[1028] All Too Human

I’m hesitant to write this as I feel it’s going to be more confusing or accidentally misleading. I think I’ve tried to speak to it in the past, but lately it’s been a hotter-button issue for me as I continue to inch forward in what I hope to achieve with my counseling business. The phrase that feels wholly incomplete is “I fear success.” That’s the most meager launching point that needs to be explored.

When I was doing drug studies there was a major panic moment. I had just bought my land, I think paid off my house, and otherwise set myself up to live fairly comfortably in what had been built so far. I wasn’t in debt. The future was bright and wide open, and I was scheduled for my next study that was going to pay out around $8,000. Up until this point, I always had something important to pay for or some foundation I was working to establish. It wasn’t just “free money” to “do whatever I wanted with.” I felt, for the first time, a sense of limitless possibility, and I could not slow my heartrate down enough to qualify for the study…or the next 2 or 3 after that.

I’m somebody who is hyper-conscious of needing restraint. I study history. I watch “good people” get corrupted constantly. I know, in my heart-of-hearts, how little I give a fuck about so many things and how rarely do I come up against anyone who would bother to check an impulse I might have. In reality, they’re most often just salivating at the prospect of what I’ll get up to next and whether or not it will be interesting enough to warrant a pause on their infinite scrolls. This is great, if you’re doing great, consistent, or driven by something more than potentially errant notions of freedom and power.

Spending is an analogue for me. When I spend with “reckless abandon” it’s actually after I’ve considered my dozens of potential budgets and made a decision about what is going to provide the most psychological satisfaction in committing to a lane. Am I going to a few shows of my “favorite artists” over the last few years, or am I going to ALL THE SHOWS in a concerted effort to meet or pass the amount I went to last year? The money is there or incoming. The debt, relative to what you’re in debt for, is manageable if not negligible on a not-so-broad scale. And it all makes sense in the context of what I’m hoping to achieve, experience, or play with. I didn’t hesitate to buy my land, build the coffee shop, or drop the cash to make my fort livable. They all made sense in a deeper longer vision way than any one expensive buy for mere indulgence.

I’m enthusiastic and persuasive. I have been for as long as I can remember. I know, intimately, how to play on people’s ignorance, lack of self-esteem, language, pathological cyclical thinking, or otherwise chaos and stress of the myriad decisions that they haven’t quite consciously made in service to the lives in which they find themselves embedded. I know I could build a following because I already have one, and have created one in every work environment that required trust and time and genuine relationships. I’m praised almost every day for my ability to encourage and provide practical “no bullshit” advice that isn’t judgmental or self-serving. My utility is a lock. There is no reason to believe that my perspective is going to magically transfer into shit advice the bigger we get.

But what happens when you get too removed from the day-to-day struggle? What happens when the practical constraints are no longer in place because you’ve got $8000 to “do whatever” with? What happens when the “professional” who might existentially wish for us all to do better and practice good habits and yada yada no longer has to show up to keep his bills paid, because the infrastructure or client list is so large we could fall into that failing posture of so many organizations that make millions and do so much harm? What happens when the directions we might take come down to a measure of my veritably regal good will?

I’m not suggesting I’d even be deliberately malicious, but the things associated with burnout play out in subtle ways. I don’t have it in me to hold the spousal-abuse victim’s hand, by the dozens, through the 7-year cycle of stuckness. Am I going to dedicate a large amount of time on oversight and accountability if I’ve got the money to travel and amuse myself? Will I take the necessary time to find the right people to account for the things I’d otherwise feel responsible for? I already don’t trust the people I’m closest to to operate like me, and I don’t even operate as well as I should! I trust them to do as good as they can for who they are and what they’re interested in, just like me, which will change as the business evolves and the money comes in.

I’m worried it’s all going to change so fast I don’t have the opportunity to establish a strong base to work from. I got the coffee shop running on a base of extraordinarily high rent and shitty advice from a lawyer. Even if we were breaking even, we couldn’t grow, and we were embedded in something that started costing us way more than just the money. I don’t want to be desperately clamoring to fit in to the broken expectations and dictates of the larger “sick care” system. I also don’t want to situate ourselves in a place of getting constantly taken advantage of in attempting to meet needs, but not getting paid what it takes to live ourselves while doing so.

With great power comes great responsibility. To whom much is given, much will be required. You can reduce your power by subscribing to a degree of chaos or adages regarding fate. You can pretend as though the wrong kind of selfishness is a virtue and that everywhere you’ve been in life lies solely on your will, capacity and awareness. If you’re gonna rise to the challenge, you have to try and account for all that comes with it. If I’m going to unironically believe in myself and my capacity, that comes with the obligation to check why “things” do or don’t look like I might profess a desire for them to.

It's my willingness to get ratchet that I worry about. I’m willing to be shameless and unrepentant in pursuing what I want, and that’s a problem. Especially as things ramp up and start actually working, I don’t envy who gets in front of me. There, I think I need to find a way to make the megalomaniacal story boring well before I get there.

