I've avoided writing, at least posting anything I've written, for a few weeks concerned it would come off as entitled bitching for bitching's sake, and with no gained insight. There's a version of my current place in time and space that's as enabled, productive, and forward-moving as I've ever been. There's a version that's reduced to my complaints and anxieties about, still, not moving fast enough. I'm gonna search for the balance.
I read a wonderful article articulating thoughts about “stupid.” I took away that stupid is easier in groups, and those who you might want to call stupid are after a kind of transcendence of their circumstances. Why get religiously intransigent about facts unless they were of a sort that had you so beat up, so sublimated by default, you've got nothing to lose? We might then question your understanding of your position in life, those facts, or the nature of particularly defiant and stubborn creatures. Either way, it's rare someone is just well-rehearsed and methodical in their donning of a persistent “fuck you” with regard to reality and its consequences.
Consider, Trump grew up in a rich and malicious cult before his oligarchical ilk sought to expand its borders. Religious and fascist cults are marching inch by torched inch over decades, if not millennia, in an effort to solidify their rule and desperate dance to avoid feeling as helpless and afraid as they do.
My buddy and I are fixing up and flipping a house. Who doesn't have a family member, friend, or acquaintance that either does this, or has a story of someone who does, or who hasn't considered doing it themselves? Lowes and Menards are like adult playgrounds. There's YouTube videos for nearly everything. Most places, particularly in this inflationary environment, are going to settle up for larger lump sums than you will ever see unless you're a lottery winner or human lab rat. What's not to love or why temper your dreams as you're tapping in vinyl or taping up plastic to protect your accent walls?
Just as quick as you might entertain the idea of flipping a house, you recall the stories of how difficult or frustrating it was to perhaps even find someone nominally capable of fixing something at your own. I'm thankful I have the blogs and statuses where I detail out my futile struggle to find help getting things set up out here, and I've considerably less square footage or aesthetic-concerning aspects to my living environment. To do it yourself, you need time, money, and the patience to navigate the ever-present learning curve. If you're going to get the job done in any appreciable amount of time and considerably less risk to your health, you also need help.
I don't take any variable in the story of my success for granted. I don't want to waste a drop of water in the sea of potential productivity because, rational or not, I feel incredibly thirsty. I've learned to distinguish this thirst from ravenous compulsive working in service to building something my demons are just gonna mock anyway. It's a thirst born of visceral memories of feeling stranded in a proverbial desert. I haven't had the help to the degrees that would have saved me a fuck ton of time, money, and energy. I've absolutely had help, but in spurts, when they had time or were feeling capable. Sometimes it was if and when they could be bothered. Whether I've paid in cash or strands of hair, no one is waiting around my house for me to help them do anything I've got worked up around here.
To that point, I know I'm, when given the right conditions, an aberrant machine with regard to my work ethic. Do I hold people to my standard? Only at my peril, and I sympathize with my business partner who is “worse” than me, currently washing dishes with his Master's degree because it's taken 4 months of games and incomplete information to get this counseling business still not precisely up and running.
Between writing the above and starting again now, it's been six and half hours of me chasing the end of what I might claim has been a “stupid” process of bureaucratic nonsense and silent game-playing. I'm sympathetic to criticisms of “big government” or the general pace and demeanor of people who manage to keep jobs indefinitely not for their competence or vision, but ability to play along. I'm in social work, where I believe it is my responsibility to set a persistent example by which others are to follow and learn from. Would I tell a client to give up on something for which they had one or a dozen ways of asking, calling, or experimenting forward? Of course not, thus my speculation, complaints, or criticisms come right up against my “just do the next thing you dumb fuck.”
Analogies abound. There's 35-odd things to do to get the house sale-ready. Each has its own compounded redundancies, new things to learn, or variables you can't account for until you hit them. It was no different in starting the coffee shop. It's no different in getting my own house in order. You have to claw every miserable inch of progress from the nakedly embarrassing and vitriolic fog of those conducting incidental lives. You have to lay floor accounting for the budding carpel tunnel, vinyl cuts, smashed fingers, and aching knees so the piece fits just right under the trim. Or, you half ass it and put down eye-sore quarter round to try and poorly cover for your mistakes, exhaustion, or lack of care.
I feel like people pretend like we don't share considerably more than we differ, for every individual soul nonetheless. TV shows, movies, and music tie the entire world together. Our biology can only do so many, though seemingly infinite, things. Our brains have about the same meat. Like recognizes like, and whether you're drawn into the blended seam of a perfectly mitered edge or submitting a meticulously documented and accountable measure of your effort in service to a family, what drives the pursuit of either remains the same. You're trying to practice the appreciation for what you've been given. You're trying to be comprehensive in your accounting of where you're at, but also what you're capable of. The story of your impact, the decisions you make in service to who you want to be and where you want to go, is not over until you die.
I may have an infinite well of hatred that fuels my ability to write endless redundant emails in professional-doublespeak, but it doesn't cloud my ability to recognize what the work I've done is worth. I'm not driven by hatred, it's still spite, but I know who and what the enemy actually is. I fight the complacency, disorganization, absent-mindedness, and ambivalence that lend themselves so freely to any given moment. Life is begging you to kill yourself and a chorus of do-nothings are ceaselessly harmonizing.
I will get “my way” regardless. I may not recognize it as mine, at first. But all I have to know about me is that I'm as consistent and persistent in my exercise of the traits and perspectives that have served me the most in life. A presumption of decency or tactful demeanor about me can be denied, but you're gonna see and feel the work I do.
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