[956] Get Back To Where You Once Belonged

It was a small shift, but it happened and it didn’t feel good. For most of the day, I’ve been pretty content to shift things about in my house, clean up a bit, and think about how I will go about my work day tomorrow. My shows have been running for the last few hours. I’m full. I’m not precisely sleepy. It’s not terribly late. As the next show, Atlanta, began, I immediately did not want to go to work tomorrow. My heart of hearts sprang its “ugly” head.

I’ve also been thinking about my new friend/ex-coworker who I got to hang out with last night. She’s been in the process of unpacking her previous relationships and how they mirror things about her current (seemingly former as of today) situation. He’s about as cliché an insecure controlling hypocrite as any entitled 15-year-old who happens to be 45 and married. She has spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out why he has had the impact on her life and feelings as he had. The logic for having nothing to do with him was in perpetual conflict with how she felt, and how she felt was a complicated series of layers developed over years.

According to her, I’ve been instrumental in helping coax along the decision to finally break things off with him. She said she owed me, to which I assured her all I need is for her to keep being her and stay safe, as she was echoing so many sentiments I’ve heard from the battered-wives-club even if he kept the battering to the emotional type thus far. She’s a great example of someone who has every capacity to do the harrowing work of digging through their mind and building that complicated puzzle, but can astutely also testify to the difficulty and sometimes unwillingness or lack of desire to do so.

I think about my role in the conversations. Unconditional positive regard comes to mind. I don’t talk shit about nor feel negatively towards her for making what might seem like incredibly short-sided or exacerbating moves. I just kept asking questions and for her to define down the rationale behind those moves. I show up when asked to hang out and respond to texts. I played out vocally what my process would be were I writing the blog given the information at hand if it was my life. I apparently frequently echoed her therapist or other people she’s chosen to share with.

I do want to think I’m good at helping coax that process along, but I overwhelmingly believe in people doing their own work. Part of my willingness to buy-in to her process is that I recognized it. I trusted she had one, and I wouldn’t just be spinning my wheels with someone motivated to waste time and self-destruct wish as many people as she could bring down with her. What about people not like that? Is there a way to turn people out who discover a process in spite of themselves? What if the whole notion of “fixing” something about how you speak or think is as foreign to you as another language and cultural norms?

What does this have to do with not wanting to go to work? I’m running a constant informal experiment where I’m seeking a qualitative answer to the questions above while under extreme duress or limitations. I tell my guys all the time, if they learn a coping skill or get into a reflective meditative or writing habit in prison, they learned that shit on “hard mode,” so getting out things should be much easier. If you can meditate in prison, you can do it in a shed or in your car. If you can contend with the cultural norms and keep yourself out of conduct-threatening situations, you can walk away from a fight or difficult person on the street.

But, just like for them, prison is not necessarily the environment to thrive. You can do good things. You can be a genuine help and example. You’re still a cog in several complicated layers of entrenched systematic injustice and norms that, I don’t care how common the cliché is, you don’t fix from the inside. I practice the pieces of what I wish to be in my culture-shaping or culture-attacking system while I’m embedded in them, but I’m not naïve to the extent that they get knee-capped by business as usual and norms I’m financially obligated to uphold.

So with the weight of the world questions about what kind of challenges I need to be taking on swirling in my subconscious, praise for (the acknowledgement alone feels good) a capacity for helping organize the fog of disordered relationship thoughts, and fresh memories of the kind of “freedom” and fun I like to engage in as though they are removed from otherwise responsibilities and contexts, boom, a “fuck work” pang of doubt about the purpose and utility of my being there.

I’m almost certain I’m about to start going door-to-door advertising “consulting” and counseling for $20/hour. It’s less than I make at the prison, but if I just took this - ICK - “gift,” so-named by the neighbor who’s dog we helped retrieve and went on the road like the unlicensed Dr. Phil, Tony Robbins, or these “facilitators” constantly advertised to me on Instagram, maybe I cut out my own little "influencer" space. I have no desire to pretend to be a therapist, but I do want to reach as many people as possible with the tools that have helped me. I’m like a fucking infomercial for the scatter-brained notion of compiling philosophy and lectures into writing with a sprinkle of addiction counseling and hard-won life experience at some of the highest levels of power. Cops can shoot you, but DCS can destroy your family for generations.

