Sometimes I'm tempted to regard myself as just flagrantly "ungrateful." It's not the right word, but it starts with that idea. I'm going to avoid citing every horrible circumstance that is or has happened that isn't happening to me. I'm trying to hone in on a good way to describe this sense of myself.
I'm constantly thinking about, or bitching about, the discrepancy between our descriptions and actions as it pertains to "reality." That theme goes back to some of my first blogs ever. I wanted "on the level" people who could 2+2. As an adult, I get to see the ongoing consequences of that discrepancy, often what feels like outright betrayal, play out with sickening regularity. My go-to phrase bemoaning all that "doesn't make sense."
Take my foray into attempting to be a "content" creator. To me, it's a sad and pathetic desperate stab in lieu of just…you know…saving children, or being a counselor, or working on my sustainability and off-grid goals. Wouldn't it be grand if each day I woke up secure in both my finances, focus, and sense of what the future could hold? But, for nearly my entire existence, that's a considerable fairy-tale more than registering as "realistic."
My parents had debt. They had debt so long that it was taken out of what my dad was to inherit from I believe my grandpa dying. The only period I wasn't in debt was when I was doing drug studies, and the second I went to buy a thing to live in, that was gone. But, I was also renting and at the mercy of ever-shit roommates, so the debt was on it's way or slowly churning through my resources in one form or another. Mortgages have always sounded insane to me. Student loans. Car payments. I have a very unpretty car. I own that car.
Debt is reality. It's a chosen one through millions of betrayals each day. My "ingratitude" for whatever comforts or freedom I enjoy is born of having my face rubbed in that fact indefinitely. The fact that I can pit my remote sense of joy/engagement against whether or not I should maintain a certain debt ratio is insane. I haven't' gone to 135 shows every year of my life. I've been in debt the whole time well before I decided it should count towards invaluable memories and experiences.
In a world that made sense, I would just be able to do good. I would just use my skill as a talker, people would like me, I'd have earned respect, and I'd use my money to see shows, eat, and live a fairly straight-forward and peaceful enough life with my little dad-projects and hobbies and series of forays with divorcées until I died.
But no. I, with all my "potential," and in like some constant mockery or that ill-begotten spite of my work so far am left to contemplate if I'd rather Door Dash, gamble on a YouTube venture, or break myself over some new miserable nonsense job that wastes and exploits me in lieu of at least making it remote. And it's not so much that there's some expectation of "sympathy," as though I have zero awareness of how fucked everyone and everything is. It's that I feel like I'm the only one who wants more.
My mind thought of the union pushes. It's all good news. These pussies aren't fighting for enough. Our politics aren't demanding enough as we slowly warm up to the idea of not having crypt keepers continue to defy nature. I wonder if I'm not demanding enough of myself, but then just watched myself spend 30 hours aggressively digesting and working to try and escape my paradigm with something "new" or "different" or that challenged me, until I found it's failure point and contradictions and deceptions and source of its power….the same mythological, "This isn't so bad!" nonsense of seemingly every fucking thing else. Glossing over details. Excusing away the negligence. And pretending like you didn't just lie to my fucking face and charge me for the privilege of listening to you!
It's bad. It's real bad in a lot of real serious ways. I just finished Hyperbole and a Half (I know, many years after it was popular), but Allie Brosh ends her book by realizing she's as bad as she is in spite of her wishes and stories and confusions as to the consequences of being bad. It's hard for her to not be selfish or violent or judgmental. When she's practicing otherwise, it's hard. It's just a bad core that needs active attention and decision-making to rise to the level of author and accountable fleetingly-normal and respectable person.
It's bad when I can graduate, work the kind of jobs I do, work the kind of hobbies and life goals I do, work harder and longer on random shit over 2 days than most might on their primary occupation over weeks, and I'm feeling like a fucking chump. I'm sitting and spinning on the existential dick that claimed my asshole before I even knew it was there.