There’s something that feels perverse though as well in helping people. Like, I know some people really deeply appreciate what I’ve told them. And I know they’re vulnerable. So, gimme $10? Gimme $50 because you need me that badly because your therapist and doctors are all shit? But it’s not just you, it’s every person with average intelligence unluckily born to a neglected area to abusive or ignorant average parents. I deserve to be rewarded that greatly for knowing you so intimately? For understanding the broader trends and nature of an average person?

I launched the website. I’ve been feeling more motivated and creative in ways to promote and open to navigating the foreseeable bumps in trying to punkishly DIY my way forward with a burning credit card. I need to make peace with the idea that there is no real check on power that doesn’t come with death. I don’t have any genuine desire to misuse power or take advantage of people. That’s a nice way to put what may still happen as things creep into areas I’m as yet unfamiliar with regarding freedom or opportunity. Make sure you speak up if you see things getting bad, but I can’t pretend I have any confidence you will.

[1027] Nice Things

“You can’t give up.”

I was just on the phone with my supervisor. She was calling to “make sure I had the support” after I called my officer manager’s supervisor. I provided her supervisor the context behind the months of struggle I’ve been listening to about the lack of leadership, direction, or protection from threatening and escalating-in-creepiness behaviors from clients. My office manager has tried, many times in the past, to email, ask for help, and detail her concerns. She’s most often met with outright silence.

My supervisor nonchalantly suggested that, like her, I know you can’t give up and stop advocating. If you have a genuine plan and boundaries and capacity to help and protect yourself, and that advocacy is in service to that, sure. If your leadership is shit, of course you can give up. I’ve stopped bringing things to “leadership” on many occasions because they’re not leadership. They’re figureheads playing sadomasochistic roles. They don’t want to use any real individuated wisdom or bring consequences. They want the tortured dance that protects the glossy edifices of “professionalism” and “care.”

Give up. Give up more often than not. Most things most of the time aren’t going to get you where you wish to go. You think you need the paycheck, so you’ll squeeze your head until you bleed from your pores. You can quit before or after you’ve followed directions to stick gauze in your ears and nose and hold buckets for the rivers from your eyes.

75-90% of the reason I stay in any role for as long as I do is related to my coworkers. My longest job had large periods where I considered my managers and coworkers like family. My actual supervisors at DCS and I got along very well. My supervisor now leaves me alone, and my office managers, save for one, are able to laugh and joke and not turn on each other while also handling our difficult clients. They’re overwhelmed by default, and the busiest one is on the verge of quitting. Why? An incredibly creepy client, who has already hit on her, rifled through our trash and appeared to play with used tampons for 25 minutes while in the employee bathroom.

Previously, clients have threatened violence. They get extremely cussy and rude. The office managers are responsible for dealing with 300+ members, most days there’s maybe 2 of them, and with pharmacy changes, random incoherent communication, and seemingly zero support to address the more dramatic ones, it’s a recipe for popping. If she leaves, the precarious place I occupy psychologically about my responsibilities or desire to maintain groups with integrity becomes pretty severely threatened. I still need to make about eight grand though.

It's an unconscious thing to keep yourself trapped in these abuse cycles and advocate that others abuse themselves as well. That’s something I don’t think my supervisor is aware that she did. She’s not actually concerned about my office manager, just like she’s not actually trying to support me. She’s trying to contain the Bedford office. Every industry, in the name of capital, control, and professionalism, does the same thing. Train derails? Oh the toxins won’t possibly be that bad, you know, all history and evidence aside haha! Market crashes? It’s a race to the scripts about normal business cycles and personal accountability. It’s at once arguably one of, if not the most powerful patterns and so simultaneously tired. He beats you? Laundry list of reasons/excuses you’re trapped and dependent follow.

Until you delineate a breaking point, you don’t have one until your body or mind fails you. Any discussion about boundaries or self-care could, if nowhere else, start just before the physical limit of exerting yourself against or in service to that which breaks you into pieces.

If there’s some broader “point” of existing, be it service to each other or something “greater” that you call “God” or abstract “goodness,” it’s to not kill yourself as you go about it. It might speak to why the Jesus story is so compelling; it embodies the Noble Battered Wife narrative.  A point of true genius to couch the balance or comeuppance after death, right? Helps keep the flock from feeling like they need to own or do anything this precise moment that their skin is peeling away. No no, I’m sure that’s just wool!

It makes sense why you either can’t recognize the narrative, feel the depth of its consequences, or draw any real and sustained effort or motivation from its recitation to react contrarily. It’s built into our psychological fabric of meaning. We aren’t just battered wives; we’re designed and predestined to thrive the more we contort ourselves to the thrashing. Keep the secret. Suffer. Pass on the generational trauma like you might a pocket knife that will run down the length of your teenage daughter’s arm. Don’t police how, whether, and why you do…anything, let alone begin to trust what you can see, hear, and feel in interacting with the information.