I have a kind of psychological habit, I like think it’s wisdom, of downplaying what I might have. If I don’t respect the test to get the certification, why should I be proud of the certification? I consider both my degree and my CADAC II kind-of jokes. I’m not good at talking to people because I know how to answer test questions or memorize a series of facts. I share a title with a messy bitch who thinks I need to write an essay to tell her, “Fuck you.” And the higher up the ladder you go with the letters after your name, you find people in ever-increasing silos of pretension and strange relationships to power and control.

What do I really want? I want to stay up late and binge the 30-odd hours of TV I’ve stockpiled over the last couple weeks. I want considerably more money for doing what I keep seeming to discover I’m good at, but can’t capitalize on in “official” or “respectable” ways to the extent I would like. Do I need a contract or partnership with someone “established” to talk to people? No. I need to nut up and introduce myself to my clientele who don’t yet know I exist. I need to personalize a practice of behavior that I can scale and partner with those who are willing to do the work.

This feels like classic overthinking arresting my otherwise usual gung-ho to jump into the roundabout means by which I get what I want. At the same time, I do worry, given the nature of the industry and task, that I’ll end up running afoul of some of the same powers that have locked me out of certain spaces already. There’s a bit of an awkward conversation in walking the “traveling counselor” line who ensures he reminds you he is not a therapist. The easiest out I have for that discomfort I don’t even want to use. I have my degree, I am state certified, I am an official counselor. I have more than enough “regular” status or power indicators to move in considerably more directions than I feel like I am currently.

I guess I kind of want both. I don’t respect Dr. Phil, I got bored with Tony Robbins in my teens, and whatever you want to say about these Instagram people, I’ve never felt a desire to watch their whole commercial. I like school and knowing shit. I wouldn’t be against getting more licenses and degrees, I just won’t do so if it means debt. I don’t want to come off as someone lazy or cheap providing the back-alley abortion version of a private practice or poor-man’s Tony Robbins. But I really, really want more money and I do seem to help people.

I don’t things to get out of hand. Maybe I find enough vulnerable, but paying, people, and the floor starts to shift on me. I technically have independent accountability at the prison, but in practical terms, you have to maintain your own standards. Maybe that’s where the conflict arises. I’ve psychologically rooted in a “standard” above my current “official” station. I respect doctors and therapists for as many as I can’t stand and absolutely don’t trust. I didn’t start typing in my credentials on my reports until the CADAC II was official. It matters to people reading it. I worry about all of the other things they’ll be reading in me going about my business differently.

I think a lot of it boils down to me not wanting to look or feel foolish and desperate. I’ll talk to a friend indefinitely until they reach a better place, but you’re high if you don’t think I’d love to be paid for it by people I’m not friendly with. I spent a lot of time getting good at DCS. That shit is valuable information that no one is sharing. Is it “dirty” to capitalize on people who are otherwise desperate to understand how to navigate that system? I want to do it for free, but, I don’t. I want the whole system to be under my attack, and I need money and the information I have getting out there in order for that to happen.

Can I say I’m living my values if I’m not experimenting more and iterating upon reaching sudden doubts and pauses when I think about how I’m occupying my time? I’m a “Do everything, do it now, do it anyway” kind of mother fucker. Who am I waiting for? Who’s going to give me permission? Am I just going to all of a sudden start giving too much a fuck what people think? Now? ::tongue deeply entrenched in cheek:: On the precipice of greatness!?

I’m not trying hard enough. The stakes are considerably higher in people’s lives than my vague and remote embarrassment about the lack of letters after my name. A socially-imposed embarrassment that no less conflicts with my very real respect for smart and motivated people who manage to achieve them. I think you can do both. I think you can be useful in the realms generally set aside for egg-heads pretending their capacity for doing homework is tantamount to competence in people engagement. I think I can stay in my lane, and will be talking about what that lane looks like well before some dramatic clash or decline.

I need to stop waiting for something to happen. I start the party, mingle, put the pieces together, build and refine. I create and do shit. That’s all my pitch needs to be for people struggling to do the same.

[955] Choose Your Character

I’m positive there’s something to explore about my experience thus far in the prison. It’s mildly unfortunate I must do so at 10:25 PM before I need to be up at 5.

I appear to be helping people.

Prison is its own kind of culture. It’s like a small town if all of the people from every small town that you were supposed to stay away from got together. It’s not that they are a hoard of violent unrepentant maniacs just waiting for you to drop your guard. It’s that it’s a lot of people who have missed out on what might be considered an entire world of information, support, encouragement, or patience.

