[1012] Swing Life Away

I’m so confused. The other day, I envisioned myself hanging from one of my ceiling 2x4s and writing a facebook status, “Bye, can someone please grab the cats?” I’m not suicidal, but I let my curiosity and taboo orientation ride the thought waves to see if I’ll be “moved” or “jarred” one way or another. The takeaway is that thinking about that made me feel nothing. It was just a thought. It didn’t instruct. It didn’t cause fear. I don’t feel guilty. There I am, just dangling, and then a smirk slowly starts to appear at the idea that, you know, this is really about the cats and making sure they’re okay.

I’m more confused by what, if anything, my “purpose” is. I know I have to make my own decisions and own each moment I’m alive. I know there’s a certain gratification and sense of being/belonging in helping others. I don’t mean to echo too loudly the sentiment of a forlorn teen. I just mean that I’m built a certain way. My truck hauls things a regular car can’t. It’s built to. I’m built in a way that can contemplate tragedy and crisis in detached and pragmatic ways. I’m built in a way that voraciously consumes and aggregates information. I’m quick. I’m well-rehearsed.

My grandparents, if nothing else, worked. They worked to survive. My aunts and uncles all had/have jobs, made it through school. If we reduce the concept of “work” to “made money,” you can better account for their pathological and selfish behavior. Money keeps the bills paid, work keeps the house clean, discipline keeps you in line with the disciplinarian right up until they die or their power is usurped. “Work” is the common refrain for dictating orientation and purpose. You work to provide for your family. You work to distinguish yourself…at work. You work because no one is going to work for you, particularly in your faux representative democracy.

I discuss work often in how I do counseling. You don’t just show up, take your medicine, and blithely check in each week. You have to practice learning how to identify your feelings. You have to practice patience. You have to train your sense of responsibility and ownership. This takes existential-level work that your clients aren’t just bad at, but have literally been using substances to a degree that it perhaps cripples their ability to ever discover how. What, then, are we to say about the nature, purpose, or impact of their work?

I’m 34. In that time, I’ve worked hard enough on at least one instrument to have proven myself capable of performing techniques at one point in my life I would have described as “godlike.” I’ve worked to learn about the world to the point where I was spending thousands of dollars trying to build a website to organize and sort it all to become something useful for connecting and finding patterns. I’ve worked 3 jobs at once and 20-hour days for several years. I’ve worked 4 times longer in a role that burns people out routinely and would have stayed were it not for shit management. I’ve scrubbed the fuck out of a bathroom caked in grime of a mentally unwell client. I’ve created and ran a coffee shop, party house, done well in school, and been a person who has averaged reading more than a book a day. I’ve transported thousands of bricks and built out my house. I’ve hauled scrap, tires, pallets and torn down barns. I’ve been management and general labor. I’ve remodeled a house. I’ve been a part of a winning sports team and a jazz band. I’m working in counseling while trying to get my own business running.

I’ve scratched the surface. In that time I’ve also watched thousands of TV episodes, hundreds of movies, and dicked around, literally, or in days spent in the fog of “I’m not doing enough” or “Where to now?” or “Wanna spend hours driving around until we land somewhere to eat?” I’ve had 3 serious-enough relationships, entire weeks spent by the pool, and thousands wasted or gambled on less than meaningful pursuits. I’ve been to well over 100 concerts, dozens of comedy shows and several theme parks. I’ve beaten as completely possible that it is to beat 50 or so video games and spent as many or more hours playing them socially.

Almost never does it feel like “enough.” There’s work, forever, on whatever you choose, but the times I felt like anything I was doing mattered, whether it was drinking to oblivion or doing something around the house, was when I thought it was shared.

I’m confused because I don’t know what’s been shared. I don’t appear in pictures with most of the people I knew in college, let alone high school outside of a yearbook. My relationships appear to have been overwhelmingly built on a combination of naivety and “romantic” notions of who I am or what it means to be together. No matter what I watch, read, or play I’m not in some active conversation or exploration of the topic. I’m still the kid at dinner trying to tell his exhausted and disinterested mom about his day and getting shut down. Were we sharing a meal back then, or was she obligated to feed us?

I’m thankful for Hussain in sharing the struggle of getting the business started. I’m thankful I get to add “home renovator” via Byron to my list of accomplishments for every infuriating and baffling piece of crazy that has fucked that project. I will always boast about my partnership with Hatsam and the support our parents gave us. Friends certainly contributed back then. What was it to? Whether it was the shop or the parties, who was really there?

I’ve all-but stopped writing goofy paragraphs on old friends timelines for their birthdays. We’re not going to call each other. It doesn’t mean anything more or less to them than the unwashed uncapitalized mass “happy birthday” messages from the other veritable strangers. Anymore there’s several I’m convinced would be confused and offended I even bothered. What do I make of the time together? What do I allow myself to be convinced of about the nature of the friendship or words exchanged? Is it a measure of “wisdom” to maintain a kind of military-detachment that expects you or them to ship out or die at any moment?

I don’t seem to understand what I’m built for. If I bring everyone together to party and celebrate, I’m actually the target for scorn and resentment. If I reach out first, second, or a seventh and fifteenth time, now I’m a borderline creep or disingenuous puppy who can’t register it’s been abandoned. If I focus on learning and nerd shit, who cares? I’m not figuring out a way to get paid for what I know and the slurry of Patreon professionals are barely skirting by producing content every day and appearing on TV. I can’t persuade myself to take music seriously enough to sacrifice anything in service to again reaching my heights. Even if I’ve created for myself an adult playground with tools and space, I come up against some hard limits in the weather, time, budget, and tolerance for risk and pain while occupying the middle of nowhere.