I kinda feel like I cracked a code in my broader confusion about the state of our existence. In the general “opposite day” that people occupy in how they use words, “sacrifice” at the individual word, if not syllable, gets to run a micro-ironic instant life-death-relive cycle, like so many tributes to undead saviors. You’re not lying, you’re celebrating and emulating peak nobility in death. Everything’s a target. Mass shootings are pretty on the nose, but we’ll kill the planet, education, regulation of any kind, or even the memory of a just, civil, and safe space until we can only sustain interpretative mockeries. We’ll co-opt literally everything into feeding the self-destructive architecture. Think about what happened to “woke” or #metoo or Black Lives Matter or anything that started pretty clearly in opposition only to be snatched out from under the already embattled and stultified ethic.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

[1026] Type 2 Brain

I was awake at 5:30 AM today. I went to bed earlier than I might usually, and given I only sleep for 4 or 5 hours, I’ve been fairly awake for just over 2 hours. I have a few things I want and need to do today. I found myself immediately distracted trying to make coffee without my usual cup, get my contacts in, navigate the cats, and set up my work computer. A few days ago, drunk, I proclaimed that I would turn up my effort in fixing our problems in getting the counseling business in working order. That meant to me spending money creating an online presence, organizing spreadsheets, and making an obscene amount of phone calls with hopefully in-person meetings setup. I really want to do “just all that” right now. The mild, familiar, foreboding panic struck.

I still have my day job. I still have my day job taking away time that my business requires. I’m already incredibly distractable. I know I’ve been mentally checking out of my day job with each week and each email telling us they’re expanding into new markets while continuing to neglect ours. I’m already anticipating a call, email, or just some negative thought and attitude constantly pulling me away from figuring out a detail that lets me get a website looking and operating as I wish.

I feel so wrong. I don’t know how to do both. I don’t know how to earnestly use the same potential focus and energy to churn through day-job tasks so I can beast mode my endeavor. I’m living this incredibly uncomfortable contradiction that suggests my effort in both directions will be a waste of time and money. At least with the day-job, I know how little I need to do to keep spending money on toys, trips, shows, and food. I’ve bled indefinitely in service to my entrepreneurial ideals to lose money, get taken advantage of, work myself to the point of passing out, and temper my disposition. I know how much it took of me to get, not “nowhere,” but I’m not running a coffee shop I’ve had open for ten years, nor am I hopping over to the next house to flip, nor do I have anyone out here on the land working on a shared project or me helping with one of theirs.

The entire story of my effort is one of constant begrudging effort to not get overwhelmingly dejected that no one is coming, nothing will work, and never is it going to make sense, go smooth, or result in some anticipated level of status and stability after having done wise, helpful, useful, and forward-thinking things. I could save myself the disappointment, money, time, and discomfort in my gut by just doing the functional nothing of my day-job, making the regular amount, and adopting a “come what may” posture about the business.

But everything antagonizes. Every person who tells me what a good job I’m doing, or how I’m not like any counselor they’ve had before, or that they’ve never trusted someone enough to call outside regular work hours, or how they appreciate that I know how to push, or that they’re thankful I wish to protect the integrity and focus of the groups, or that my advice and patience are things I should get paid a lot for, or how someone doesn’t know how I’m able to “do what I do,” or literally anything nice and encouraging ever – I want to break down. It’s not right that I’m, apparently, this capable of eliciting this kind of feedback, whether it’s accountable or true-enough I’ll leave to you, and I’m just a cog. I’m just stuck. I’m just flailing to “fit” into an entire system and culture designed around the exact opposite of what I’m fighting to maintain.

Having more time is great. Filling that time with more concerts and comedians is even better. Getting to spend time with my dad and friends is as good as anything I imagined about my obscenely wealthy future where I had retired at 30 and pretty much maintained being in the business of partying. My mind is occupied by things screaming at me that enough of the foundation isn’t right. I’ve yet to enable the exponential potential of the positive sentiments offered. Something about those sentiments has to be true. Either they’re total bullshit and I’ve weaponized them against myself in service to building something out of a series of false narratives. They’re only a little true, so it’s a mildly less damning version of the last scenario. They’re true-enough to qualify as functional, which means I’m either a fucking moron, or uncreative, or horribly poorly connected to make anything that functions, again, in sheer irony, that I’m already working and getting paid at precisely what I’m trying to do for myself. Or they’re particularly and individually true in the earnest way in which I believe they’re conveyed, which triggers my, “Well, wouldn’t it make sense for me to get paid and organized around these habits verses the shit I’m stuck in?” sensibility.

I don’t want to shut off the tap of a paycheck I can anticipate, particularly when I don’t have my next 20 tickets bought yet, and $7000 of debt, and just rediscovered an Amazon deal tracker that saw me buying $130 headphones for $15 and $145 watch for $20. Money is always on its way out. Always. I don’t know how to reconcile my divided gut. As soon as I get done writing, I’ll get the email off to probation, I might get some discharges done, and I might get some drug screen results and notes completed. It’ll probably be around 10:30. My first group isn’t until 3. That’s almost 5 hours to watch some videos on how to design a website, get it paid for and setup, do my groups, and be on my merry way. It’s not hard. It’s not a time crunch. But it’s still wrong and it’s still off, and there’s any number of calls or emails I’ll get that break even that vague semblance of order.

