on the horizon.

I reflect a lot on why it continues to frustrate me when I think about the different directions people went after college. Now, we've hit the age points I called-out in my early 20s after the divorces I (sorry?) called coming and the hairlines have started to recede. People's smiles are looking a little more dead and the posts feeling obligated to promote the “happiness” of our lives feels less insistent. What's the take-away? Continue to live in service to our presumptions and pretensions regarding a “normal” life? It was worth it to run the experiment of things we knew, in our heart of hearts, was not what we wanted?

I know it takes an incredible amount of work and bravery to try and live in service to a “highest” ideal. Really, who's paying the bills? You have to look incredibly closely at what you're trying to create, what you can do without, or what it will say about you when things inevitably come to a grinding halt. I don't know that there are enough words to describe how different I feel even trying to “be me” verses play the many other parts I feel obligated enough to partake in. I can't describe the cascading frustration when I zero in on how fucking absurd it is to be granted so much and feel so stuck because...the pallets and a huge scrapping score are waiting just as I discover my trailer is out of commission, and I wasted money on the wrong tires, and it's unclear if a trip I've been planning for months will interfere with my ability to capitalize on my access to either. What good goddamn reason is there, universe, that I haven't been loading pallets and picking up scrap the last few weeks? I'm too broke to fix my trailer AND have a few months of savings? After a dozen passes under this framing, it never begins to make sense.

The move then is to center around what has been done and how much finer the line gets with each step down it. I can afford the trailer, extremely begrudgingly. Like with everything I call out well in advance, it does not make paying for it, fighting with rusted lug nuts, nor the tasks to engage in potentially last minute any more palatable. I've already achieved a serious amount of pallet and tire hauling before I discovered the new issues. I have a trailer to even be worked on. I have job prospects and lines of income at least in the works, so the added anxiety and frustration at the costs should be mitigated eventually. There is an entire world of scrap and pallets still left to be gathered no matter how frustrating it is to look ill-prepared and inadequate in the present moment.

That's my biggest problem. The moment feels like such a demonstrable and insidious lie and wholly a statement about me and what I haven't established yet. It takes effort to rope everything else in. It takes reminding myself that I tend to forgive people the circumstances of life because I'm so intimately familiar with getting fucked by them as well. I could have been more methodical in the type of tires I bought to ensure they were the correct size and not taken the tire guy's comment over the phone at face value. Is $200 ever going to make or break me? No. Is it just another testament to how expensive it is to be poor when you're navigating problems as they arise to the “best” of your attention and budget? Absolutely.

I feel like I have an incredible sense about the incredible heights I could reach. I don't overly romanticize anything, the past included, but it feels alive today as the same things that kept me excited and motivated and creative then pop up in what I elicit from people today. I'm still funny and engaging. I'm still sincere in how I relate information that means things to me. I'm still, sometimes on the verge of literally, fighting to not have certain standards of honesty and behavior fall through bureaucratic and pious holes of indifference. My “happy hobbit hole” is not a community and my forays into self-sustaining side-hustles cost an incredible amount in gas.

I do think an important shift has happened, at least nominally, in that I'm behaving more like the money is secondary. That's a class shift. I left my job earlier than anticipated, citing all of my righteous ideals, and after sternly dictating the pithy, but large enough, sums it would take for me to keep playing along. I passed on a sure-hire at another establishment with the same mindset. I don't want to be miserable and taken advantage of as much as what is on offer. I'm willing to exploit and be exploited, but it's taken me 3 years to open up more options as to how. What kind of fool works that determinedly only to persist in business-as-usual veins for longer than is required?

I continue to ask myself just what it is I need. Do I need recognition? Meh, I've only grown to look down on people more after increasing time around them. Do I need respect? Hard to ask for what you don't really give, so no as well. Do I need “entertainment?” It all, often, just feels like passing the time more than some deeply interested pursuit and exploration of why some artist is arting. No, I need to feel individuated in spite of the myriad reasons to suspect I'm a statistic across the endless means of categorizing. Writing is individual to the dictates of my head and fingers. The path(s) I choose will stem from the reasons or arbitrariness contained within.

Of course, my individual has morphed over time as incentives and obligations have evolved. I don't really care to surround myself with “friends” in the same way as I imagined in the past. This isn't a revulsion for social interactions, it is just another dagger in the romance. I want the creativity and chaos of genuine individuals pursuing their goals alongside and in service to each other. The focus and clarity of the how and why you are doing things is what bonds or outlives any one member. You can bind together because the profit potential exists, or you can vibe on an eternally enriching source of energy for defining the, not impractical, means for pursuing how to be your kind of individual. You can exist in service to or sacrifice of your conception of society writ large. You can marry every highest ideal to daily slog and you can do it in only ways you can define or figure ways to feel good and balanced about.

That's how I last in “normal” environments. I was alone when I went to people's houses and explained to them how the State worked. I made the rules of what was and was not appropriate in how we were going to conduct communication and visits, and those rules made just enough room for your traumatized and ratchet lifestyle without compromising safety or what it takes for me to live with myself. If anything, now is the time to be even louder. The impediment to that kind of definite statement is the “if only I had” kind of thinking. Had what? The motivation or organization? The drive? The desire? Surely I maintain those things, but it is perpetually unclear as to how they should manifest. I don't need a fancy camera to make Youtube videos. I don't need hundreds of dollars to knock on doors. I don't need to work 80 hours every two weeks an hour away to keep the bills paid.

I quit my job less than a week ago. I got a part-time job, am orchestrating going private practice for counseling, have looked into and sent quasi-applications to other part-time gigs. I haven't had the rug pulled out from under me for the scrapping or pallets. I haven't even begun the “real” work of what it would take to make the land profitable. I'm not in panic mode. I've just been given too many hours to get into my head and find familiar circumstances worth bemoaning. The needle has moved, but it feels different because I'm not desperate or feeling like my back is against the wall. It's a new kind of disorienting freedom.

I need to explore more grant writing and talking to people who do conservation and gardening. I kind of leave a lot of that up to Allie, but there's no reason I can't bump into someone who likes what I'm doing or knows who I should speak to that can fund, a year or few at at time, the effort to continually develop what we're doing. I never get properly worried until I've spoken to a few dozen people who all turn out to be shit, and I haven't even spoken to one. All of this could be functionally mute in weeks as well if this counseling pans out like it absolutely should. For now, I should focus on enjoying my trip to Chicago, the food, and ability to catch up on shows. Nothing is going anywhere.