Hello darkness, my old friend.
Starting is the easy part. Keeping it going is an entirely different beast.
I saw, live, an embodiment of greatness, not for the first time, but definitely on a level that one should process several times over. Combine the magic of music, the talent or intelligence, and extravagant settings and history, and you can connote the sacredness of a moment in space. Is a world-class violinist Christ-like in his excellence? Or in his modesty? Can the music be so perfect as to lull you to sleep?
The word on my mind for months as been “goal.” I’m constantly asking my guys about their goals. I’m not feeling anxious, precisely, about my ability to pursue or achieve mine, but they feel…waffly. Oddly enough, one of my standing goals, to watch ALL TV, has struggled to serve its space-filler goal posture, and I’ve been approximately 20 hours behind for weeks. It’s almost like the stories are heavier in their predictability or cliché when they’ve certainly been just as predictable and cliché as they’ve always been.
I’ve been talking so much about the weeks or months I need to keep my job. It’s practice to not let burnout creep in. It’s constantly trying to remind myself I’m doing easy work, more efficiently than I could be otherwise, getting paid more than I ever have, and I’m aggressively building in points of joy to occupy my mind so the prison walls don’t close in. Now, after a major “indulgence,” which I genuinely conceive as a form of healthcare, I need to work my job for another 3 months. That statement doesn’t fill me with dread, which is a start, but my real goals have nothing to do with maintaining normal employment.
We’re begging the question of what strides I have or haven’t made in service to the out-patient clinic. Well, dear reader, I feel like I’m doing nothing. I run right up against the problem of not wanting to work after work. I fill my long-weekends with activities. A lot of the out-of-my-control practical realities still exist when it comes to business hours and response times. I’m not convinced I won’t still be going door-to-door soon, but I can’t shake the sketchy baggage I feel that would carry. I probably need to just take a few hours, join some online advertising/counseling practices, and engage in text/telehealth, but for some damn reason, it does not feel like a drive to get it done.
Why? At the end, what do I get? More money sounds nice, but at the rate I’m making negotiations with my billables, there’s little reason to believe it’ll be more than I’m making now for quite some time without referrals or dedicated cases. Freedom? I kind of have a fair amount of freedom as it is, and if I get more, it’ll take considerably more money than I have now to optimize it. I would likely be investing a lot of time in the effort to make an income stream “passive.” As well the people and places I’ve reached out to for help kind of showed a test-run for how involved and otherwise busy their lives are as well. Are we prepared to go it alone quasi-indefinitely? It’s not getting us very far in this moment.
I have achieved so much of what I’ve wanted. I’m now drifting into spaces like expensive cologne buying and making a, relatively, small investment in my overall health. I’m so comfortable save my manufactured debt crisis and pithy externalities of bureaucracy and weather. I’m warm. I’m full. I have so much stuff. I have dozens of plans and projects. I have friends. Is that all well and good enough?
I miss thinking of myself as a partner or like I was helping and supporting someone else. It’s not “I want a girlfriend.” It’s that I know the difference between what it feels like to do things for myself and do them for others, especially if I care about them. It’s not that I don’t like helping my guys, but they’re not really my guys, are they? They’re my responsibility, my obligation, but just like every single person who blew smoke up my ass about my efficacy at the methadone clinic, ain’t no one reaching out.
This friend who I only ever very sporadically speak to, and it’s not always clear to me what we’re talking about, said it seemed like it would be a “chore” for me to download shows for her. Like, no, I’m hungry for something like that. I want to help. It’s literally one of my largest preoccupations. You’d be doing me a favor if you needed to see a movie or show. Let me spend a few hours showing you ways to torrent that won’t get your internet cutoff or you catching fines. On my dating profile it says I’m perpetually wanting to please and working on that.
It’s not that my goals are too easy. I don’t have a version of what I need to accomplish that amounts to, “brush teeth, show up, don’t punch supervisor.” So much of my orientation, even projects on the land, were situated around trying to make Allie more comfortable. I’ll shit in a bag and compost or burn it. You want a whole septic system and water upgrades? Okay, let’s hunt for IBC tanks, budget for pumps, spend hours researching, and then…break up shortly after. One more in-progress thing for the board.
Maybe I mean something different now when I talk of “taking over the world” than I have in the past. There was more of a Billions character in my initial utterances. Rich guy doing whatever a rich guy does. Now, I’d like to conceive of myself as a constitutive part to many movements. What if there really is some direct correlation to the amount of good I can squeeze out of a prison environment and my long-term stability or happiness? I do, genuinely, think everything is connected. I don’t dare say I have an appreciation or knowledge of precisely how. If my guys, on average, don’t come back to prison at the same rate under other counselors, we’re still going to be a species of flirty fascists and hate crimes.
There seems to be this disconnect between my power and what it gives me. I want, I’m pretty sure, all the time in the world to fuck off and do my own thing. I want to take a dozen music lessons a week. I want to marathon a show, and then all the shows. I want to travel because I can afford it or more likely because you like to and I want to enable you. I want to have a business that takes the values I’m teaching in class and counseling, and puts them into firehose mode. And yet, still, now 33, all I can do is kind of limp along at either job, new business endeavor that never quite catches, or sketchy-adjacent land project that the wind literally blows over?
A goal is to find better questions. I don’t even know that I expect anything of myself beyond continuing to show up to work. In a different era, in a different person, that would be fair-enough, no? Keep the bills paid, drink a beer, shut up. Find you one of them low self-esteem women who won’t leave you, and cherish your TV time.
I’m just gonna bide my time, keep being a good counselor, get these guitars donated, and keep tracking whether or not I’m on some kind of brink that pretends I have really any fucks for whether or not I keep this or any job for longer than I can stand. I figure shit out, tend to get what I want, and maybe I just don’t want much beyond this level of indulgence, narrative, and effort. I’m just looking for a problem to push against and not finding it. I’d kill to be a fleeing Ukrainian right now.
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