And I’m just a little bit cold, and my cat took off outside before eating breakfast, and I’m going to be thinking about the UPS truck who is bound to pretend to drop off my package again in spite of me finally getting numbers on my house. I’ll forget I need to eat and shit and I’ll need to release a spider back into the wild. The details that describe the undermined effort and intention will get delineated, and the next time someone asks how things are going, I’ll barely refrain from saying, “What’s really needed is gone, if it was ever there to begin with” like some forlorn poet.

A major contributor to my general frustration is that I’m unable to discern the reason “anything has to be like this.” Is it just some rule that you can’t treat people fairly under capitalism? Is “fair” even a reasonable concept to entertain? I’ll always wonder why nothing “we” talked about wishing to achieve or be to each other never was bothered with. Why can’t we just shut up? Why does the lie need to be so loud and at the heart of the ironic churn? Why does the betrayal have to manifest in so many catchphrases and corporate-speak or empty truisms about love and family? Why, if it’s already so hard, do we make it harder with layers of bullshit and laziness and fear over phantoms?

I’m 34. I habitually find relationships where communication and honesty aren’t really the girl’s thing until crisis hits, and then perhaps we should never speak again? My friends are on collision courses with varying forms of heart-attacks or strokes and then baffled when I would suggest they won’t be able to stop me when I go into heart-attack/stroke modes of effort and stress to get what I want. I love my house, but I would never use it to entertain, as if anyone’s ever coming. I have so much shit. I have so many projects and things to play with. I don’t have anything outside of myself to orient towards besides the professions of “woulds” and “coulds” that I’m apparently in no way capable of doing on my own nor enabling and inspiring others to help me with in an ongoing and persistently positively financially consequential way.

I have the fantasy I’m always measuring myself against. I’ve started and continued to run a coffee shop. It has a presence in the mall and a delivery service. I’ve learned all these things about house flipping and am always shopping around or working on the next one. Each day I’ll wake up and take another bite out of a project on the land, read a chapter or two, get a lesson from some insanely talented musician, work out, call up one of a dozen people and get a delicious meal. All of the details in all of the blogs about the rent, weather, mental and physical health of anyone involved, time, money, or ability to focus when “surprise” panic sets in allow for it to be a considerably more compelling delusion than it should be. But it also serves to make the reasonable argument for a measured (registers as plodding) approach to anything new or “big” I wish to approach. So, again, I’m wrong and feeling wrong, even if I’m not, as it becomes impossible to tell which aspects of the story I have any real control over. I can chill and slow down. The more I feverishly move to learn and overachieve? I introduce more chaos and panic and I’m left alone and cold.

Just because I don’t know what to do doesn’t mean I’m desperate to be told what to do or follow orders. I don’t need your sky daddies, your superficial rules, or your frightened personal ethos that keeps you emotionally “stable.” I want more things to make sense. I think it is a “just” cause and thing to believe in when not marred in subjective experiences alone. The more I can get things to make sense, the more I’m able to move through whatever is in front of me. I’ve spoken about the panic dozens of times; it’s taken a slightly different form and I’ve found more details. It makes a little more sense. I’m feeling myself drawn towards what was handicapping drudgery as I run out of things to say. It doesn’t get better, because neither you nor I are any better or worse than our awareness and culpability to any given moment. We’re certainly not fucking that.

[1025] Bang

Do I have to talk about it? No, not really, but it’s probably more unique and entertaining than what you’ve been up to today.

I feel like it never fails. When I think I’m going to be “done” with my day, wrap up the last of my responsibilities and psychologically transition into the headspace that anticipates drinking beer at Winterfest and seeing a comedian, pain and tragedy knee cap me at the finish line. Mine is a profession where I’m walking the razor’s edge of others’ sense of stability. A “normal” work day might end with someone genuinely expressing how convinced they are that today is the day to die.

There’s procedures, of course. When someone tells you in 5 different ways with a tone that leads you to believe they’re serious that they’re on the suicide train, you’re supposed to get their answers to a questionnaire! The questionnaire will then determine if you need to create a “safety plan.” The ensuring that you have this timely documented will protect you from liability when you’re otherwise ill-equipped counselor might open themselves up to (not really) consequences if they botch the engagement.

This is what I’m paid less than inflation-adjusted minimum wage though for, right? Not to just cope with derailing where my head wants and needs to go for “self-care,” but juggle life and death? You know what you tell a person who’s on the verge of killing themselves? It’s a gamble. You’re not in a conversation or negotiation, you’re on the other end of a desperate confessional. And your alleged supports are tried-and-true social-working despots who know well in advance that they can’t really save anyone nor is it necessarily their fault if someone dies. It’s not an unpersuasive or unreasonable place to come from, but it is woefully incomplete.

This is the kind of danger you run into though when you take this “wide net” cavalier approach to admitting people under the auspice of “some help is better than no help.” It’s presumably better for profits or for your self-conception that you’re reaching more people, but it plays out as a series of cascading mini catastrophes. We attempt to “counsel” people in groups sometimes comprised of people who haven’t been in the program for even 2 months. During that 2 months their attendance might be miserable, and we might discover they have some pretty severe mental health concerns that this environment is in no way equipped to deal with.