We all fucking deserve better, not just and especially me. What the fuck is there to lose by trying to do better? Is the fucking story of this shit heap played out enough? It's like "cancel culture." We all got scared there for a minute. Now Matt Rife is on the rise. The zeitgeist is over it. Let people say "retarded" and "fat shame" and just generally understand what a joke is before they fuck off back to their life, right? We figured that shit out, why not something more important?
I found myself envying Planet Earth documentarians and photographers. Do you have any idea how insane that is? Fuck the jungle. Fuck the mosquitos. Fuck the diseases in different countries. Why the fuck did I want to trade places with the asshole chasing the chimps? I mean, chimps are cool, but fuck chasing a goddamn chip around the jungle.
But their lives have snapped into focus. The mission is clear. He's doing "good" just by being there arguing with a primate and contemplating ways to get them to accept his presence in their tree. Should all of our missions be so clear? Should we so reliably be able to trust our task and the payout? Chimp guy is at the mercy of what the animals want to do that day. He's free. Me? You? We have to fist fuck ourselves with the most selfish and greedy cunts of our species, every day, in big ways and small, no matter how much we bleed.
Oh, wait, EXCEPT WE FUCKING DON'T, AND WE DO SO ANYWAY.
We take our very nasty and guilty feelings over what our gaping asshole looks like, and then proceed to fistfuck ourselves, the people we claim to care about, and keep fucking until we're positive the future gets as thoroughly fucked as we've been. We class it up and call it "generational trauma." We play act like anywhere is safe. You think it's a mental health crisis and opioid epidemic? HA! Our very concept of mental health is defined by its pathological norms. We don't even know what "better" is. It's not a real registering feeling for nearly everyone. There's no motivation, no direction, and in that forever irony, even those who profess to help you get there don't have a fucking clue.
Every single thing I own or do is in perpetual standing of some kind of defiance first. It's precariously placed, waiting to crash and break or get taken away. If I can't pay my bills, I get to imagine selling my cars. After 20 years and helping thousands or specializing in areas almost no one is equipped to deal with, I need to stay on my toes. I can't get lazy and think I've earned a sense of security or deserve a savings account and multiple streams of income.
It's a fucking joke. It's a fucking scam. It's all one giant diffuse lie that seeps into every. fucking. thing. It doesn't get better. We're not going to change. I'll never be able to "just play" my instruments and sing the song on my heart because I'll never get a chance to stop screaming.
If I won the lottery tomorrow, "reality" would still be fucked. I'd still be trying to work all these broken levers and I'd start to learn just how useless money truly is. The bills would be paid, sure. I'd have more "fun" useless shit and set goals like seeing 365 shows one year, but "it" would still be fundamentally broken. My "best friend" would still be a story of Shakespearean betrayal. My extended family would still be selfish cunts. My brother would still be whatever weird state he's in about me. I'd still be alone out here or wherever I chose to go. The things I wished to fight, like DCS, would be because they are still acting horribly.
I don't own my life. It's waiting for me at the company store. I check it in and out at the mercy of their needs or demands. My time is spent thinking about how they're gonna fuck me next. It's spent praying my car doesn't break down. It's spent dreading the next empty hopeless conversation I have about my next work environment. It's doing the math on the money I don't have to do the project I'm perfectly well capable of exercising my ability otherwise. I can sit here all day and bang the drums, or read my comics, or watch shitty Star Trek, and it's all just grains of sand ticking away until the inevitable newest actualization of the death I'm embedded in.
How can you be ungrateful for something that isn't yours? I don't rule out the role of chance or the infinite creativity you must explore with your agency. Those do very little to assuage choking on the thick atmospheric bullshit. The world is horrible. You're horrible. I'm horrible. It's just not in the way you've baked into your self-serving story. You have to figure this shit out and fight it. You fucking have to. We're going to be stuck here for eternity otherwise.
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