[941] Centered

I need to get centered. There's a certain undefinable point I feel you reach in life where nothing you say, pretty much ever, gets to be classified as anything beyond a kind of indulgent bitching. At the same time, there are credible problems everyone faces, at all times, be they pertaining to health, social environments, or the struggle against whatever constitutes an unforgiving and unrelenting existence. Maybe some day I'll stop qualifying my need to vent and organize at the top of blogs. Today is not that day.

I'll start with the first scene that keeps coming to my mind. In an episode of “How To With John Wilson,” John finds himself at the residence of an extremely rich man who bemoans how his dozen high-priced vehicles are stored in $500,000 dollar garages with lift systems. “I'd love to go subterranean,” he states, describing the hassle of having to pull a car out and lower the car above in order to drive it.

John also finds himself attending a baby shower for the wife of the Bang energy drink CEO. It's a costume party. The CEO shows John around his house, and appears incapable of saying anything, about his preferences or otherwise, without tying it back into his product line. He lives in a mansion, and discusses the property that will be the biggest in the area, on an island, they have in development. He seems like a hollowed-out shell of a human being, wholly subsumed by the overwhelming narrative woven into his drinks and financial success.

I dream, often enough, about being “rich.” That's the superficial understanding of the dream. I want flow. I want to be unburdened by thoughts that I find incredibly boring and taxing for their resemblance to brick walls through which I can't burst my head. How many hours of my life have been spent worrying about my car breaking down? How many tense hours has my jaw been clenched as I pretend, through sheer wishing and will, that my engine will keep it together until the next stop?

Ever busy, when one aspect of my busy-enough day is going right or wrong, it's no struggle for my mind to race to the cascading series of issues that will arise. Car won't work? Okay, is a friend's available to borrow, or is an insane amount of debt in rental fees coming? When you make plans, like buying cheap concert tickets, it feels like the universe is punishing for your hubris to think you could anticipate your ability to get there. Is that money wasted? Or just an opportunity to spend more, maybe on Uber?

I didn't get this job I had forgotten I applied for and, in my heart of hearts, don't want anymore than any other job I've applied for. My mind, in spite of myself, let the thoughts about what a consistent paycheck could enable. I envisioned a new (old) car payment, perhaps some of the toys I didn't see fit to add to my Christmas spree. I went ahead and just paid my internet bill for the year. Why not? They're getting the money anyway. It's all debt at a perpetually existential level. I'm not *realistically* leaving this plot of land any time soon, no matter how much I cite the encroaching fascism and speculate on exit strategies.

I'm one snapshot of everyone's situation. I know I certainly have it better. That becomes the default cliché mode of thinking. Well, who has it worse? Who's sicker? Who's poorer? Who's currently getting physically beaten up by people they love? This is how we curtail what may otherwise be a persistent fire to change our circumstances. What more could we ask for than to be alive in the first place? Isn't it enough that the worst of all possible tragedies didn't strike today? I get sick of my fucking self when I initiate a “grass is greener” protocol and some disingenuous weighing system of plight and privilege.

I suffer most when I let myself desire things. I start to act impulsively to usher the envisioned future of obtaining those things. More often than it feels currently, when I get what I want, I'm able to “get to work.” When I think of all of the reasons I'm unable to work on what I please, the darkest modes and feelings take over. What the fuck is the point of constantly struggling, not to push your limits and learn about yourself, but to merely hang on with some pathetic prayer to nowhere that “it” or “things” will “get better?” Would any fish fight so hard upstream if it knew there was zero chance of breeding before the trip?

I forgot which philosopher imaged Sisyphus as enjoying the labor of pushing the boulder up the hill. Find joy in the struggle, you'll never be sad. Find purpose in the fight for fighting's sake, you can always return, like overworked cliches, to a stable conception of your place in life. You can temper your goals and be reasonable about your purpose like a character from In The Heights.

I think I've worked incredibly hard to not just persistently speak to, but actually demonstrate work in service to my values. I don't know the first time I wrote that I wished to be in real estate or flipping houses, but I do know the second I was handed the tools and house to work on, I began turning it out faster than anyone else involved was prepared for. I'm not “stuck” in getting this counseling business running so much as literally half a dozen bureaucracies, around the holidays, don't really care to help people, answer questions, nor return phone calls and emails. The world isn't designed to help and improve, it's to “conserve” around whatever you wish to make of the evolving systems.

In this precise moment, I need to fix my truck. In a world that made sense, I'd have a car I could afford that ran well enough to not need thousands a year. I'd have an appreciable job that paid for that car, and a house that didn't start as a shed. I wouldn't need a Masters to be “middle class.” I could count on the things I plan because I could budget and only dip into credit cards for dire emergencies. Not a single moment of my life since graduating college has operated that way. I've scrimped to make up for negligent and lying roommates. Rent payments beckoned. Cars broke down. The jobs on offer are incredibly difficult or horrendously managed. I'm fighting to maintain a basic conception of myself, well before I think of “more.”

