Before Florida, I was in Chicago with my other great friend who's living her own version of the same things I am. Incredibly short-sided and idiot "leadership." Clients/students who are stressed out and ill-equipped. She's wearing 4 different leadership hats and considering her options for transitioning roles. Whether you're welding in Chicago, or in academia in Florida, it's politics, systems that move too slow, if at all, and among many other metrics, monetary and time exploitation presented as a gift you should be grateful for.
As thinkers, doers, and otherwise intelligent types, we all do some version of the same thing. We look at the broader picture, instinctively feel responsible for it, and ask what can be done. The personal saga of perhaps attempting to consume less or grow more or demonstrate through canvas bags and donations where your consciousness lies might flourish. My friend in Chicago wanted to engage in a kind of exploration conversation about how to broadly shift the paradigm or see if I've discovered something she hasn't yet to "fix things."
No matter how idealistic we might be about living sustainably or breaking up or competing with instantiated power, there are dozens of considerations we can immediately swap in to arrest more radical action. Who doesn't like driving 5 to 10 minutes up the road to Target? Who doesn't worry about having job options in densely populated areas?
I'm a dreaming idealist who suffers as such routinely. I make a concerted effort to couch my suffering in an appreciation and honest relaying of my moment or days as they strike me. I, after many, many years of singing the same tune regarding my hopeless hatred for everything I'm made to engage with or waste time on, have not found anything "better" or, most importantly to me, more practical, than to start from this place, literally in a field, and try to have my idealized life on top of the shit sandwich. I was amongst the old and entitled "Owner's Club" getting golf cart rides to the entrance at Rockville. If they have a car payment or mortgage, they're in considerably more debt than me.
I've felt lighter the last week. The mission was clear. Get to the venue, walk to stages, drink water or otherwise, rock out, take videos, eat, get back, shower, chill, repeat. I wasn't even tempted to clench my jaw. My shoulders weren't in my ears. The pain and work it takes to festival right paid off what festivals pay. It was worth it. I contrast this with the amount of work I put in to "stay stable" in my conception of myself with regard to my day job or the feedback and level of conversation I engage in with my colleagues. There's no amount of massaging that really makes the pain go away.
On the broadest scale, I can see how I appear to be trending. I get more and more stuff. I get a little more access. I learn about a new, absurd, hurdle to trying to do anything good in the world, get paid adequately for it, and avoid getting punished by someone who feels threatened you exist and try. I live a cartoonishly privileged life when you compare it to the catastrophic circumstances of what might constitute "average." But it'd be foolish to get deceived by the perks and placations. The foundation is extremely fragile.
Part of that fragility is that I'm only one person. I'm not a society. I'm not even a collection of friends or partners truly working towards a singular goal. The other major catch to being a thinker or doer or feeler of responsibility is that you work alone. You have a vague notion you need to work out to either prove how brilliant you are, or at least hold true to yourself that you believed until the end. It's a recipe for self-destruction that I feel I caught in myself fairly early and build into my imploring that if/when you wanted to come play on my land, you'd be living almost free to experiment in a way I deeply appreciate is a component of your being. I wish to enable that propensity. Please see the effort into gardening I made for a year when I've little interest in doing so myself.
By the numbers, I've spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on things Allie wanted to do, Byron wanted to do, investing in the space and tools for what I thought "we," those born complaining about the things at 15, 25, and now 35 wanted to "fix." I'm still the only one standing out here. We're still intellectualizing and abstracting the struggle and mildly to not-so-mildly resenting the implication that we don't care or haven't worked hard enough in our own miserable little corners. I guarantee we will all fail until the conversation, well, happens at all, but with enough regularity, clarity, and direction to prompt the kind of action that I'm increasingly less inclined to take on my own.
More importantly to me, I'm less inclined to entertain the conversation that doesn't include sacrifice, incredible amounts of discomfort, ticks, shitting in bags, thousands in shared debt investment, or dogged nearly irrational pursuits in leverage and experimentation to get somewhere different. I'm "Owner's Club" and 48 shows left on the year different after building this space over the last 6 years. Shit has flown by. Yet I suspect my effort so far will still prove unpersuasive the next 6 years, like the blogs weren't persuasive before I found the land; and the conversations never took place about what to do with the chunks of study money.
