[950] Ring My Bell

I pick up the phone.

I think, well, I know, it’s incredibly important to pick up the phone. When I was growing up, and bill collectors were harassing my injured dad for years, I did not pick up the phone. I’m not speaking to being habitual or disingenuous. I’m speaking to being open, available, and accountable. I can be found. I got my first phone at 15, and from that moment for the last 18 years, day or night, if you have my phone number (and pretty much everyone who might read this does or did at one point), I’ve been available.

 

Just in case that wasn’t enough, if the phone was dead, lost, or otherwise not in my possession, I lived and worked in various locations with phones! I was also plugged into social media and have a dozen email addresses. My phone number has been the same my entire life. My oldest email address is still in use. I’m here in the middle of nowhere, and if you happened to search for the business name I came up with my freshman year of college you can find me.

 

We make a choice to call or not to call each other every day. Most of us probably feel like we no longer have much in common or shared history. I figure a good amount of people feel as though they’ve “outgrown” versions of themselves that would have rolled with me or my dreams. With the windows into each other’s lives, we got both the myth that the grass was greener, and the sobering reminders that people are just people doing their thing, be it over there, or next to you, and maybe they can’t “entertain” you anymore than your spouse did the first few years of your marriage.

 

I try hard to interrupt thoughts about “could’ve.” While I think people can express a level of sincerity about their plans or thoughts, I don’t think they know shit lol. I think we all adopt narratives because they’re necessary for survival, then we find ways to make excuses for why our feelings do or don’t conform to them. The “wisdom” one derives from that process is either a measure of what you’ve choked down or the conscious resistance to being dictated by ever-ambivalent or malicious forces.

 

It’s work to find a goal, set it, pursue it, and sacrifice for it. It’s work to discover how it might need to change. It's work to assess the landscape and consider how even your best ideas might no longer fit like they might have yesterday. It’s just work all the way down, all the time, if you’re doing it right. Always be assessing. Even when I’m doing “nothing,” I’m working on the next plan. I’m working my way through my more accessible goals. This is work to figure out what killer line is lying dormant in my head to help me orient how I’m going to go back to work.

 

For the last year or so I’ve been renting space on the land. What you’d think couldn’t be more straightforward “park here, come back and get it when you’re done” has been a saga of poor communication, mud, property damage, and now several hours of pipe-dream wasted conversations. The latest engagement had me on the phone with a couple of guys looking to rent space for storage containers. They move pallets of shit, load the containers, move the containers. I forgot to say “allegedly” because none of this operation I’ve seen, nor am thinking anymore I much wish to be a part of. They, sometimes, answer the phone. I’m doing other things with my life and time.

 

My hedging of opportunities is always at play. I’m not going to dangle at the end of someone’s goodwill or disappear in a cloud of smoke they’ve tried to blow up my ass. It’s the lowest bar I can reasonably expect from someone. Talk. Answer. Don’t fucking lie and waste my time.

 

But that’s not what people are on, so it’s what I always have to be on. This plays out at every level of my life. Who do I hang out with? Byron and Hussain answer their phones. What jobs do I take? The subcontracted company for the prison called me, my supervisor called me, they confirmed interview dates and me getting hired immediately, and got me in a week early when I asked to start sooner. I became someone’s go-to scrapper because, even if I couldn’t do the job, I always answered the phone.

 

I’ve been criticized pretty regularly when I “insist” to be acknowledged. You can feel the tension in conversations or texts that I would dare point out that you didn’t follow through or functionally lied about where you were coming from. It’s my problem either way. Either I wait indefinitely for you to come down from your mountain, or I commit the egregious faux pas of respecting my time and taking my ass and mind to somewhere I can be appreciated or feel like I’m getting somewhere. I can’t win unless I truly own how little I wish to fuck with people who don’t pick up the phone. That ownership struggles against a desire to remain open and accommodating to the same chaotic life that often doesn’t carry out my plans as intended.

 

But then again, in the chaos, I still pick up the phone. I call you back at 5 o’clock when I get back to my car from the prison that doesn’t let me have a phone. Then I tell you my schedule and what days I have off. I give you my work email and office extension. I contextualize it further and make sure you realize I’m running several games at once, and while I’m technically “open” to what we may do together, shit changes quick, so we need to establish a routine, commitment, or pattern of communication that doesn’t sweep away the effort thus far. Almost everyone I talk to is completely full of shit about what they intend to do, either as a function of lazy language, or just because they don’t feel there’s anything riding on being accountable. What makes you or I any different from the worst consequences of that behavior? Are we planning and prioritizing, or being dragged along by the angriest or most chaotic forces?

 

I’m itching and impatient to move on my best day. When I have more money, more opportunities, more pieces working well than I already have, I may be downright tyrannical if I’m too close to the excuses and the nonsense that amounts to the failure of phone answering.

 

I’ve tried to make time the locus of my value system. I want my time. I want to spend my time around the people I care about, on the subjects that keep me interested or might have the greatest impact on society. I want to fill every waking minute of my life plugged into something meaningful. I’ve experimented aggressively with giving my time to things I thought would meet that criterion. When the things get bought, the friends disappear, or the goal achieved, you’re left with your experience of time in any given moment. Is it filled with resentment for old friends? Is it filled with anxiety about things you can’t control? Is it idle and depressing or bored?

 

No. It’s planning. It’s thinking. It’s watching. It’s writing. It’s wishing. It’s moving on to the next person who might pick up and the project that might take off. It’s learned that if everything else fails, the process and patterns remain the same. I’m not addicted to making excuses for how I spend my time or the horrors my phone is going through in looking for a signal. I’m right here, and always have been.