Well, I’m almost pathologically disposed to a desire to genuinely help. Not the kind of help that adopts the catchphrases and proceeds to mindlessly follow policy or read from a script. I show up when you call, cover a meal, keep an open door, and listen indefinitely. I seek to genuinely help my thoughts and influence my behavior, and it has provoked habits of speech and reflection I think serve me fairly well.

I reminisce about the absolute pain in the ass of what it has meant to create my living arrangement over the last few years. Even if my goals struggle through merciless circumstance to come to fruition, they serve as living anchors. I know what I want, but only after repeating it a thousand times in blunt and nuanced ways. I know what kind of example I can set, should set, and how it makes me feel if I’m not doing so. I like being the guy who jumps from beater vehicle after beater to the one with a winch to pull his own ass out of the ditch.

Prison, like any small town, is filled with gossip. The word, consistently, from people I don’t even know, is that my guys like me. They think I care. They seem to connect with my form of deliberate challenges to unpack their thinking, refine their goals, and suggest ideas for peeling away the layers of trauma or ignorance that speaks to why they started using. I can dig that.

I don’t know that it’s ironic more than incredibly sad, but the precise means by which I connect with my guys and theoretically imbue this new found investment and intrigue about themselves is how I perceive myself to have been alienated by most people I’ve ever cared about. They didn’t want the challenge or obligation of the work I was offering. They struggled to even spend time hanging out. They stopped commenting, stopped talking, and went wildly in the direction of judgment and caricature to solidify my “out” status.

Several things at once could be happening here, so for the sake of argument, let’s say I’m just a really bad study of my nature and the points to which I’ve drawn meticulous contention over that pissed off a former friend. Perhaps I’m especially bad at reading the words and body language of my clients which any sane or normal person could immediately recognize as dripping with bullshit. Maybe every time I thought I was inviting a conversation, I went blind to all of the “Fuck you, idiot” comments I was making, and it really is on me to not be confused why no one wanted to be around that…

It is one of the most tear-jerking things to read some of what my guys are writing about their lives or their perspective on a class and what they’re hoping for. It’s hard not to be disgusted by the nature of the problems and piety on offer from people I’ve known. It’s hard to think about the opportunities squandered because something vague and distasteful like “discomfort” could placate an otherwise obligation or notional self-respect. How many of your children have died on you? How often were you drinking at 9? How guilty do you still feel about stealing to feed yourself at 12? Can hardly imagine? This shit is routine with my guys.

I think what makes my guys different is that they’re living within visceral consequence. There’s a familiarity, consistency, and camaraderie in prison, but I promise you, no one wants to be there. No one wants to shit in public, be strip searched, fed “passable” food, nor be tucked in a bunk with 150 strangers who may or may not be mentally unwell, violent, or at their breaking point. What that will do is compel your mind to look for anything else to think about or work on. The suffering is right up against your nose. I don’t care how proud or cool you think you are, prison will humble you.

You, though? You’re educated. You’re still cute enough or found your partner and only-quasi-miserable job. Your conversations are about options and indulgences. Whatever existential brink you may be teetering on, it’s as abstract and improbable as a considerably worse plague or asteroid impact. You don’t need to rewire your brain so that triggering moments won’t derail even the memory of stability. You don’t have more painful and regretful memories than positive ones to sort through, drunk parent or medical turmoil notwithstanding. You’re “just you,” with only so much to say. Where would I possibly get off talking to and impressing upon you my so-called ideals?

I was told before I got the job that I would see death. It took 6 weeks and I watched nurses, unsuccessfully, attempt to resuscitate a 37-year-old who died playing basketball. I don’t know how to distinguish my behavior from someone who isn’t constantly thinking about death. The death of those friendships. The death of certain ideals. The death of opportunities and every day that dies for nothing more than what might be desperately extracted from it in trying to deny death. A great many notions of yourself and standing will die after you find yourself incarcerated.

I was willing to attack the worst parts, or at least the most nagging and seemingly pathological and painful parts, of me. That began to fuel my insistence for a certain awareness of “now” and my responsibility to it. I wasn’t going to feel better pining or mourning or sitting and staring and bitching. I was going to build or I wasn’t really going to exist. I was going to invite or I couldn’t expect people to be open. I was going to parse or I wasn’t going to pretend I was so sure of where I was coming from. It’s been a lot of work, physically and mentally. I had a field, now I have a house. I had “friends” and “girlfriends,” now I have clients as primed as they’ll ever be, who are hungry to not end up like me if I’d found solace in substance use instead of writing.

