[977] Idle Stands

I wonder what I would be like were I to grow comfortable with idle time.

I’ve gotten my first peaks into the practical obligations of my new job. I can’t pretend I have some genuine “enthusiasm” for it. The same conditions about how or why I am inclined to “help” people are in play. I’m still in this teeter. Will I get the call tomorrow that we’re working for DCS? Will disability accept our rounded and refined application, opening the door to thousands a week with a handful of clients? Do I need to make one more concerted push to “work myself to death” for the next 6 months or so before I’ve allocated or organized in a way that after 18 years I’ll have stumbled into “passive” income?

I had a solid weekend. I played volleyball. I saw a decent comedy show. I drank with a friend, talked to strangers that bought me shots, and was apparently getting hit on by a former client I am in no way interested in complicating my professional standing over. If I could have managed to feel a little less tired and hungover, the next day would have spelled grilled delicious food and more company. I’m trying to remind myself that I’m already living some version of it.

But the time is still idle. It’s 2:15 AM on Tuesday, and I don’t care if I’m drowsy in the morning because so little is being asked of me. If I want to keep paying the bills, this is the task. I didn’t use any portion of the day to continue building, not because I was busy before my 2:00 PM Zoom meeting, but because I am expected to be available and responding to emails as though my salary is justified. I’ve managed to hit TV-watching levels akin to when I was doing drug studies.

I’ve considered reevaluating my goals. My major hang-up remains an inability to respect attempting to do less than I already am. Can I really not just enjoy myself? Or am I allowing ingratiated anxiety dictate? I know it’s easier to conceive of my place when I pull back and see myself on the continuum or journey. I know it’s about the nature of your work more than the award or next purchase. I guess I’d just like to see the dividends more often.

Unless I’m right in the middle of shit, I can’t know the outcome. I don’t know if the words I said or impression I left reverberates like I’d like. I’m not content to tout my title or field and cross my arms that by default I care or am doing something meaningful. I want to feel like there’s some kind of robust and perpetuating fix or creation that’s recognized as worth protecting. I don’t know if I exist around the psychological makeup for that to be possible. That is, money will perpetuate; familiar and connected legacy institutions will too. Are they any good? Do we have the tools to evaluate and hold accountable?

It’s an extremely uncomfortable position to hold that most people seem perfectly happy to not think. I see an immense chasm between doing whatever’s in front of you to survive, and thinking about it. I appreciated the sentiment from a meth-addicted person from one of the Louis Theroux documentaries I just watched. “When you’re deep in your addiction, there is no choice. When you been clean for a little while, then you can choose.”

I choose to go about my capture with little debt gambles, hobby and food indulgences, and increasingly gas and entertainment. These still take precedence over any contribution to charity, and well before your ill-fated political campaign. There’s something about my ego and priorities that wants lawn seats for a band I barely know before I try to “fix” some bigger issue. This is a ridiculous framing of who’s hurting, what exists to help, and whether it does, but the disconnect is there. All of our actions, charitable or indulgent, exist contradictory to the suggestion there’s any collective will or wisdom guiding them. It all boils down to whether or not I feel good or bad about myself. But what’s good and bad in ever-isolated, ambivalent, and arbitrary environments?

It confuses me sometimes when I hear thoughtful people talk about the statistical unlikeliness of getting shot in school. To remain silent or stuck on how we ever arrived at a place where that’s the topic of conversation, let alone the meat chunks those children were blown into, I think is about as large of a cultural sin as you can commit. How many things have to fail for extended periods of time before the “start” of the conversation is, “It’s hopeless, let’s arm Mrs. Gipp.” None of us could be doing, saying, thinking, entreating, showing up, organizing, brainstorming, or investigating in this idle time?

I feel like a crazy person. I know facebook isn’t the hot platform, but I think out of 56 people, 3? Maybe had anything to say about Uvalde? It’s old news. It’s not really anything to do with today’s problems in my life and my state. I can’t help, fix, or say what hasn’t already been said. It is what it is. Let’s laugh off the continued march towards fascism, so 15 minutes after the midterms when AR-15s become standard issue at the beginning of the school year (to threaten raped classmates thinking they were about to abort) we can exclaim about the absurdity, injustice, and horror we never saw coming.

Maybe I haven’t talked about it for a while, but you know what I really want a lot of money for? I want to build teams to utilize data and organize around the principles I’m trying to bring to the land. I want to know every single office up for election, how it operates, and who’s trying to fuck with it. I want to know the most efficient door-knocking routes and send people along them 15 times until everyone’s been reached. I want to have the busses that get people to polls. I want to have small oasis that are off-grid and working on power dynamics that can grow independent of the chaos. I don’t want to wait idly at some institution indefinitely until I rise to a level of incidental power. I want to actively beat the fuck out of what exists and see it change NOW.

I can’t do it hovering over my email. I can’t do it with whiny naïve and entitled faux-Left activists pretending their version of screaming at the machine works like the Tea Party and Nazis. I can’t do it with some personal cache of information dumps and spreadsheets. I can’t do it when my air dies and truck needs work. I can’t do it alone. It can’t be done just because I think it would work or I draw on lessons and history. It can’t be done because we don’t treat ourselves as though we’re worth the fight. We won’t do the work to account. You literally won’t even talk to me.

On and on I’ll opine about my TV shows, not ours, not that they’re making us think or share anything. I’ll work my half-dozen projects. I’ll collect my bricks. I’ll encourage addicts and the poor to refrain from killing themselves too quickly. And we’ll all hold our collective breath as the water rises. I mean, we’ll probably get by. We’ve got networks and money. We’re educated. Things can get so much worse before we really have to do or say anything.