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.
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