The idea of profoundly influencing someone’s life because I happened to pass on the ideas and habits instilled in me feels empty. I don’t mean that in a bad way. I just don’t feel like I own the ideas I’ve read or were raised on anymore than I’m responsible for an offender getting their life together or a former friend distancing themselves. I’m a conduit for what I think is worth building. I guess you can add a brick or go fuck yourself. I don’t believe most people I’ve encountered are really trying their best or wrestling with death in spite of its inevitability. I don’t sense the urgency or obligation. The entitled took their lives for granted before turning ones they envied into something to resent.

The hollow feeling comes from thinking about the people who can’t be bothered to think about how or why people become literal prisoners. You, too, are in a cage. The type of shit you’re taking is on a world stage. Because your charges amount to cultural norms and the collective secretive shame, you’re let off with an indefinite warning. The consequences get to play out in the lives of the most vulnerable. My job isn’t to “plant seeds” and fight the statistical odds for maintaining sobriety. My job is to attack you, larger, uglier, perpetual existential threat that would toss me away as soon as any other inmate. You pre-contemplative gods of ambivalence and laziness hold the heads for my wall.

This is why no “job” or “individual” will ever be enough. I want everyone to feel like they have a shot and to take it seriously. My lifelong experience has been being carried along a fascist wave of sentiments distilled into doomsday clock minutes. We’re a disgusting embarrassment, but not hopeless, and that’s the problem. You hope you’re not as bad as you are. Prison makes it nearly impossible to deny. So, who do you think is really capable of the necessary change?

I see more enthusiasm and attention from these guys every day than I’ve seen from meme-lords over years. You not proud of what you’re doing? You’re not still eager to share? Do you even believe in yourself? I certainly did.

[954] What's That Sound?

I want this to be quick, because it’s incredibly old news. This morning, I was told, “You come off as arrogant and make people feel small.” This was a reactionary comment when I informed my coworker that I had gotten my CADAC II and was relatively displeased with my score. I poo-pooed the idea of getting what I considered a C+ (it’s not even scored that way), and how relatively “easy” and “useless” the study materials were. I conveyed that I would have been beaten for that grade as a kid.

My coworker is an addict, has 10 felonies, openly admits to functionally destroying the foundation of her child’s life, and “worked really hard” for her 500-something score. When she hears me talk, generally, about anything I consider important about my personality, capability, style, or work ethic, she’s annoyed. She questioned my ability to function in a team. She maintains this posture that she’ll tell you “straight up” what she thinks in case no one else can be bothered. She’s also the one who whispered to management about how I smelled.

 

I know she’s vulnerable. I know she feels like she’s walking a precarious line too. What fucks me up is that, again, we’re COUNSELORS. We’re supposed to be good at open and honest communication and practicing what we preach. I wrote a 1-page mini digression hoping to explain to her some of the reasons I have the personality I do. Her response was to tell me, “That was a whole lot of words to tell me ‘fuck you.'"

 

While not exactly an invitation, boy did it feel like one. You could know nothing else about me but my proclivity to say “fuck you.” But, I’m so much worse than that. I’m downright mean. I’m a genuine threat to your continued sobriety if I bury my comments deep in your broken brain. That’s what fucks me up about this. If you genuinely value your place in the world and what you’ve achieved in spite of setbacks, why, on your life, would you provoke someone with the capacity to *accidentally* make you feel small?

 

If you are going to assist me in becoming exceptionally angry, prompt the bodily recall of the trauma of my childhood living environment. Make me feel like I’m walking on eggshells because I can’t trust how you’re going to respond to something. Guilt trip me or accuse me of not thinking about things in the exact manner you think I should be thinking them. Take my earnest effort to relate and make a condescending summary judgment of my being meant to shuffle me away and dismiss the different points or questions I raised. Fluidly contradict yourself while taking a wanton high-minded heavy-handed swipe at your conception of me. Ping, ground floor, let’s ask you if this is exactly the way you convinced your child to become an addict too.

 

Of course, I didn’t ask her that. But, were I less concerned with money or practicing what I preach as a literal counselor, I can, will, and want to. I want to say it with that tone that tells you I don’t care if you live or die, because I’ll mean it that way. I want you to experience those consequences you harp on about, but don’t sincerely attempt to translate to your clients.