What happens to the group? They see someone “nodding,” and they have no idea if they’re just tired or high. They hear someone slurring. Is it a speech impediment, or are they drunk? They hear someone manically ramble. Are they just high energy? An anxiety disorder, unmedicated, turns a member incredibly hostile. Depression, abusive relationships, and ongoing illegal activity in the misappropriation of medication gets downplayed as mere details undermining the broader effort.

This last week I’ve had people do a timeline exercise. They put emotionally compelling instances from birth until today on a list, their ages next to them, and then we proceed to develop questions to unpack what’s on the line. If you have a traumatic memory at 6 and then the next one at 18, what was going on in those 12 years between? If you have 7 tear-inducing thoughts all coupled over a short period, who was around? Who died? Did you move? Did you drop out? Did you switch from incidental use to harder things? It gives you a chance to create a flow that unpacks deeper memories and magnify areas of your life you’ve condensed in the stories and habits of your self-conception today.

I’ve talked with some of my clients for 7 months. I’ve learned more about them in one week with this exercise than I have the entire rest of my time. Everyone’s been molested. Everyone’s had their favorite and most important emotional support die on them. Everyone’s witnessed or on the receiving end of violence. Everyone’s still blaming themselves for things they did as children. Human depravity knows no bounds, and it’s working its way through our bodies and minds like air and water.

You know how you conquer addiction? Incorporating the feelings associated with all of your disassociated memories. You break, by recognizing and redirecting, the automatic response to mask, blame, hide, or self-destruct. You know what you can’t really do surrounded by people you don’t trust 5 to 15 minutes at a time once a week? That isn’t to say there aren’t productive groups or people who take thing seriously and consistently attest to the utility and appreciation they feel. But we’re playing doctor. They have brain boo-boos, I provide the Band-Aid version of surgery.

My suicide-ideating client said she needed to be locked up somewhere. She had been thrown into her dark place by getting treated incredibly unfairly by probation, a therapist at shithole-doesn’t-begin-to-describe-it Centerstone, and against her best effort to keep it together in spite of her mental health problems and relatively new introduction to the program. She needed to take a call from probation while we were talking. She didn’t respond to my texts for 10 or 15 minutes, so I called in a wellness check. She didn’t meet their criterion for forced detainment and transportation, and she agreed to go to the psych ward. She told me she lived 20 minutes away and would text me or have the hospital do so when she arrived. She had packed and said she was leaving as we hung up.

An hour later, I text her asking if she made it, she responds she’s in the town that’s about halfway there. I’ve heard nothing else back.

As with most people, I can usually identify when you’re cursed with being too smart for your own good. She’s highly emotionally intelligent and intuitive. She’s one who came into groups swinging with awesome contributions and no pussy-footing about discussing explicitly what she needed. That kind of gusto and confidence is, unfortunately, a red flag in these kinds of environments. She’s not an entitled rich person with every reason to believe undying delusional self-confidence is going to result in continued unearned prosperity. She’s desperate. She’s like my guy who complimented and thanked me for how much help my advice was contributing to fixing his marriage, and wouldn’t you know it, he wants to be a counselor too! And he would greatly appreciate any information I could provide.

The next day, he’s calling me and the office over and over again, before work, and while I’m in group, panicking over slipping up and failing a drug test while on probation.

Then it comes out his mental health, that he was in control of on medication, is not where it needs to be because he can’t find someone to prescribe him what he has been taking for 6 years. My advice, 15 steps ahead of what he needs to focus on, is twisted into this “help” that realistically barely, if ever, accesses the roots of any given individual. I’m expected to maintain a certain level of persistent positivity and “support,” as the waterfall of unaddressed and potentially un-addressable issues eeks out over months while we’re otherwise talking ourselves in circles.

While you’ve been reading this, have you just been screaming to yourself the “obvious” answers and conclusions I should draw from this? Are you so deeply thankful that the people I describe aren’t you? Do you thump your own tale of tragedy and mental health struggles that keeps anything new neatly boxed in and away from your responsibility? I do. I call every person their own black hole for a reason. I write dispassionately, forever, because they are variables on the stream of what I’m conscious of, but not to be blamed for. I care, right? At least enough to not let my “intellectualizing” turn into the psychopathic antagonism or negligence of my colleagues and colleague-adjacents.

The struggle is not the notes. The struggle is not the hour or two I have to do something annoying, be it in service to the housekeeping of the job or to try and get someone pointed in a not-dead direction. The struggle is with the shape systems are destined to take when people are at the helm. Is this the best we can do? If she’s dead tomorrow, do I shrug it off and say, “Hey, I tried!” and point to the risk assessment I attempted to do? You know, the thing that’s hard to interject between each line that might then signal a “click” and destroy your ability to keep her talking after reducing her to the paperwork.

I don’t take any special pride or feel some sense of nobility as a feeble Band-Aid. If, and it’s a big if, you encounter people genuinely interested and capable of “fixing” themselves or “stabilizing” and creating whatever their version of “better” is, they’re still human. They can persuade themselves they’re worth nothing, the effort doesn’t matter, no one cares, and it all ends as the inevitable heat-death of the universe. And they’re right. They’re not more or less right than if they described the exact opposite opinion of themselves on some transcendent upward spiral. But they’re right enough for them in any given moment that they wish to be convinced of what they say or feel, and wish to justify their next act.

