Let's just start there. I came home after seeing Hussain and him showing me how my car needs an alignment after the work he's done. He's predictably frustrated with our therapist who can't be bothered to communicate with us why a 20 minute task is going on 3 weeks to complete. The car has needed $150 or so in parts, he doesn't charge me labor, but it also needs tires, which I just bought for $270. Add in the cat litter, air fresheners, toilet cleaner, and some other "house supplies" things, almost $400 of crap, not fun crap, not wholly-unnecessary crap, just crap to live, drive, and clean, is on the way. Also, all the bills email me at once. $106.50 for the internet, and finally a nice surprise a radically reduced $150 for my electricity as the weather has improved. $8 for my seedbox. and $800 to my home insurance company because I figured, why not keep the spending ball rolling and avoid installment fees? I've been home for approximately an hour, and it only took me 20 minutes to spend $1400, $1600 on the day if you add the IMAX movie, gas and food I bought earlier. I also discovered a leak in my roof, and the rubber tape I suspect I'll need to fix it, $50.
I didn't buy truck tires. I don't have kids. I didn't have to pay my insurance for the year all at once. I didn't have to spend an obscene $17 on a bacon, egg, and sausage sandwich and large vanilla latte. I didn't have to see a movie. I could cross my fingers and pray for a few more months regarding my tires or just replace the worst ones. Do I absolutely have to have $5 air freshener? Of course not. It's not that any one piece of my day can't be sacrificed, or excused for, or defended in the spirit of living once and simple pleasures. It's that the whole premise and project that I'm working within, in my view, is irreparably broken, so it all feels futile and arbitrary fundamentally.
I'm smart and did well in school, and it doesn't matter. I've worked myself near to death across various industries, and it doesn't matter. I've attempted to start my own business several times, and it doesn't matter. I've lived as broke and hermit-like as you could reasonably expect a person to live, and it hasn't mattered. I'm as honest as a person can get without it becoming pathological, and it doesn't matter. I can get all the praise and positive feedback in the world, and it doesn't matter. I can be as giving and forgiving as you'll ever find in life, and it doesn't matter. I can live without things like running water, working toilets, air conditioning, or a bed, and it doesn't matter. I can create as open and freely accessible environment to live easier, play, experiment, save, or create, and it doesn't matter.
Nothing I do fucking matters. I'm not going to get paid enough, I'm not going to get recognized. There is no reward at the top of the hill. I'm not maintaining my access to heaven. I'm not winning friends and influencing people. I'm just telling a story of a wretchedly ironic caricature of the hero's journey. Perhaps in an anime you'll see them training. Each session they level up, or after they nearly die fighting a bad guy, they unlock new powers and potential. In One Piece the truly destined get a conqueror's aura that can paralyze or incapacitate through sheer will. Everything they do matters. Everything contributes towards them building strength, a reputation, a team, and a story that will transcend any given life or death struggle.
When I say "it doesn't matter" I don't mean "there's no consequences." I'd rather be in my paradigm than my paradigm but a little dumber, a little poorer, a little sicker, a little less well-connected, or a little more psychologically at the behest of my mother. I mean for you to think that the answer to "Everything happens for a reason" is "Yeah, shitty, shitty reasons." My schooling was a joke designed to extract money. My job(s) over the years the same thing. The business environments I've attempted to work in keep the tradition going. I could blame a most-encapsulating notion of capitalism, but I prefer to not obscure the simple greed at bottom. It's the greed of "convenience fees" and "transfer fees" and "processing fees" and "installment fees" and creeping ever higher interest rates. It's the greed drawn from an infinite well of insecurity that what you've created and how isn't actually good for anyone, fulfilling, or a worthwhile expenditure of time.
We were watching Kitchen Nightmares. The failing kitchens were all filled with greedy people. Their lost loved one needed never be dealt with as "their heart was no longer in" keeping the business alive. Gordon Ramsay comes in, points out the obvious, but then also magically resolves years of trauma and resentments in neatly packaged 40 minute episodes. 21 out of 105 kitchens are still open. That is a 20% success rate. If you're on Suboxone, there's a 90% chance you will still relapse. 10% of 21 million addicts actually seek treatment. I can't tell you how 1-to-1 the parallels in the worst kitchens matched the language of many of my clients. You're only twice as likely to save your kitchen as you are to "beat" your addiction, which is resting comfortably at 10%.
It's the behavior. It's your behavior that's fucked up, that sets the conditions for indefinite failure. Whether you want on-the-nose examples like millions of votes for fascism, or the, somehow, "abstract" fallout of your perpetual silence about things that matter, no one can succeed under these conditions without heavily sacrificing things none of us should think are acceptable. Did I describe such an extravagant and wasteful existence above? It's the first time I've claimed to spend money on anything that wasn't concerts or comedy shows in a while. Would I, could I, should I have the money if I dialed back trips around the Midwest and $50-$200 ticket prices? Sure. I could also die tomorrow. I'm on the road a lot, and that's where a lot of people die.
Specifically, the bad, wrong, always-fucking-me behavior is the lies. It's the pleasantries, the pageantry, the omissions, the red tape, the "good luck," the "I've just," the positive feedback backed by no more money, access, freedom, or power. I'm lied to constantly. It's the thing I hear most often every week. It's every sentiment offered to pretend "things" are "better" than they are. It's hopes and wishes and dreams side-stepping even acknowledging there's a problem, let alone exchanging ways on how to fix it, let even more alone fix it in perpetuity. We don't know what we're aiming at, why, what it could feel like once we got there, or what we're to draw on as we project its impact into the future. We have children we don't want and then somehow don't viciously punish the ones who would rather they go neglected or hungry than aborted. We take jobs we don't want and buy shit we don't need because slavery has been rebranded and taken us out of the sun if we're not a beleaguered minority. We pretend your human rights should pair with your access to capital; yours, or what's been mostly subsidized by everyone else.
