[926] Combinatorial Explosion

I try not to get lost in the weeds.

When it comes to things going wrong, or when I'm feeling a certain kind of anxious, one of the first things I do is try to “look” at the feeling. I haven't reached a place of zen or awareness that allows me better endurance or the ability to incorporate elevated levels of nausea or pain, but I try to pause and look inside. Often, I'm just hungry. More often, I have some contingent piece of a puzzle that I have no means of proactively addressing. Putting that piece in place seems easy. I can't. I don't have the tool or response I need. It's just sitting there, not being picked up and put in place to complete the picture. This underscores endless reams of anxiety.

Keep in mind, this is described in the vein of things going “wrong.” Some people get worked up in perpetuity for the slow-motion train wreck that is climate change or creeping fascism. The pieces to complete the puzzle are often abstract notions of how to combat power or whose speech to crack down on. Once you qualify the situation as “wrong,” you can reach out towards anything to conceivably become a fix. It's a recipe to protect and exacerbate the anxiety. It's to muddy the waters of how to conceive of your agency or what you can really be in control of.

On the other side, what do we make of anxiety about things going right? We know people recreate patterns related to their trauma, tearing down things that might otherwise make them feel safe or loved. We have many parables regarding power and the inevitable corruption once you obtain “too much” of it. I find myself getting increasingly worried about what happens when all of the “first-world poor” things are no longer my main preoccupation. I've spent my entire adult life orienting around how to dig myself to a level where I'm not habitually mitigated by a dollar amount.

I'm also not a person who's unaware of nor perfectly happy with the amount of power he has already. My first steps into writing had two overriding themes. My teenage limerence-ridden heart, and my capacity and awareness for manipulation. When I turn it on in a professional realm, I get untrusting, insecure, and generally befuddled poor people to like me and comply. When I refuse to employ it towards people I wish to be close to, I tend to be the most annoying or biggest asshole or series of other judgmental words you could ever hope for. I have, and have exercised, the power to let a litany of relationships dither or explode and let the pieces be allusions in forgotten blogs.

In many ways, I'm in precisely the same places I was 10 years ago as I am today. I'm starting another business. I'm advocating for the growth and iteration that encompasses different areas of interest, and hopefully speaks to many levels of the era's problems. I want exactly the same things from the people I'm working with. I'm still trying to speak as honestly as I feel about the hurdles and negotiations it takes to create.

Mentally, I've achieved a moderate peace with the pace it has taken to not be exhausted by being cranked up to 11 at all times. I recall how obsessed and dramatic it felt in trying to get the coffee shop going. In actual time, it took 3 months to go from idea to have a physical structure and contract with the mall. The counseling business is happening faster, but the same anticipatory anxiety is there. The same waiting game for a form to get back or call to be returned. I'm weathering it better, but I see as bright and big of a future from doing this as I did then.

So, what happens if things start going right? What happens when I'm working 20 hours and clearing a grand or more every week? What happens when I enlist enough people to grow and scale to other counties or throughout the state? What happens when I just call the people who do big professional work at big professional prices and can tell them to simply get to work? What happens when all of the things I believe about basic accountability and civility balloon and start attracting people who want interviews or consulting? If doing this cold-calling for my other new job has taught me anything, everyone is a freakin' consultant.

What happens when my vehicles just work for long periods of time or I have zero qualms taking them in, using a rental, and going about my day? What happens as I take more time for all of the hobbies or schedule the series of concerts I wish to see out for the year? Am I “happier” than I am now? Do I sleep any better? Does my enthusiasm become so large and so much that it practically overwhelms whatever next endeavor I set my sights on?

I've always taken for granted the success would come. I've never been under any illusions about how hard I've worked, am prepared to work, nor what the end-game results of my manipulation or awareness powers would be. There's certainly a sense of a “culmination” factor of my years at DCS and the other jobs at play here, but I don't know that I've fundamentally shifted into any higher a gear in some important ways since even high school. I've learned mere facts and am nominally more patient, but who's to say my new baseline isn't blinding me to the growth, I guess. Were I more creative, it feels dumb to think I couldn't have been living out of a shed at 23. I certainly could have bought one and told my roommates I wasn't going to pay the rest of the lease, you know, like the dumb cunts have done to me.

