[959] By Way Of Analogy

If my last blog I was looking for a problem, I think maybe now it’s sinking in what I might’ve been looking for.

It’s hard not to be in a kind of perpetual reflection when you’re working in a prison. Everything you say is being scrutinized for a measure of authenticity or weakness. There’s nothing else to do but be sucked into the immediacy of the collectively present and overbearing circumstance. You’re caged, told what to do, unequal, and there’s rules that don’t just catch up to you, but can come crashing down in riot gear and bullets if you’re having a particularly bad day.

My role is absolutely fascinating. I’m new dad. I’m older brother. I’m non-judgmental uncle. I’m the closest thing to a therapist or encouraging voice some of these dudes have ever had. And I’m in another system almost perfectly designed to snuff out the memory, let alone responsibility, of that role. Like every single social work job I find, the people running it don’t actually give a shit. They have money to make. They have bills to pay. They rose to the middle of fill-in-your-bureaucracy and don’t intend to learn your name anymore than they believe you should concern yourself much with your once-a-week out-patient clients.

Worse than the harm from simple negligence and selfishness is the stupidity. You couldn’t ask for the worst people to be put in charge of “training.” You couldn’t design a more perfectly convoluted series of questions and non-answers to get even the smallest things done. I don’t know if stupid is large enough of a concept for it to bear the cross of what is so routine and ubiquitous. I don’t know how many long-term employees you have to lose each month before the clue finds its way to changing how you operate.

I’m attempting to model behavior. I don’t struggle with goal-setting. I don’t wake up every day with an excuse for not getting to work on time. I don’t need to drill in a habit of making my bed because my ability to focus and achieve is not predicated on building my esteem with small wins and new-daddy over my shoulder making sure I don’t get too impulsive. I haven’t cancelled a single class. I haven’t missed a day of work. I haven’t been late with notes or treatment plans or just threw up my arms and said I was too “out of it” to do stand-to on my dorm day.

Who’s borrowing from my example? Not various-levels-of-burnt coworkers. There’s always going to be a group of people, no matter the setting, that are going to “get it” in a way others won’t. Is that anything to do with me? Or do I get to pawn off my larger responsibility to the statistics? I can tell you a thousand times I can see the focus, determination, read the testimony, bask in the class engagement, but what if the snobby pork rind C/O is right and it’s all a song and dance?

It puts a searchlight on what my larger targets and goals have been all along. I’m not about fixing a shitty subcontracted company’s posture towards its employees. I want to take on Indiana. I want to fundamentally shift your concept of the State, and what its alleged powers and presumptions are. I have a considerably better shot at that by making a lot of money than I do writing a brilliant letter of discontent with coworker signatures.

But we’re getting too big and broad. My day-to-day issue isn’t that I’m not a heavy political animal. My issue is that things don’t work and the ones who could fix them won’t. I’m exceptionally good at many things I do in work settings. You take 5 days? I take 20 minutes. You write 2 lines? I submit a paragraph of analysis. You cancel class? I add 1 more, put together discussion topics for one you abandoned, and start eyeballing a complete overhaul to how we employ this whole group system to begin with. But, like everywhere else I’ve worked, that doesn’t matter. It’s not recognized and respected and enabled.

So I do what? Repeat what I hear a dozen times a day from coworkers, “It is what it is?” Pretend like I’m not gutted when I make continual outsized efforts to actually “meet expectations” that are ever-shifting and I was never really taught in the first place? Act polite when I’m told I have to attend a “mandatory” interruption of my day for some pageantry or meeting that has absolutely nothing to do with me?

I know why life sucks. I know why every single one of my guys drinks, shoots up, inhales, or otherwise tries to ignore and shove down the waterfall of shit that I feel I bathe in when I subject myself to these environments. Of course, you should fuck off and get high when literally nothing you do matters. Now, I’m lucky, I get plenty of smoke blown up my ass about the impact I’m having, so I can easily dismiss the catastrophizing notion. Them, though? Who cares about them? Not Indiana. Not The D.O.C. Not people I talk to when I bring up what I do in conversation. How would they be able to recognize it even if you do care? How can I expect them to recognize something I can’t from those mouthing words allegedly concerned about my well-being?

So what do we have to “radically accept?” Seems like such a cop out. “You’re fucked! Deal with it! Ha!” Like it’s “radical” the idea people are pussies and overwhelmed. I practically live to deny shit you might tell me to accept. I could quit and try to do a drug study and be out of debt in two weeks. I’m every day massaging the idea of lasting right up to the end of the highlighted calendar pages. I have to accept that if I believe the world to be genuinely small, and if I’ve done as much work as I have to recognize the things I think we all need to survive and live well, then I’m actually able to squeeze a fair amount of good out of otherwise abject shit, even if it does basically nothing for me at the deepest levels.

Am I broken? I can get a little misty reading these guys’ stories. I can get very enthused when someone writes down what feels like a great phrase or breakthrough, but I don’t ride those kinds of highs. Those are their wins. Nietzsche didn’t clap for me. Helping people is not my drug. I want to destroy. I want to attack. I want to flaunt and celebrate the power that overcomes what feels insurmountable for its lack of definition. I think the same reason helping people does nothing for me is why I haven’t been interested in having kids. I’m a cheerleader, sure, but I want to recognize the same fire in you that I have, not spend my life trying to persuade you not to be a fuck up.

I got guitars donated. Whether they’ll be approved or handled in time for class tomorrow, I don’t know. It took me 2 months, but I accomplished, somewhat, a goal to improve one of the classes that was on the verge of being abandoned. Go me. If I have nothing else, I get to listen to this absolute beast of a guitar player and singer in the advanced class. I get to worm my way into the heads of the people who’ve been watching me to see if I was full of shit about getting more guitars. Fuck the doubters, of course I got more guitars. That’s the whole fucking point of everything.