The totality of it all comes to a head in a moment too. It's the lunge of the engine after 3 days of crossing fingers and toes as you baby it down the rural road. It's after I've hopped out of the shower only for a muddy not-my-problem to call to me from my front yard where my last feeble attempt to make “passive income” gets stuck in the fucking mud. It's when your annoying fucking cat keeps trying to jump in your lap, verses play with the other annoying fucking cat, which you only got to try and keep either entertained.

Am I capable of fixing anything, ever? Or am I always at the mercy of circumstance? I went into more debt getting a replacement outdoor AC/heating unit. You know what I can't install because all of my tools are at the house I'm fixing up? The house I couldn't complete months ago? I get to anticipate the energy bill as I sit next to a wasteful, inadequate, space heater. But I should be thankful, right? People like my house-fix pictures. I'm not literally freezing to death.

I feel sick at performing a kind of “glass half full” version of the world. I'm about balance, right? But within a concept of balance, you're allotting for a seemingly endless torrent of bullshit provided you're able to square it with some hopeful or meaningful narrative. All sins wash out in judgment or forgiveness of your god, right? Let's couch all of our sense of accountability in death, just in case we might otherwise be prompted to fucking do something else or better in life.

I'm sneaking the best parts of my life away like crumbs from a cake that was never offered to me. I have to dress up living in poverty with terms like “hood rich.” I have to elevate concepts like “grit” or “resilience” when sense or decency can't be found. I have to retreat to my coping mechanism because I can't pull myself any further from dreams or desires without turning wholly self-destructive. There's always a missing piece. I wanted x, but it didn't come with batteries. I got x, and batteries, but a newer model was released, cheaper, improved, the next day. I went to return the first one only to discover THE GOVERNMENT BROKE THE MAIL! So I retreat and try not to recall what I know about x and its evolution. I personalize the responsibility for appreciating my lot and the conditions I'm forced to work under. Who really needs the latest and best anyway? I can't fix the mail, hell, I could barely, and if I'm honest not really, afford x to begin with. I'll get by.

Yeah, maybe, until you can't.

My ex was/is incredibly high-strung and never felt “stable.” I'm sympathetic to this, but I try considerably harder than she did to not turn my feelings against the people I'm trying to enlist in changing the feeling. My best friend is the complete opposite of her. Things are pretty much always going to be okay or are considerably better than we've maybe the ability to consciously appreciate in any given moment. His style betrays my sense of urgency when I've got the tools and intention to use them. Her style builds a wall of increasingly unjustified doubt and resentment for anything that might qualify as good. My experience attempting to balance either most often results in qualifying opening paragraphs and a search for the next things I could conceivably work on when dealing with either creates their different kind of barriers. This blog feeling like the most pressing and worthwhile.

It's really easy to trick yourself into a sense of “accomplishment” in buying something. I have a goal of eating every day. I'm not done with my obligations or work because I hit a drive thru. I think we have a severely stifled conception of just what it is we're buying ourselves. It certainly isn't time. We're buying into narratives about the value of how that time is spent. Provided the money you make covers some bare-minimum you consider a worthwhile existence, whether it took you 10 or 100 hours, it'll feel “worth it.” You buy yourself friends or work associates who will feed your self-soothing narrative, excuse-riddled, comfortable, complacent idea of who you are and where you fit. “Everyone's car breaks down! Fix it and move on!” you'll exclaim, happy to pretend you've never heard of planned obsolescence. You can afford the fix, right? You can't afford yourself the endless burden of shaping a culture that would otherwise design itself to fuck you and everyone like you.

It's easy for me to believe I've bitten off more than I can chew in my ever-feeble bid to shape the world. At the same time, I know it's a battle worth someone like me. I don't really get a choice if I'm going to do more than splash about kiddie pools of human interaction. I don't get to be a hermit. I don't get to pretend I'm more afraid or exhausted than I am. I don't get to front like I'm a “family man” or “do-gooder” only concerned with the story of my effort more than the tangible accounting. I am living spite, after all. I'll break my dick off while getting fucked just to reach back and fuck you with it harder.

I don't know where that comes from. I've yet to discover a more consistent or resolutely truer way of describing what keeps me moving in the world. Surely it's some preverbal survival instinct. I don't want to mythologize it though. I don't want it to look like my best last option for bothering to live at all. I don't want to be incidentally at the end of yet another unconscious force dictating the rules, lending itself to personalized cliches and hidden insecurities. I want the things I want for good reasons. I work on the examples I wish to set. I create what's in my mind's eye. I at least create an incredibly messy version of what's in my mind.

“Things” would be incredibly easier for me if I could ever believe the timelines people give me for how things work. People, mind you, who've watched their culture be revolutionized by science and technology that's tantamount to miracles happening nearly every day. When you really drill down into how you're pissing away your time, it's no secret why you might only aspire to so much, or why you're comfortable writing off my anxiety as a quirk of my nature and not a black mark on your sense of responsibility. This, regardless of whether or not you can seemingly do anything more than I appear to be doing. Where's your perspective?