 

I get immensely positive feedback from people open and willing to receive what I’m offering. My clients tell me things like, “It seems like you actually care,” “I think it’s amazing you actually get people to engage,” “You talk like us so it’s easier to relate to,”I’ve never had this kind of one-on-one with any of my previous counselors.” Is there always going to be some level of blowing smoke up my ass and flattery with this population? Duh. Can I tell the difference? I’d be an embarrassingly shitty counselor/assessor/teacher if I couldn’t.

 

Thankfully, I’m so aware of my process, that I can experience the elevated blood pressure, the cold dead thousand yard stare, the litany of horrible things I wish to say, and the rush of the idea of burning things down professionally and interpersonally, and feel myself getting bored talking about it, wishing to catch up on my truly stellar lineup of TV shows. The weather is brilliant. I’m hungry. And, yet again, I prove that I occupy rarefied and privileged air in my capacity to not just make you feel small, but reduce you to the unquestionably unstable projection that lies at the heart of your being. That makes me feel pretty big and powerful. When you feel small, consider, you just might be, and not simply because I’m selectively psychopathic or mean. I suspect when I draw your awareness onto that it stings exceedingly more than a pithy “fuck you.”

[953] Last Stop To Nowhereville

Maybe it sounds kind of ridiculous or a weird ask, but I want to work somewhere that I never hear the term “big words.”

In prison, you’re not finding the most educated individuals. I don’t feel a particular way over the obligation to adjust conversation or teaching styles to match the audience. In the event a “big word” gets used around inmates, they’re probably not going to acknowledge that they don’t know what it means and move right along. More often, I hear “big words” from colleagues, who seem perfectly unwilling or unable to open a dictionary or use Google.

 

It's the kind of pet peeve that speaks to my larger existential angst. Why, the fuck, would you not want to know or learn!? Especially when you are in a role that requires a lot of writing, why would you not be interested in constantly building your arsenal in how you convey yourself? When you start to answer the question, the picture is exceptionally bleak. The bar is incredibly low. The “standard” of most work environments is to “do the job” as loosely as you can define or get away with doing it. People have this chip on their shoulder about sounding “too smart” or “book smart.” Somewhere, I know they begrudge the effort it would take to look the word up, let alone take steps to reinforce their memory.

 

I see the “it’s not worth it” attitude everywhere. Why pay attention and proactively engage a problem? Why try when no one expects you to? Why believe, think, read, watch, whatever if there isn’t an ice cream reward or you’re not getting paid enough? I’m learning to appreciate more each day how being the little engine that could with its own locomotive power is practically divine. I don’t have significant and crippling questions as to “why” I do anything, even if I don’t have the most articulated answer. I know how terrible it feels to look or sound like the people around me.

 

Do they feel as miserable as they sound? Did I miss where I would be able to load my mind up with so much hopeless dread and laziness and just carry on like things were great?

 

I’m not even in that deep of a writing mood. But it just keeps hitting me, over and over and over again, that if I’m not occupying my mind in an active way, I’m falling apart. I started feeling unwell after lunch. I’ve ran through study questions for this test I need to take soon. I’ve inched along my spreadsheet and created a group for guitar class. I’m very thankful that the other people in the “office” we share leave early. I get two hours to do literally anything. Yesterday, I cleaned up and rearranged furniture. It was glorious. The day before, I napped for an hour.

 

I’m less tempted to blow up this easy money than I am generally. The temptation is there, and it is real, but I’m not plotting my escape for the short term. I’m in too much debt. Of course, the truck needs help. Of course, there’s a catch in getting reimbursed for these test fees. Of course, there’s hiccups in the amount and timing of my tax refund. Of course, when I start to feel remotely comfortable, hopeful, like I’ve sped something up or finally put in enough time, the universe conspires, and I’m left writing, waiting, and singing the same tune.

 

I’ve got 4 events scheduled for this month. I should have a new, new bowling ball over the weekend. The weather has been more than tolerable. I feel great about the new shirts I bought and my over-spraying cologne and lotion regimen. My Pokemon cards are probably worth a lot of money. I know I’m going to blink and it’s going to be June or July, and with any luck no disasters will strike, and I’ll have a few thousand banked and feeling comfortable about. Who’s to say that we haven’t worked out how to get in with disability or gotten into a new house for renovating by then?