I’m told, pretty regularly, about my capacity for building rapport and trust. I’ve watched people light up that they get to keep me as a counselor when they change group times. I’ve been told I can be talked to and seem like I really care in a way others don’t. I’ve watched the disappointment and anger as I’ve switched roles or the fear that I’m more abandoning you than saving myself. I’m not high on my own supply of self-serving narrative bullshit. I have a particular, high-powered, and special or different use. I can only seem to find it working in service to things that take advantage of me or treat me like a threat to what’s understood as a “normal” or “decent” way of existing. I can be really good at building trust and being encouraging, and line the pockets of a company that won’t provide insurance that covers the contacts in both of my eyes. I can give away the space to pursue dreams and create and be yelled at and looked at with ongoing suspicion about what I really want.

Even if I figured out what I was built for, who am I working for? An abstract notion of “the youth” and “their future?” I’m well past the point of believing I can “help” any fucking moron who has made a career of avoiding responsibility or bothering to define words. I can’t “save” you from yourself nor single-handedly fix my environment or problems of communication any better than an entitled billionaire.

Is this what I’m here for? Am I to keep reporting on the relative futility of it all? Am I just meant to watch and record as I confirm under different conditions how useless my hands and brain really are upon subjection to the infinite spin of errant interpretation and superficial relationships? What am I fucking doing? My best guess is “trying to amass money.” After that? Eat. Travel around and look for a remote sense of security. Build something, maybe better, maybe just more headaches, and keep people from…hurting themselves? Feeling victimized once more? News flash, I could have the best business in the world and you know what it can’t do? Make people pick up the phone, show up, or recognize anything about what it took to create.

You can’t help others if you can’t help yourself. I have no idea how to “help myself” be less suspicious about how or whether I’m capable of finding and maintaining meaningful relationships. Useful ones, sure. If your investment in me is on your terms, it’s not an investment in me. It’s not a recognition of me. I don’t exist beyond a narrative fixture in a fantasy. I wasn’t looking for a “wife” or “girlfriend,” and still aren’t. I cared about the people and what they wanted to do. I wanted to help and give and invest, and I can’t really explain how persistently that was denied and thrown back in my face. At the moment I might start to suspect that I could be a positive or consistent good in someone’s life, they pull out, and I’m a laundry list of problems and gaps and not-enoughs.

The “healthiest” relationships I could point to do a fucking circus extravaganza of not seriously discussing or fixing areas of contention. The overall sense of companionship or stability trumps the work and devastating consequences of battling things out. That’s the rule. Keep the image alive. Don’t race to the bottom where neither of you will find peace or solidarity in sharing a truth more precious than the most accessible and translatable narrative. Keep the sunglasses on your black eye teeth beaming pictures. Stay busy and distracted so you can better forget there was ever a smell coming from the basement at all.

We build families of this stuff. We’ve built entire nations on empty notions codified in anecdotes and lore. What do you win for speaking to that? Exile from the nation. Even if you play along, you don’t feel safe. Your soul no longer belongs to them. Any tenuous truce between your perspective and their power over you can get shattered in an instant. My uncles stole my grandmother’s house when she died and cut me out of the will. Do I isolate from them, be rude at Thanksgiving, and watch the proceeds of its sale when they die get sent to the church? Do I hurt and disappoint my dad who loves his brothers and his sons and just wants peace and prosperity for us all? Do I mock and practice ingratitude for the intangible things my grandparents have given me, their examples still being talked about now?

So I can mediate a crisis between you and the State, or between you and a problem you don’t have the time or notion on how, but perhaps intention to figure out, or with myself when it comes to a physical activity, socializing foray, or hobby preoccupation, but not within my thieving or leaching family. Got it, universe. I can invite a conversation about any given line from a digression like this, and I’m only going to catch those perfectly unwilling to quote, focus, or bother to do really any work to understand what was actually said or grasp the sentiment offered more than incoherently shit their feelings and demand I see and trust they know more than me. I can spend hundreds of hours on a given preoccupation or thinker and in seconds they, and I, will be caricatured.

Is that friendly? Am I just being impatient and “too serious” in wanting to get as far away from that crazy-making behavior as possible? If I’m feeling isolated or antsy, and I join the sports team where everyone smokes, drinks, and is overweight, am I in the wrong for feeling like I still don’t fit in? If I discuss the lengths I go to approach the myriad problems I might identify, can you begin to understand how isolating it is when you’re met with that look like a dog who’s waiting for you to drop something for them to eat? Like you’re speaking Chinese or talking about moving grains of sand one at a time across a vast distance.

There I dangle. My environment kills me. It’s often by design, but mostly through negligence. It’s a silence that crushes my head and restricts my heart and punctures ears. It’s a look, so infused, by the layers of dream-work laid over the necessary shoveling I’m discussing. It’s the void behind your eyes betrayed by the fear, anger, and sadness. The people I “counsel” are overwhelmingly terrified of me. They shrink if we meet in person. They say “hey” and grab what they need and leave. It’s not “me,” of course, they’re reacting to. It’s how they feel. It’s why they became addicted. It’s why they’re tuning in, to the extent they are, to what I have to say and not the other way around. That’s the ongoing tragedy. I’ll be read as some smug or proud braggart by someone who feels just like them who’ll gleefully skip past the invitation to own and explore how they’ve weaponized their weakness and victimhood.

I’ve said too much. Who was this for? It’s 4:04 AM and I’ve got to get a nap in before gearing up to head north for Thanksgiving. I’m just kidding, I know who it’s for. All of the blogs, always, are for me. Because I’m the only one who can give me what I need. I have to find the words or reason to keep playing along while I otherwise swing in the breeze. I’m thankful I don’t want to die, but I’m still incredibly confused about what I’m supposed to live for when I feel like you’d prefer it if I were dead. Not everyone, just almost everyone who’s gotten to know me. I’m also thankful I thrive on spite.