[998] Deep See Diver

What if I was able to persuade myself into what I’ll call a “fundamental wait?”

I’m impatient. As far as I understand myself, I’ve always been that way. I had to get my school work done NOW. I had to master some aspect of a videogame well past the point of frustration or needing to sleep. If the world is ending, I walk along a path where so much of the ground beneath me is cracked and fallen away. I’m, by disposition, situated to want “the next thing” while I’m literally in the midst of having gotten the series of things I’ve wanted before.

I either don’t describe myself as getting some “fundamental” thing, or I’ve just given up on expecting more from the nature of what happens when you want something. There aren’t so many moments I truly wish to sit in, quasi-enjoyable or otherwise. If I was learning a new song or technique, that harkens back to the obsessive place of playing videogames. If I’m enjoying a show, I’m often pulling away from any particularly “deep” investment in the writers or networks doing good by it the whole time. The “want” in watching so much television is to fuel the engine of seeking ever-more in a way that was more sustainable.

I feel like in thinking so often about death, it allowed me to transform impatience into an appreciation for what was in front of me more than I was able to find “patience.” I’m still incredibly impatient. It rears its ugly head the moment I put something meaningful to me in the hands of anyone else. I can’t (shouldn’t) necessarily rely on anyone to work as quick or potentially pathologically as me, nor are they going to have the same internal sense about the order of operations in prioritizing what gets attended to.

 I don’t really know what “patience” looks like. It takes the same form as “forgiveness” to me. Both feel like derivatives of “understanding.” I don’t forgive my mom, but I understand her in the context of millions of broken people with brains running aberrant patterns. I’m not patient with difficult people or scenarios, I just understand that it’s not my fight, it’s not personal, and I’m comfortable being honest with myself about how, fundamentally, I just really don’t care. After I understand all of that about them and myself I begin to move into “actual choice” space to engage the spite engine and carry on “moral” or “human” enough to not feel at the whims and mercy of the ambivalent chaos of culture.

I embody what it feels to not care, and it clues me in to how little I’m cared for. There are good and bad reasons that so many of us may recognize and feel the same. You can “wait it out” the lack of care of an “institution” that lumbers along and is so deliberately obscure. You can feel and react to the person behind the desk who talks to you like trash. When you can’t find or define the person, and lack sufficient insight about yourself, you land in a place of thought-policing and calls to destroy abstract feeling-provoking conversations or disagreeable governing practices.

I try to not throw the baby out with the bath water. I can identify the things about me, the institutions I join, and the ideas I haven’t made more explicit, and how they are at war to dictate how I move in the world. I don’t, most of the time, blow up on the person behind the desk. I probably don’t conceive of them as an individual person to begin with. I understand being constrained by institutional forces. I know the vast majority of time I ever wish to blow up is informed by a dozen things inconveniently adding up before a fateful encounter.

But, I don’t have a fundamental ability nor argument for not, at some point, “blowing shit up.” The universe doesn’t stop entire galaxies from colliding, why should I concern myself with the fallout of battling semantics or designating and removing a cancer working upon the cultural zeitgeist? This feels like a fancy way of justifying solipsism that most people just call “fuck you.” My agency, revolt, or desire to effect change does not cede to how much I understand. This is why it’s impossible to “talk yourself into” something that doesn’t feel right. The logic is sound, but the experience bellows. All the details of the larger context and perpetual theoretical actions are there, but fuck me if I’m not amped, panicking, or blacking out with rage. I, also, and vitally important, don’t want to change, thus, presumably, making it that much harder to discover, let alone entertain, what the “patient” or “fundamental wait” state would even look like.

I challenge people to discuss what they want. Uncontrollably, they find themselves talking about what they aren’t, what they don’t like, or insisting they don’t know the answers to questions they’ve just explicitly answered. The logic is there, but they don’t feel confident in their ideas and capacity. They don’t trust themselves to remain committed and honest to the fallout of doing “more” or standing up and alone for their individual perspective. And why should they? Most ideas, most of the time, are incredibly stupid, wrong, and working to actively harm our ability to continue existing at all.

I practice the opposite. I assert, often, what I want, why I want it, and how I think it will evolve or contradict things I’ve wanted in the past. Do I want a long-term committed relationship, or to be a whore? Yes. Do I want more money than I know what to do with, or find solace in my fort with music, shows, and projects now capable of being paid for in a month’s-worth of effort? Yes. Do I want to “help” people and continue to staunchly argue that I can’t, in reality, help them when they can’t help themselves, so I’ll take a proto-fascist position on how to distribute power or what can be left up to a vote, and be heavily persuaded Nazis need to be punched, shot, or otherwise disempowered? Dump it all in.

I want to be left alone, and called to engage in random things at random times. I want to sit here all day and watch TV, and get outside and work on the land. I want to eat unhealthy food, and desire a convenient affordable way to get all of the best food in me as much or more often without having to spend, really any time, learning more about cooking or investing in future dirty dishes. The seeming contradictions are a result of a lack of clarity. When you chase an unclear feeling with direct questions and can honestly speak to the answer, for you if no one else, you can feel the nature and power of what it means to make a choice. That’s how I learned to watch TV instead of continue to try and work 3 jobs.

The story of my current moment is that I want to pay down debt. Deeper, I want to own the things I own. I want to quit my job. Deeper, I want to find a way to actively cope with one of the easiest jobs I’ve ever had because it doesn’t feel bad to have “extra” money. Deeper, I’m worried I’m stuck in this “lack of appreciation” space for my circumstances because my day-to-day experience is most often felt as either a run-from or begrudgingly-engage-in thoughts about the company I work for or the nature of what I’m involved in. Deeper, the failures and conversations I have with myself about the job or how I feel conjure all of the larger despair around not being able to run my own business, not be in a new house I’m remodeling, or not be working on something on the land or on an instrument without so many other obligations on my mind.

Instead of doing my notes last night, I built a very odd stand so I could rearrange my computer monitors along with the furniture and my instruments. I was tired at midnight and stayed up until 2:30 or 3, “just because” I was seeking that weak sense of “control” or “autonomy” of a child defying a parent’s proclamation of bedtime. I do versions of this a lot, laying on the ground at work while the insistence to input notes whispers overhead. It’s not what I want to practice. It’s not who I am. It’s a middle finger to the idea that I have anything meaningful and worthwhile to do worthy of being impatient about not engaging in. To me, the country is still on fire. I still want to genuinely improve on my hobbies. It would be magic to be able to go back to sleeping for as long as I wanted, when I wanted.

I seek an ongoing transcendence. I don’t think you get to embody that without being impatient, at least it doesn’t feel that way. I wish to get past the conversations about how, whether, and why 2+2=4 with people who can’t recognize the utility and universality of math. The “human math” for those that would argue it’s a bad analogy is precisely this. Complicated, seemingly contradictory feelings + attention and time honestly exploring them = process for engaging the world and yourself made of more choices than incidental circumstances.

This is the only way I can continue to “do my job,” today, tomorrow, or in any moment when the whole of my being is crying out to blow shit up and go back to sleep. I feel the power of my ability to do that. I respect that I actually will. I better have at least as many reasons and plans around doing so as have informed my reasons not to.