 

I don’t think complaining is a demonstration of a lack of appreciation or accountability. I’m realizing when I might engage in a “bitch fest” there’s a temptation to apologize for it and create one of my little lists of the things going right or to be thankful for. Surely, this is a decent exercise to get into regardless, but it feels a little off to employ it like that. Like when someone says, “It could always be worse!” Sure, but fuck you, this is still bad for bad reasons or could theoretically be addressed if we weren’t hapless pieces of shit. Just because I can use several work hours to play on one of the guitars doesn’t mean that I feel great about some “efficient” personal brownie points laboring under what is otherwise kind of a joke or insult.

 

I haven’t just continued to meander for a while, so let’s begin there. I thought I might be done writing, and then looked around at the next 2 hours of my life I need to spend either doing this, reading more of my Wait But Why article, or pretending to have the dopamine levels that would memorize some flash cards.

 

I’ve thought for a minute that I need a shroom or acid trip. I have shrooms, but I’m worried that the same thing will happen the last time I took them, and I’ll get bored an hour in and be waiting for the trip to end. Something feels like it needs dislodged in my head. I feel like I can easily depict my circumstances in incredibly positive terms with an extremely great outlook. I can then think about that story as it maps against practically anyone who has ever existed, and I’m comfortably in the top 1% of existence.

 

So, why, ever, feel low or down about that? It’s obviously not just about material wealth. I don’t have a deep and intimate bench of people I associate with or friends. I know that a lot of my disappointment comes from the idea relayed at the top. One way or another, most environments aren’t really for me, sentiments regarding my privilege notwithstanding. I’m not polite. I’m not ever content to “just do my job.” I’m not even the kind of person who gives a shit if you tell the boss you think I smell. But I’m forced to care and over-correct because I’ve got a foot in both worlds. I have a reputation to protect regarding things I have little to no emotional investment in for people I can’t begin to respect.

 

That gets exhausting. It’s also exhausting to want really anything out of people. There’s this tension between wanting to have a standard and an expectation, and then needing the wisdom of remaining detached or at a distance. 50% of whether someone does well in recovery is tied to their attachment with a therapist or counselor. People aren’t doing drugs just because addiction is a disease they triggered or caught. People are doing drugs because there’s so few safe and healthy environments from which to get the right kind of signals to survive and live well. If there’s only so many people with the disposition or willingness to get into the field at all, let alone be any good at it, and those numbers are subject to the same statistics relative to the population at large, it’s not a secret why we don’t appear to be making a dent in the ongoing consequences of substance abuse.

 

Like, I work in a prison. I still can’t wrap my head around why. It’s prison. It’s people who’ve done not-so-great to abjectly ridiculous and horrible things just kinda meandering and saying hi. One client got a crazy look in his eye and relayed how he connected with descriptions of psychopaths in a book he was reading yesterday. I’ve connected with those descriptions too yet managed to stay out of prison. There’s a level where of course I’m a person who’s working in a prison. I’m the guy who shows up at strangers’ homes and maybe takes their kids. Prison? Prison, who?

 

So much of my life reduces to my ability to justify or pursue the dollar amount. I think I take lengthy reprieves in between roles so that kind of statement doesn’t become the prevailing narrative I allow myself to adopt. I certainly continued to pursue money between July and January, I just did it in more affordable and creative ways. It’s all trade-offs all the time, right? You can only ever have 2 out of 3 with time, money, or tools. The closest I’ve come to attacking this idea is when I get to working with salvaged material, or spending other people’s money. You know what still costs money? Nails and screws and the tools to shape-up the wood for more than incredibly rough projects.

 

I hate that so much. I hate it sooooo much. Even if I make Costco wages, it’s still more than minimum wage and I don’t have to smell like food. It’s enough money for me to do some things with, and to a greater degree than if I had a rent or mortgage payment. What I’ve learned, is that even if I functionally had double the amount of money a “normal” person would have, I’d still be at least as hindered as I am now. Where should my hope for “the masses” go with that perspective? When I can’t do something, it’s a paycheck or 3 away. So, for you it’s 2 or 6? Plus, you’re carrying more liability, have more social ties, and are probably less of a dramatic cunt prone to acting out.