"We're all addicted to something." If 1 in 10 addicts are ever going to stay sober, I think it's almost exactly the same psychological forces that dictate the 1 in 10 smart, empathetic, motivated, do-types to break from their internal dialogue and attempt to pair or match it with someone else. Although, the odds are even lower, because the pool of people is a tenth of the addict pool. I personally know 6, and the efforts we've made so far are still routinely undermined by "life," be it mental health concerns, or undermining and resentments within our own families. I should be flipping my next house, or seeing dozens of clients for a more-than-merely-living wage, or franchising my coffee shop, or rubbing elbows with all the rich successful types who appreciated my insight and enthusiasm at the prospect of getting them to write their own book.
But I'm not doing any of that. I'm here, alone, with the cats, dreading my easiest remote work day tomorrow. I put in a ton of job applications, when I could not get too distracted by the amount of spam email sign-ups and dead deceptive listings. I'm mourning the ease with which I carried my shoulders. The contrast has been striking as I'm thrust back into everyone's drama and emptiness crying out for daddy to make them all feel better. I know why your god flooded everything and let his kid get tortured. He didn't understand the suffering is built in to whether or not it's your creation.
If you're not creating something that constantly rediscovers gratitude and power and connection, you die. You crave death, turn the craving into something noble and worthy of worship, and retool the whole of conscious existence into variations of your death-cult thinking under the instantiated delusion that you won't suffer or will one day achieve eternal bliss.
Your god is a lie, and always has been. The story you've been telling yourself is full of more lies than you know how to identify because you're unwilling to do the work. You're sacrificing your potential, but you can't really conceive of your potential. You're silent until you're selfishly claiming to want empathy or to vent more than excuse yourself. Your god, be it magic sky-daddy rushing in to eventually make it all better, or other self-serving narrative about your value, intelligence, or perspective, it isn't a fart in the vacuum if someone isn't there to sniff, remark, and return fire.
My idea for "fixing things" or "changing the world" is to create $15-$20K versions of pop-up sustainable spots where anyone part of the initiative learns how to build, grow, and share in ways they're not used to, but feel better than what they're giving now. It's sustained via regular jobs, menial or otherwise, that we work to transition out of, if we want to, through capital experiments, or self-sustaining practices. You need land, not unlike mine, tools, not unlike what I already have, time, which we have considerably more of than we wish to believe, and some hard conversations about where to set up, who is responsible for what, budgeting, time-delays, catastrophes, time-frames, points of discomfort and sacrifice, and measurable metrics of success. I don't think you have to be errant dreamy hippies fucking off and flirting with tetanus.
I think every worry you bring to the table is valid, or you wouldn't have been invited to it at all. I think I've had every faith in what you're capable of for as long as I've been bitching, talking, or inviting. I think in the next 6 years, if I'm out of debt, if I'm working some job that doesn't make me feel hollow and angry, and if I've accumulated every thing, hobby, or skill I've earnestly thought to acquire, I have an extremely small expectation I will get there alone, and whether it's me and one other person, or me and a dozen, I know how I'm trending amidst the dumpster fire. Do you? Is what you're really after the mild incremental indulgences that accompany playing safe and selfish?
If I had all the money in the world tomorrow, the work remains the same. Do we have a clear enough idea of what it is? It's not look for daddy. It's not merely bemoan circumstances. It's not to get to every show. It's not compound self-serving narratives. It's not to worship the word "but." It's not to bitch to each other about how irrational or unfair or unsympathetic everyone in charge or around us is. It's not to get stuck in guilt for the wasted time or energy. It's not to voraciously charge towards idealistic exit strategies. It's not to pretend we're more emotionally stable or capable than we've proven so far. Whatever country you try to escape to is on the same doomed planet. Whatever job you take has a built-in bureaucracy. Your body is super acquainted with injuries and energy levels by now. Check back with me in 6 years, I guess.
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