I can’t say that anything is pressing, but we’re due for a quick jaunt through the old mindscape.
The last few weeks my primary focus has been the building of my workshop. As with most things I endeavor to do, it’s been harder and more complicated than I anticipated. But, given that I’ve resolved myself psychologically to $10,000 or so in debt provided I have a workshop (and maybe working pool), it’s more a question of the weather and my will to get things done. Well, I also took a 5-day detour to help assemble a gazebo, and then to Kentucky Kingdom. Now, I’m home, the weather’s perfect, but damn is it feeling right to just exist by myself and collect.
For the trip to Kentucky, an acquaintance joined us, Byron’s adopted kid, and 3 of the kid’s friends. This is an acquaintance I’ve lived with and known for several years. He’s one of Byron’s charges who has been “nudged” away from the wholly self-destructive and immature tracks that he was on when we first met him, only to drift back. He now has a good job, bought a house well outside of his resources, and is slowly trending towards killing himself because he can sense how trapped and irresponsible he has made his circumstances. He has a girl who’s much younger than him, and acts like it, and has tried unsuccessfully to address his issues with extensive acid use.
He tricked me. We went to lunch and began talking about how my buddy’s kid, in coming from a poverty and hood-rat setting, associates with at least one who sells guns, or these bootleg poor-quality gun-adjacent things, to get by. That kid has no parents. Another of his friends is 16 and alcohol dependent. Some line or another struck me as the conversation began to be about how to logistically and legally assist the transportation of weapons and to what lengths we might “excuse” how they deviated from the trip plans to acquire and smoke weed. We’re adult men in our 30s. I’m not going to employ my brainpower to sort ratchet shit for teenagers.
I began to point out the discrepancy in what I thought the example we might set could be, and what our conversation had devolved into. This made the acquaintance quite incensed. To him, these kids are nothing. He’s never going to see them again, he said. We can’t “save” them, and it’s not our job to interject ourselves into their lives like we’re their parents or can fix anything. Leaving aside that these kids are 1 degree away from the one my buddy needs to protect, he was striking at a bigger denunciation. He disagrees, seemingly, with the larger scope of what adult men are to be responsible for.
Both Byron and I have seen first hand what mild interventions can do to course correct someone’s shitty direction. It’s not a “theory” that if you provide guidance or a consistent standard, people will fall in line behind it. From a purely practical and experiential place, there’s reason enough to say something, do something, or be present and the one denying them when they ask for alcohol. On top of this though, this acquaintance is literally the product of being redirected. Moreover, to the extent that he has eschewed that larger responsibility to own his shitty reasoning and dismissal of intervening where he could, the sadder and more chaotic the life he has led. I at one point just asked him how he finds himself arguing against attempting to help idiot poor kids do better. It’s a weird position to try to defend.
Eventually, as he denied he was saying anything unreasonable, got louder and talked over everything attempting to be said, and it turned into a level of immature inanity I didn’t sign up for, I literally walked away from the table, and eventually restaurant, when it continued outside. A bit of a stroll around Louisville and 45 or so minutes later, we reconvened at the car and returned to the park.
Other news, my ex has reached out to me after almost a year. She wrote perhaps half a dozen pages suggesting some serious self-reflection and growth. There were apologies, nice things said about me, and an invitation to keep investigating how she might both better understand herself or get me on the same page about the depth and nature of her feelings. It almost immediately turned to chaos when, as she later pointed out, she responded to my response to her from a place of emotion. She got very judgmental and accusatory, I got pissed and wrote a thing I was happy to amend before sending, and then more clarity and apologies were introduced.
It’s been a reminder that this whole process of introspection and being honest with oneself is literally a skill that needs to be practiced. It doesn’t matter if you’re smart, hard-working, good-looking, or from some kind of background, you might have absolutely terrible words and thoughts about how you relate to others. You don’t have to be arguing against gun-running addict children to struggle with the task of orienting yourself.
I consider myself at something of the other end of that “what’s my responsibility” spectrum. Whether I’m perfectly feeble or inadequate to address the needs of addicted youth, befuddled acquaintances, or sincere and dramatic ex-girlfriends, I do accept that given my awareness and work, I have something of a responsibility to all of it. That responsibility often looks like keeping my cool and finding the patience or walking away. I’m not going to hit suicidal sad boy, ridicule emotional instability (unless it’s coming from my mother), nor pretend that I deserve to run a fucking addiction clinic if I personally am acquainted with someone, a child no less, who I’m willing to ignore (even in thought!), because…it doesn’t serve me? I don’t believe we’re all connected? I don’t have anything to offer in what I’ve learned? It’s hard to conceive of myself as so small and naïve.
I find myself feeling a touch overwhelmed in the number of things I try to be responsible for. Who says I need to get the workshop done? Me. Who says I have to say yes to invitations to help or talk? Again, me. Who says I need to keep reaching out and exploring avenues for my own business and the things I hope to generate over time? Who says I ever have to open my mouth when the topic of conversation appears to violate a whole host of my best conceptions of myself?
In one sense, yes, I’m invited to fights I don’t want and each individuals’ brand of self-destruction. But also, I’m constantly swinging. In my manner and in what I respect, speak to, or work on, it’s a threat by default. It’s why you feel small when you feel small. I spend more time trying to improve on my hobbies than I’m witness to people in their careers, relationships, or sense of ownership and well-being. Even if I don’t and won’t do what I think I’m capable of each day, I slumped outside and at least arranged the pieces to about where they need to be so when the moment strikes to get the fuck back to work, I can own the inches I moved in between.
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