 

That’s a pretty binary and matter-of-fact reduction, but I think there’s an easily graspable practical truth contained in it. It’s hard even with the leeway and license I’ve given myself. I’d be “nowhere” with children. I’d have swallowed more than a mountain of hopes and dreams if I had to keep a kid alive. Did I mention, I still have not managed to capture some overt health concern or major catastrophe that’s just embedded in my existence? Seriously, where do people find it in them to carry on even as well as they do, let alone what I would foist upon them.

 

Now, tell me how that thought isn’t condescending and the kind of hopeless I can’t stand from other people. Can you do it, or not? Can you try regardless, or not? Are you literally just the basic series of movements and words to keep yourself alive as the sack your genes are carried around in, or are you human, punking those bitch-ass genes no matter how many millennia they think they’ve passed through?

 

I suppose I’m rather adept at responding to feeling bad. I’m still writing, after all. I still eat food I like. I still watch my shows. I still speak to things right up to and before the line that gets me fired. I don’t even know if I “don’t” want to “feel bad.” I want to stay salty and aware of the things that threaten me or my best conception of my identity. And even if it’s not the best, a decent, or “more better” version of someone than I care to bother with generally. Like, I’d fuck with me in life. I’m chill. I’m funny. I do shit. I genuinely invest myself in things people proclaim to need and am self-aware enough to know both where that impulse comes from and how to not let it get the best of me.

 

That surely adds another layer to my plight. That eagerness to please. I really do want to do good and well. I want the living breathing examples set and raging forward. I want the momentum and thing to point to. I want to viciously attack excuses and bring my wildest imagination into the present. I want that so much I think I sometimes make myself sick over it when I approach how to think about it incorrectly. People tell me they get sick at the thought of what people do to their children. I get sick thinking about how I’ve watched the people tasked with responding to what people do to their children.

 

Maybe I’m just greedy. It feels like “my” existence. I’m extremely selfish in wanting an environment that is “generally safe” by treating it with the deference and respect it deserves. You know how to not get stabbed in prison? Make friends. What if all your friends are shit and help create the conditions that you might get stabbed? Look, do you want the paycheck or not? Corrections officers antagonize. One counselor is particularly incredibly rude and yelling at people on the day she goes to the dorm. If a fight breaks out, you know who has the pepper spray and radios and is rushing to help? The same people who get the job deliberately to fuck with inmates. You know who you’re sitting down to lunch with every day? The “counselor” who meant to fill out the C/O application.

 

I don’t think it’s naïve to keep the idea close that each day can come with a new opportunity or surprise. I didn’t know when I started in January that I’d have the opportunity to feel bad about a new work friend transferring. Perhaps, if I came to this environment for nothing else, when I leave, I’ll have someone I can reach out to who will actually play a sport with me. Would you trade 30 days of your life for about $4500 and potential longer-term friend? I got a few friends from DCS, and that took 2 years.

 

Maybe I don’t have the phrasing, but I think it’s dumb to not expect things from people. I think people expect literally my entire life, at some perverse level, under capitalism and subservient role-playing in professionally ambivalent domains. You expect me to smell good, look a certain way, and follow an endlessly shifting set of rules implemented imprecisely if not arbitrarily. I need to get up, continually assess and orient, stay out of prison, stay sober, up on my notes, keep the taxes paid and on the right side of the yellow line. It’s not out-and-out unreasonable to have expectations, and I’m okay with constantly navigating the grey areas of what constitutes harm.

 

I don’t think those who should be expecting more from themselves bother to, and that is what translates into the low expectations “generally.” You find the happy little line you think matches the effort you’re capable of or the world deserves, full stop. After that, whatever will be will be. You can’t be bothered to take the risk. You aren’t obligated to look up the goddamn word in the dictionary because you’ve made a clear and conscious choice to not associate with people who use such contemptible big words. Why does my anger and anxiety always tie back to the examples I’m watching get set? I don’t have unreasonable expectations for drug-addled and ignorant convicts. I HAVE FUCKING EXPECTATIONS FOR THE ASSHOLES IN CHARGE OF COMMUNICATING TO THEM.

 

Is that okay for me to do? Is that my fundamental misstep I should make peace with never happening in the way I’d like? Should I be working to “give up” thinking you should be prepared for class, personalize treatment plans, answer direct questions with direct answers, follow-up in a timely way, explain poor antagonistic policy and reasoning, implement a training plan, or just generally shut the fuck up about things you’re unwilling or unable to enforce? That’s a lot at once and maybe not answerable as a whole, but what would I be asserting, what example would I be accepting, if I just rolled with that?