That we feel equally justified to persist in our ego and psychological trappings forces me to consider the desperate psychosis of the culture writ-large. You see, in reality, we’re complicit co-conspirators in the unsustainable exploitation of literally every resource. You can chalk it up to law-of-the-jungle and natural cycle dynamics if you please. You can extoll the virtues of capital and technology to obscure the underlining intentionality and machinery. You can maintain a persistent moral delusion and solipsism or be born dumb enough to never find yourself even considering. We must wish to die too if this is how we’ve chosen to go about caring for one another.

[1024] Lay It On Me

Let’s keep fishing. It’s precisely 1 AM in this illusion of time. I decided to stay in bed until approximately 11:30 AM this morning. I picked up my, still silenced phone from the shows on the weekend, to discover I had missed a meeting. The meeting was one I’m not entirely sure was asked for by the person it was supposed to be with. The meeting was confirmed via email, but with no calendar indication. The meeting was to discuss – I don’t know – It was just supposed to be about how a person who sick with both HIV and cancer is still sick with those things and might be about to die. Superficially, you might think I approached the chance to be a part of this meeting with too much ambivalence. If you’re me, you’re heavily suspicious and question the wisdom of insisting upon and presenting the meeting to me in the first place.

There are many things that would have not happened. I wouldn’t have said some measure of encouraging thing that would make him better. I wouldn’t be able to offer medical advice. I wouldn’t have been able to show solidarity in tears or psychological war stories of empathetic horror. I, by all accounts, would have had an immense opportunity to make things worse in being unable to mask my relative indifference to a situation that I can’t influence in a direction the person involved or onlookers would say, “It was good you were there.” Knowing this at my core, I believe I stuffed any remote idea that I might attend so far away from my active consciousness that I immediately calculated whatever negative opinions I might garner by not showing would be preferable, indeed better, than starting my day indulging the façade to that degree.

Much more simply, I just didn’t bother with thinking about work until I wanted to. There’s every reason to think the previous paragraph is true, but if the slightest conditions had changed, like me hearing my cat start to heave before vomiting, I could have been up and on the call and played along, and none would be the wiser about my growing ambivalence towards my job and antagonizing anxiety slowly creeping into my desire to “do” or be polite.

I’m writing again instead of doing notes. There’s 6 of them. They’ll take approximately an hour if I don’t focus. I even rearranged my furniture so I could establish a little desk-like area so I’m not fumbling with a drum pad resting on my ankle as a mouse platform. I’ve watched a fair amount of TV. I’ve played the piano I questioned the wisdom of owning two days ago. I’ve eaten store bought food and only left the house to pee as I’ve still not fixed my water.

But I’ve been a little on fire. Allowing myself to access that ambivalence has provided more focus and intention. I can tell because when I was playing the piano, I wasn’t struggling to play the piano, I was just playing. I’m feeling the intentionality grow behind fixing the water and cleaning up around my property, and just generally getting a touch more organized. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me as to why the harder I genuinely neglect the thing I don’t care about the more I find a desire to do what I do care about, but then, of course that’s not true.

My first group for the day we readdressed what it means to be honest. People are always free-flowing in their shares about what they’re lying to themselves about or how they know they’re lying when it comes to what they “need to do” or “hope gets done” or “should be doing differently.” You don’t have to be smart to recognize when you’re full of shit, and you don’t have to be an emotional genius to know when you feel guilty or empty and stuck after expressing some familiar hopeless sentiment about how to improve your life. People were focused and looking into the camera. The lie is so loud and all-encompassing and we’re staring into it with little trust or clue on how to best it.

I feel as trapped or stuck as anyone else. I might externalize the factors and fight to demonstrate otherwise, but my heart-of-hearts isn’t appeased. I get flickers of hope when I see how others acknowledge and describe the same condition. I get chills, routinely, in how some people describe their circumstances and the efforts they’ve made to improve and how they’ve noticed the difference. I started this year speaking to how I recognized a need for more structure. I’ve taken to “structuring” my weekends and off-time with shows. I’ve been contemplating how and whether I could go to music camps to redevelop practice habits.

The structure I need is of a broader cultural one. I need more than is on offer. I need a senator who isn’t a literal fascist. I need a job that is willing to pay me what I’m worth, not what they’ve deemed is fair. I need to feel like I can get body work done and check-ups without sacrificing weeks to months of my life earning the privilege. I need to see a string of things that make consistent sense to combat the abject nonsense of advertising infotainment feeds and errant ignorant commentary. I need to be working with a crowd focused on problems that transcend the here and now.

I have such gripes with these “conscious collectives” or pretentious hobbyists who all seek the same kind of detachment from the broader picture. They’re like bizarro religious cultists who feel entitled to a particular language expressed in a particular self-protecting way, but the way they deny the broader suffering is through less blood-drenched imagery, drug use, and spending mysteriously high amounts of money. Mysterious in that it comes from places just as dirty and implicated as they would otherwise rail against if they weren’t born on the right side of it.

