[967] Love Me Knot

Maybe just consider this a first draft of the many things I was thinking about on the drive home.

My last day at the prison was on Friday. I left early. Almost no one showed up for my last two classes. I considered it another marker on the “people don’t care about you as much as what you can do for them” score card. I don’t say that to suggest I wanted or needed people to show up or lavish praise and attention. I say it to speak to the incongruent nature of what people profess and how they behave. Most, if not all, of the counselors have cancelled classes for good and bad reasons, often without notice or at the last minute. This led to the quick, “They don’t care about us” sentiment you hear often. Me? Never missed a class, never cancelled a class. Did you show up? No. Especially not when it might’ve mattered in a different way. Shout out to Boaty.

I left the job because I got another lined up. Unbeknownst to me, I can’t start for a month given their training and HR schedules. What did I do next? Volunteer myself for shifts at the place my buddy is working. I still need money, right? I’m still in debt. So, do whatever is available to get it. This is my automatic response. I don’t think, “I have a month off, I can get caught up on so many TV shows.” I didn’t think about things I could do around the house to organize or pretty up the space. I didn’t think about playing my guitar in a more dedicated way. I said, “Get back to work.”

Then, I find myself in a text exchange with my newest friend. She speaks regularly to her desire to “play.” That’s her vibe, desire, and drive. The idea that she would get straight back to work elicits a “Ha! I’d be enjoying my time off!” Different strokes, perhaps, but also resounding as a decent point. I don’t *have* to be anywhere. I could organize this time around a certain kind of play or fun. I could just relax. Is that precisely what I want to do? Not really.

When I started to entertain the idea of not just going back into some job environment, I discovered the energy for more grounded thoughts about the logistics of building more of my fence. I came home and, in spite of being pretty freakin tired, I organized a few things, showered, and started typing this. I made lists of things to buy and calculate. I thought about how lucky I might be to have an uninterrupted week to collect more pallets. You know, I am falling asleep as I type this. I’m gonna try to pick it back up in the morning.

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In this precise moment, I’ve got perhaps a dozen of things to do that don’t involve “regular job” kind of work. I need to wash blankets, buy groceries, weed whack, check my roof for a leak, get more pallets, organize clothes, do dishes….but that’s the thing. Once you start listing the things, they start to look like a list that can be more or less accomplished in a day. Whatever can’t, starts turning into project that needs budgeted and prioritized. Pallets are gonna be gas money and hopefully a healthy truck and trailer throughout. Same rules if I start plotting my fence continuation, but add nails and a trip to pick up my air compressor.

I also understand the work I give myself with these projects falls considerably more in the “want” than “have to” category. That then bumps into how much I “want” to add more debt or court injury or sweat to death. I have to note that the landscape I’m working within has changed. I didn’t used to get opinions from neighbors about what I was doing. Will my effort be met with more bullshit or the county telling me I’ve crossed a line and need to tear things down?

Or what if we think about the out-patient clinic? Why not spend this entire time networking? Why not go out and make introductions and get what I want, even if it’s exasperated by all of the dead ends? We still have this disability paperwork to fill out, which I know is stressing out Hussain who’s concurrently working two jobs and needs to start on his paper for his doctorate. Shouldn’t I buckle down today and see about getting that 50-page document wrapped up?

I just feel generally tired. I’m exhausted by the idea of sitting around and watching TV. I don’t have the get-up-and-go mode engaged to approach anything I’ve mentioned.

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I let myself sleep a few more hours. The dishes are done, things moved and organized around my house, and I found one pair of my shorts. I’ve only managed to eat dark chocolate freeze dried raspberries, and I’m listening through a “meh” list of artists from an Altpress article. My thoughts swung to the idea of “learned helplessness.”

I think one of the biggest things I hate about people is a lack of desire to improve or change. When I think about how little ill-will or anger I hold towards most people, I have to wonder how I consistently garner the kind of resentment, suspicion, or silence that I do (as though their contingent). I think some of these thoughts were prompted after watching Peter Boghossian get into an all-too-familiar altercation with social worker students in Portland.

Peter set up a Socratic thought experiment outside of the social work building. He started getting yelled at and told to “fuck off” from people on the roof. They read his sign with the proposition that “there are only two genders.” They gathered around eventually to all-but berate him into silence. They didn’t ask or care about the exercise he was doing. They reiterated over and over and over again about the “harm” of posing or asking questions and how they might be perceived. Mind you, they never said “misunderstood,” the only thing that mattered was the perception of those who were so distraught they had to go home verses look at a sign.

The kid my buddy is fostering has a kind of learned helplessness. He can find all the intention in the world to hang out with friends or locate and smoke his weed, but when groceries need bought, he’ll idly wait and make comments like, “Bro, we need food.” Yeah, get in the car and go get some, you ain’t got a job and you’ve been given the money. He’s certainly experienced a litany of traumas throughout his life and grew up generally impoverished. He has something of an excuse, though it is dwindling rapidly.

If you’re attending a university and have the capacity to pass your classes, you have the privilege and obligation to figure out how to fucking talk and listen to people. The irony that these people are going into “social work” is not lost on me. Do they know what people even are if a sign is going to send them home in tremors and tears? A sign and thought experiment, mind you, employed by a literal scholar and philosopher who is as much fodder for indiscriminate ridicule and dismissal as the “white” caricature they employ for all of its insisted upon derogatory connotation.

Literally one person who’s behaved like the students in the video I’ve watched has apologized to me. One. Kristen’s the only one who it dawned on her that berating, assuming, and swimming in shitty rumor mills isn’t, like, friendly or respectful or appropriate. Allie literally ripped off part of my house lol. I can read old emails where I’m constantly apologizing for being impatient or misunderstanding or picking the wrong words. People in my life? I’m the enemy to be isolated until death it seems. The cunty addict I worked with? Bet the thought doesn’t even occur to her that reading someone’s open sharing as “fuck you” is incredibly insensitive and shitty. But it can just sit there as a reason to not engage with each other indefinitely. You think my mom has ever apologized for being a psycho lol? You think the cunts at DCS have wiped the smug off their lips as they target the best employees or families?

I’m a big believer in not apologizing if you don’t feel it. I rarely if ever felt it growing up. I, most often, didn’t even realize what I had done wrong because, again my mom is a psycho. Or, I felt shitty, wanted you to feel shitty, and said whatever I said and meant it. Why add insult to injury by offering a lie? If I extend that rationale to the people who’ve been shitty to me, here’s my standing problem. You don’t even recognize the nature of how fucked you are, and you don’t care to learn, and you won’t improve no matter the consequences. There’s no apology coming because you’ve done nothing wrong.

Say I believe some of my clients and their capacity for growth and change. What world are they plugged into? One in which I can as easily discuss the improvements I’ve witnessed in their behavior and capacity for exploration and accountability, but also can’t be bothered to own when it screams at you for no reason, breaks your shit, or blocks your ability to do something worthwhile. “No one cares about us” starts to ring true. The reasons for staying selfish and sober for your own reasons gets incredibly obvious.

Once I figure out that I’m just tired or hungry as reasons I’m not up and about, the mess of existing among so many cunts creeps in. The question isn’t whether I want to work or not. The question is whether I’m resolved to beating myself stupid against the bricks of intransigence, ignorance, and indifference. Do I want the thoughts of how isolating my project is to toy with me, or can I situate them front and center and get on with it?