 

A line from a lecture series I’m half-rewatching sticks out. Piaget was a great scientist because he asked if there was a pattern in the data that was previously thrown out regarding childhood development. I see patterns in the excuses people make for not doing “more” or their “best.” The same shit that can’t be bothered to keep an appointment with me is the same shit that pushes my “training” indefinitely. The shitty lashing out responses I get to my questions or proactive approach is the same insecurity that functionally begs me to be “patient” and “forgiving” for persistent disrespect. What we’re willing to reflexively and colloquially throw away as someone’s bad day or quirk I suspect is much darker. I think it’s an in-built unacknowledged and unaddressed (often) self-destructive capacity. I think my existence triggers people to pay attention to it.

 

When I do something well, it shines a light on what they don’t. I don’t even have to speak to it. If I pop up and rush to the dorms to meet my new people, you, who hasn’t been to the dorm in a week, “hates me.” You think about how stressful your life is at home and how unfair it is what has been asked of you this week. You don’t grant me the license and humanity to think the exact same things as you, and then I go to the dorm.

 

When I behave my values, it shines a light on how you maybe don’t stand as upright in service to yours as you think. I speak my mind, in increasingly respectful and tactful ways as I get older. You’re the “honest” one in your group or family? Cool. I bet you’ll whisper to the boss before you bring your grievance to whom it’s with. (Holy fuck did I call this one.)

 

I don’t even have to particularly excel at what I’m doing, and it garners the same attitude and responses. The bar is incredibly low, remember. Basic competence, answering the phone, taking the half hour to input notes, take attendance, respond to the email, will make you look like you’re something new, worthwhile, and different. And, you are.

 

In lieu of doing those things, you can talk a lot. You can make a lot of promises. You can elevate every level of drama in your life to occupy every waking moment of your thought process because you don’t have a cogent value or goal to cut through the noise and orient your obligations. You can make an in/formal enemy of people like me. You can get passive aggressive and snippy where I might otherwise be attempting to exist as politely as the circumstances will allow.

 

I’m caught in this cycle of bullshit and drama. This must speak to why I’ve felt an increase in tension and been mildly clench-y the last few days. I’ve lost before I’ve begun because my existence is the problem. The way I engage with the world evokes predictable responses. I’m not addicted to the abuse, but in my life still costing money, I’m thrust into these unhealthy cycles and interactions seemingly indefinitely. My default environment is as sick as if everyone in my life was using drugs, and I wished, irrepressibly genuinely, to stay sober. My biology wants to be bonded and feel safe and accept people “where they are” so I might otherwise focus on the things trying to kill me; but I feel like the people I am around are constantly trying to kill me. And in ever-ubiquitous irony, they feel like I’m trying to kill them too.

 

They’re right.

 

If they’re balls of shitty excuses, laziness, and deliberately employed helplessness, I want that dead. If they’re ambivalent to the consequences of their behavior, kill that mother fucker too. If they’re in denial of how deeply they resent that I’ve managed to scrape together a semblance of the life and behaviors I think lend themselves to the best kind of existence, send that shit to hell, bring it back to piss on it, then send it on down again.

 

A prisoner, let’s call him Mr. Helper, relayed a story about how much he’s “called to help.” Another inmate was stumbling around, likely intoxicated. This inmate said he went up to him and asked if there was something he could do. Mr. Helper, citing his deference to God and his good nature then relayed he wasn’t sure if this other inmate would lash out, but if he did, he’d respond by incapacitating him. He won’t let himself be attacked or violated, you know, as a man merely defending himself. The story was a long meander avoiding an explicit discussion about both gentlemen’s relative gang affiliations and sticking noses in where they don’t belong. Jesus isn’t telling you to invite potentially physical altercations into your life.

 

Which God are you relying on to justify your desire kill and call it self-defense? What gang dances you around like a puppet? Plenty of people have hit me who I have not hit back, and I’m not as big as Mr. Helper. I don’t need to hide from how good it has felt to be invigorated by rage. I own what I’m capable of. When you don’t, I’m a threat. I don’t need to interject myself into your life and look for a reason for swinging. I appear fated to be trapped in your respective mental prisons as you wait for a sign on how to take me down. I see this shit EVERYWHERE. I’m told your God is everywhere. Good fucking luck, God. 

 

I’m coming for you.