That's, perhaps, the most consistent thing about me. I genuinely do not, have not, nor will in the future, want to be the problem in that...immature? Selfish? Nakedly unapologetic held-harmless way like what I'm doing isn't designed to fuck things? I've been stiffed with home clean-ups, extra bills, the baggage of in-group out-group judgment and silent treatments. I'm never not trying to talk about things only to be met with sometimes screams and extra-read-into indictments of my character. It's like...really been a lot, and from so many people I had gone into our dynamic with a deliriously hopeful naivety about what we meant to each other. A hopefulness literally bred from a deliberate effort to not treat people like pawns.

So what if things go right? What if I no longer need to concern myself with anything but that superficial charm and management capacity? What if I don't need anything but a fleet of useful "friends" or mock-intimacy? Where do I go when my life is wall-to-wall appointments or series of projects seemingly started in service to my deepest ideals? Will it make mourning the dead any easier? I doubt it. Will I erase my sense of spite and resentment for not being offered the basic civility of a polite and curious conversation? Also seems unlikely. Do I just grow angrier and angrier that everything I could be, could have wanted or gotten, didn't happen 10 years earlier with people perfectly fucking capable of trying harder or doing better? Seems a great way to complicate things unnecessarily, but what are we to make of our inclinations?

I don't know if I'll manage to be less exacting or demanding as things go “right.” I've driven myself to precisely a position I've wanted to be in in order to say the things I have and weather the practical storms that come with creating things. I know it won't last forever or go perfectly, but god fucking dammit, I want it to shine. I want it to shame every piece of shit fuckhole cunt it comes across. How could I tolerate a dumb fuck looking at me baffled by the idea that were he to politely ask questions or not lie on his paperwork the world would start to make a little more sense and his job would get easier? I'm worried my darkest and meanest inclinations will come out.

I've literally just ran this experiment to predictable results. My home felt under threat, and I literally threw shit along with my ex-girlfriend out. I let it go for over a year and a half the things that, were I just trying to “manage” her verses share in collective prosperity, I could have acted on sooner. My experience has been a series of disappointments regarding people who don't “get it” or “care” about the feedback loops created from their behavior or lacking efforts. Maybe they have a brain issue. Maybe their unconscious darkness goes into overdrive when enabled. I'm liable to kill a motherfucker who threatens what we could be, especially as the consequences get demonstrated at higher and higher levels.

I don't want to be me on the day I threw my ex out. I don't want to have the clash of high-expectations cloud my ideas of “friendship” with “professional-relationship.” I'm already worried about how to incorporate the people I know into the fold. I want them to work as I've watched them work, but people change, and their output has formed, presumably, around the pathetic expectations of the world as it is, not what I wish to push it into. I'll need to pay really close attention to the “policy” I demonstrate and “training” of that which you might not really be able to train.

I know that it takes all types and that the burden is not mine to shoulder alone. I don't want to be in charge so much as I want to not be the fucking hopeless and ridiculous and embarrassingly shitty and fucky fuck fuck places I've worked for. My spite engine is still roaring. If the richest people on the planet are anything remotely like me, and they are, I can see how that drive unfiltered or unchecked could swallow a country or few.

That's why you've got to be implicated and responsible by default. That's why you have to be master of your domain. That's why you have to play the check and balance to propensities those around you may never admit nor recognize are at play in themselves. What if things go right? The worst parts about me become ravenous and there's even less in place to contain or check them? What if things go right? I isolate in ways I can't currently conceive? What if so much is going so well and being attended to in proactive accountable ways, I return right back to where I already am, left to perpetually re-frame or re-structure the very nature of what's to be considered a “problem” at all?

Since it arose in my awareness, I'm constantly struck by how obvious and loud it feels that I want to do things for people considerably more than for myself. I want plenty, but I want the story and example set from those wants. I've barely picked up a tool since we've broken up. So much of what I was doing was trying to help my ex or making it so she might enjoy the space more. I already like it here. I've consciously decided to enjoy the fruits of the labor, and prioritize the details as so much extra icing. The 30 projects on my white board? I could address every single one over the course of a month or two, to completion, with the money from working part-time from the counseling/casework alone. Why sweat it out now if no one's looking and it only serves to affirm precisely what everything else out here suffices for already?

Every single thing is every potential other thing. Every atom could exist in more ways and more spaces than there are atoms in every universe. Thus, the awareness, the celebration, the dictated and observed purpose of this moment embodies an infinite miracle cascade some of us can't be bothered to pause and accept a kiss within. Everything can be lost and found, indeed is in fact concurrently both, in every moment. The process of embodying that reality is one I'm still engaged in. I no longer need to see a yin-yang reflected in the mirror to do so, but I am by no means done balancing.