It's weird to think that I’m never gonna “get it.” That I’ll be doing some version of this for the rest of my life I find incredibly baffling. That’s something easy to believe given, well, I’m 34 and practically nothing about my relationships, professional environments, living situation, educational opportunities, general conversations, or people I’ve looked up to have coalesced into something I regard as healthy, persistent, remotely understood and confident, or even basically honest and accountable to their own nature let alone how it operates within the game at large. I’d be a fool to maintain anything but the most tepid conception of the future and my place in it provided “things” continue to go precisely as they have or people stay people.

So then what? How do I give a fuck about a few thousand in debt or upsetting a norm or expectation of an otherwise crippling work environment? What stops me from just paying the minimum on the credit card for the next 10 years as interest piles much higher than the fucks? This broad view of television I’m getting has people like Stewart Lee offering the burnt-out ironically critical takes on “the world” and “culture” as observers have been doing since we developed eyes. Speaking critically, ironically, or hilariously about it all isn’t going to shift the nature of things. If anything, it’s going to help instantiate them further as we chuckle “the pain away” from any genuine sense that something can, should, and will change provided we actually do something.

If I spent half as much on the things I’ve mentioned or thought about doing around the house, committed to them in all of the time I have between groups, my off days, and hours before concerts, I’d be done in 2 weeks. Knowing this is a big reason I find myself hung up so often. There’s a catch in being goal-oriented. I, at least, know certain projects can be done, done quickly, and if not “comfortably” at least within the budget I’m freely spending to go to shows. I’d rather be in debt to see a comedian or band that could tragically die at any moment than pretend I care or wish to speculate on whether my neighbor’s mood would be improved after I turn the pallets into a fence. Then what? I go back to TV? I buy an expensive guitar or computer? I fuck off to Europe for a week?

It's all ever-present and here now. It doesn’t matter what I pick. It doesn’t matter if I can ascertain the “truth” of how or why I’m doing something. It matters that it feels and represents me actually choosing and feeling the consequence and empowerment of that choice. I feel incredibly dejected when I have to buy a totally necessary piece of equipment to fix one of my vehicles. I will drop the same amount of money in a heartbeat at the prospect of driving 3 to 5 hours away to see a show. I will lament the idea of having to do my incredibly easy job for 3 more months, a job I get praised and thanked for routinely, and then drive myself into more debt for trinkets and toys as though I know I’m trapped and only through buying and the little rush of being naughtily click happy is the best I can manage to cope and feel alive.

I’m going to do these notes, at least half of them, and it’s going to be pushing 3 AM by the time I’m done. I have one group at 11 AM tomorrow. If it’s not raining or freezing, I might immediately go outside and see how many pallets I can break down or things I can shuffle about to make it look less like I’m keen to express my half white-trash origins. I’ll have my phone turned back up and on me in case someone wants to reach out to me about a problem I can’t fix, don’t care about, and they’re not really interested in solving.

[1023] Waiting For My Wake Up Call

Something’s not right. It’s not “wrong,” but it’s definitely not right. I can’t seem to figure out how to get moving. I can’t seem to find the drive to push the outer limits of the experiment. I can’t find the fucks to give and barely discover the focus. I envision what I might otherwise be doing or what will happen when I arrive, and instead, well I’m doing this, this time. I might just as well go to sleep, start a show, or find myself vacuuming spider webs that never bothered me for the last 9 months they’ve been there. I’ve been keen to theorize this has something to do with “undiagnosed ADHD.” I’m beginning to suspect there’s something darker and more insidious going on.

I just returned from a comedy show. I saw another one the night before with my dad who came down the 3-hour trip to visit. At the show tonight, the audience was very chatty. Although Joe Pera was encouraging answers to questions he posed to the crowd, one woman took it upon herself to share a mini monologue during a punchline. I’m absolutely fascinated by the complete lack of self-awareness when something like that happens. More to what I think is echoing in the back of my head though, her doing that is almost the norm. It’s an abysmal and disrespectful norm, like so much that modernity has presented for us to choke down, but you don’t really know if you’re going to hear the person you paid to see more than the assholes they’ve attracted to the room.

I feel like I hate this in an outsized way because I was not the person going to 65 shows a year. I might have made it to 2, more likely 1, if any at all. I didn’t have the expendable income to just write off a negative experience. I might have saved and sacrificed for a while to get a ticket at all, let alone one with a decent view. Then I get drunk bitch chiming in? Her selfish interjections stealing my invitations to connect and laugh? I might lose my goddamn mind, especially if I haven’t felt like I was connecting to myself or anyone, artist or otherwise, for a long period of time.

I’ve griped about having to tell idiots to shut the fuck up in every 3^rd movie. The people at the show yesterday weren’t any better in terms of staying quiet or paying attention. Literal conversations going on all around. Drunk over-blasting discussions about the bill. It’s fucking trashy and embarrassing and it’s this kind of stuff I think portends the end of man.

I don’t know if I’m more dangerous when I don’t know what I’m doing or believe that I do. I don’t have any real and proper compulsions, but I can savor a moment that registers as an excitable opportunity for change or chaos. I have so many tasks and chores and dreams that feel like so much plodding and errant hole digging. “Any word on the counseling business?” The refrain from onlookers after I get tricked by the word “paid.” I don’t know, I can spend money to build a website and offer text-based super-low-priced counseling. I can spend money and look for a lead generator. I can spend money and outsource outreach or access pools of people. Or, I can wait until the only seemingly remotely feasible way to get paid, even meagerly, long-term is being contracted.