We just lie, all the time. We pretend to be mentally stable as we shower the internet in stupid fucking memes. We pretend to be financially stable provided we never get too sick or downplay our cortisol levels that pay for must-have insurance. I am the absolute last person who should ever be in debt for really any reason. I live alone, in a shed, in one of the most affordable states, with a job paying considerably more than you'll find nearly anywhere. Even before I made the decision to go to all of these shows, my year-to-year trending spending was showing getting ever-indebted. All I was doing was driving and eating and working and I was losing. Could I have made more meals for myself? Sure. Could I have invested in a more fuel-efficient vehicle or diligently searched for a job closer to home? Maybe. Should I be expected to, every waking minute of my fucking life contemplate what I could do without so I can tend to basic fucking necessities to feel like a normal fucking person?
We're addicted to these bullshit fucking stories, and the kitchen-owners among us, with some professional celebrity help, have a 1 in 5 shot of keeping the miserably misplaced dream alive. The addicts have a reliable and predictable A- shot of keeping us collectively spiraling down the bowl of our fragile ego. You're depressed. You're anxious. You're angry. You're alone. You've given up your creative and motivated vision of who you imagined you'd be right now. You're tired. You're fat. You're every word is to be taken as fluff. You don't answer the call. You don't listen to the voice that nags you. You don't own anything, especially not even the very fucking fact that you don't own anything! It's all gone as quickly as you, or the people after you, can click submit.
I've wondered if I should go back to school, or learn a trade, or double-down on my debt and approach my business and potential from some creative angles. I've wondered if I should commit to retightening the purse strings and see if I can actually get within a paycheck of being out of debt verses cling to the story of the "few months away" that isn't true-enough to adequately describe the ambivalence and forlorn frustration undergirding my behavior. I'm enjoying my shows, TV, comedy, and music. The drives can be a literal pain in the ass, but..."What else would I be doing?" I'm not a real person in the environments I'm forced to adapt to or die. Nothing about me or my idea or my potential means a goddamn thing. So I'm going to laugh as often as I can, disappear into as many fantasies about family or friendship that will have me, and shake my fucking hair hard enough that my neck is sore for a week. I'm going to eat the food I like, spend obscene amounts of money on band T-shirts, and tinker on professional-level instruments.
I'm just as selfish as the next person, but I don't have to lie about it. In fact, I'm more selfish. I won't just let you have the story of yourself or your behavior. I won't just let you keep the peace. I won't be like an episode of Frasier where I step into the room and immediately continue to run with the lie. An 11 season 264 episode show ran through the 90s into the early 2000s built on insufferable caricatures habitually lying to themselves and others, and yet they're rich! And love finds a way! And the memories serve to remind them. And it can all be diagnosed and addressed as neatly as Gordan can turn around a kitchen. This is the kind of thing our brains have trained on our entire lives. This is why you're looking for a Disney prince or princess instead of a partner to work with. This is why we can get so lost in our own assholes we can turn ideas about being accepting or "woke" into compelling parodies.
You're still confused after reading this. You think I'm under some illusion that I'm more "real" than you or have some special insight into the nature of your pain and reasoning that I don't. You think I'm performing and am looking for sympathy or attention. You don't understand what the work of attempting to cope with a suicidal environment looks like. You don't actually access the depths of how hopeless and lost and fucking angry I am pretty much all the time. You will literally discuss your own issues through a series of fucking pictures and emojis or ensure your mental health struggle PSA has the best pictures of your tits and meta-data-ready hashtags. You don't fucking get it because I'm not lying to you, so none of this translates. It never has. It never will. It doesn't matter to you or the environment we're plugged into. It's for me, so I don't kill you or myself. You would never! you exclaim as your murder porn drones in the background. You can't imagine? You have a "quirky" fascination? Drawn to glamorized depictions of death is as ironically Freudian as it gets. You don't have the time or inclination to learn what I mean by that, so let your brain insert a belabored caricature. Freud is as real to you as he is to Frasier.
You believe your version of events. I don't believe what I'm saying right now, it's just what I feel and think. Show me something more. I have this version of events combined with the 1030 I've written already and the ones still to come. What do you think? Sorry. Can you think? What do you feel? Considerably more hopeful and joyous and connected and appreciative of our environment than me? I'll never know, because you'll never say it. You'll perform it. You'll Snap-it and Insta-it. You won't have a so-so time. You won't recall how you regret not missing someone more you designated as "best." You won't weigh the evidence of your satisfaction or direction of your existence; you'll filter what you're even willing to count as evidence, and reiterate it over and over again for the internal judge already on the take.
What can I control in all of this? I can keep typing until I'm done. I can keep going to work, running up the credit card, limping through my next business goals, filling up the tank, eating what I want, and beating the shit out of the infinitely abstract "you" for all of your silence, indifference, lies, and pain you cause in ignoring any word, let alone line, that might speak as whispered echoes of what was your capacity for honesty. Dumb or smart, you can choose to lie. Rich or poor, the story of either is a magnificent tapestry of bigotry or prejudice, or a holistic accounting and presenting of opportunities to act in service to discrepancies. Tax the rich and pay for literally everything we could ever need, or don't. Differentiate "poor" from "entitled," or rage-watch talking heads debate either abstraction indefinitely. I'm not pointing my finger at anything or anyone, because nothing is there. You're not there. You don't exist. You don't matter. You just won't admit it like me.
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