It all feels like wheel-spinning. Meanwhile, I have a job allowing me to live as close to my “extravagant” lifestyle as I’ve dreamed so far, but it’s proving as unfulfilling and incomplete as I always knew it would. Just because you win the lottery doesn’t mean you have a purpose, and I’ve won many lotteries. As the parade of “general audience” members continues to suggest, even the notion that I might “escape” into the world of persistent viewer/laugher/analyzer is a farse because the attention will always be drawn back to the loudest cawing asshole in the room.

I feel myself get tired when I get home. I don’t want to do 10 minutes of notes. I don’t want to fill out another reference survey. I don’t want to put the paperwork together to apply for another empty well-wishing not-so-promise that some organization “loves what we do” and “wants to work with us” but won’t be available for a year to “maybe” pay and only if we meet “specialized criterion” that will change with the wind. I don’t want to get up and drive to Bedford tomorrow to be rushed into conversations about nothing to nowhere. I don’t want to do anything right until the moment I do, but can’t. The weather was brilliant today. The first time I’ve felt I wanted to break down the pallets since the last time when it, of course, rained indefinitely weeks ago. I was on my way to Indianapolis. Even if I wasn’t, I haven’t fixed my water, so when I get immediately sweaty and grungy, I get to sleep in that and take it to work? I get to drive to Bloomington for Planet Fitness fresh-shit-in-the-air showers?

I’m feeling more tired in the way that has nothing to do with the physical. I watch as too-driven Hussain tells me he’s not sleeping and repeats “this has to work” with regard to the counseling business because he, like all of us, has his own debt and bills to pay. I gripe about 2 to 4 paychecks of debt as I spend freely to rock out and laugh, he’s 200K for school, has a mortgage, and a wife with a decent desire to spend. He said recently that he was experiencing heart trouble as he’s constantly stressed out and arguing with the school or companies he works for. He’s like me when I started the coffee shop thinking 20 steps and years ahead, and letting what hasn’t happened act as a weight or unrealistic anchor on the future.

I feel like I’ve never really wanted anything that complicated. Before I had the opportunity to be infinitely humbled, I just wanted to work. I wanted to work and get recognized and rewarded for all the work I was doing. School led me to believe that grades indicated something special or important, saying nothing about the safety it afforded me at home. When I thought I had a friend group, the goal was time together. That turned into an endless series of resentments. In relationships I feel myself occupying that “How can I help?” roll, whether it’s spending money, physically working on something, or just there to listen indefinitely to what most often amounts to a problem that’s not going to get fixed. I don’t know what to trust most of the time, and it’s leaving me very disoriented and dispirited.

Work ethic doesn’t mean just or persistent reward. It means exhaustion, exploitation, or maybe hurting yourself. When you connect with so many “friends” you have to run that experiment for 20 years before you maybe luck out and find ones who haven’t succumbed to their mental health disorders or fallen in with all manner of crazy on planet Also-Alone while left to their own devices.

What was the point? I find myself constantly asking. I look at all the crap I have in my little house. What was the point of buying these books I’m not reading? Why do I have a sewing machine? Why do I have 4 guitars and seven other instruments? I have woodworking equipment I’ve never opened. I have cooking tools I’ve used once or twice. I’m existing in this persistent fantasy where these are all tools I’m able to use in a consistent and convenient way. You know, the future where I’m meal prepping and have counter space and water that’s more water than copper silt. The future where I’m playing my instruments with nothing on my mind than the subtle differences I need to make to get my fingers right and next set of chords memorized. The future where I’ve loaded up on sewing material and spent all day watching videos until I start making custom bags and pockets for the crap I have.

Instead, I’m watching TV. And even with that, I’m not getting all of the episodes renamed so I can continue to build my channels and lists. I’ve gotten so far, and am watching what I’ve gotten. As though completing the task would leave me with too arduous of things to do next and I want it lying in wait as an excuse. You know how I bought a weighted-keys piano? Just so I could learn “A Thousand Miles” about 90% correctly, forget most of it 3 weeks later, and now stare at the piano literally at my feet as I occasionally turn it on to confirm it’s still plugged in and ready to go.

I’m sick. I’m stuck. I’m floundering, hard. I made it real and started flying around to see shows. Oh, shit, well I confirmed that airplanes exist, people are people wherever you go, and you’re gambling if you fly cheap. I’m incredibly happy and thankful I can do and say that, but it’s only a small part of the puzzle. I think people go the other direction and try to make their families or their jobs account for the whole of their puzzle. No one’s got money or time to come with me to the show most often, but they’ve got all the family time, talk, and obligations you could ever ask for. They don’t need me as a friend in the same way that I don’t need a hug from the kids I don’t have.

Maybe I’m an addict. I must be addicted to something that persistently finds the runaround discussion about what I should or could be doing, but can’t seem to be invested and intentional about changing.