[1099] Choo Choose

The last few days I've been in the space of "trying to persuade myself." It's becoming increasingly obvious that is the main pipe between my otherwise chill sensibilities and any amount of anxiety. I don't want to do what I don't want to do. I don't like the anticipation of what I instinctively imagine it's going to feel like. I think it's the same mechanism behind why you don't want to jump straight into the pool, even if you'll get immediately acclimated, and it doesn't hurt, and it shortens the "suffering."

I'm on unemployment. I've never been on unemployment before, even if I've certainly qualified for it. I have almost no bills and it's not nearly enough. But that's not even my problem. My problem is that it's a humiliating series of reminders about the state of your existence and what your literal state thinks about you.

You'll get it cancelled or penalized if you don't show them you've kept a record of the jobs you've applied to. You have to file every week, inputting the same information you've put in before, but just because they're cunts, they want your finger to slip so they can claim it doesn't match last week. You have to drive to a center an hour away for an hour and a half meeting that ensures you know how to put your resume together, submit cover letters, and get all of the paperwork in order that show you're not just "leaching" off the state.

I've graduated college, opened businesses, literally built my house, and worked for 20 different job environments both blue and white collar from literally scrubbing toilets to handling child removals. I've never been paid enough. I've always worked to concurrently create an environment I hope can directly compete with the exploitative asks and standards of what's otherwise considered "normal" or "inevitable." I paid to not only have my resume updated and professionalized for modern horrifying auto-deny machines, but have submitted dozens of applications and invested in grant-writers and fundraisers after establishing my addiction counseling company as a nonprofit.

So tell me, state of Indiana, what do you think you can teach me about how to pull myself up by my own bootstraps?

I have to create a little profile, fill out some forms, waste time and gas to play their game. Conversely, I need one grant to hit. If it's higher than $10K I'll have at least paid back what I've invested to get them submitted and keep the lights on the rest of the year. I'm one celebratory email away from having achieved what I've been after business wise for many years. My personal expenses, while still higher than what unemployment covers, hover around $10,000 a year. I don't need much to be able to offer free services and keep the bills paid.

It's not more complicated than it has to be. The idea of, "What do you really want?" has been floating around the media I've been listening to. I want the work I do and time I spend to not be "trying to persuade myself." That isn't my time at that point. That's time being hijacked by something I perceive to be a waste or unreasonable. It's why I, at least, would ever "procrastinate." I don't struggle to focus or stay organized. I struggle to swallow and remain pressed up against bullshit.

I noticed the longer I sat alone and marathoned/organized my TV shows and fired back up the video game systems that I don't clench my jaw. My shoulders don't get tight. That sense of dread doesn't kick in until I'm facing the prospect of this condescending paperwork. I can slash pirates all night, predict plot points on my shows, or play the same riffs indefinitely, and I never feel like I feel googling the address of some bullshit company to prove to no one in particular that I'm worthy of basic subsistence. I don't feel like shit paying money I don't have for people I'm investing in to help my business grow. I don't feel hollow reading code and policy to make sure I don't fuck up the taxes or forget a form for my company.

I'm not "shiny." I'm not the fake bullshit that the brain-dead world pretends to find convincing or indicative of competence. You know why I would spend $1000 or more to have you write a grant for me? Because I'm paying you to lie like other people need to hear. I can't do it long enough without giving up, letting my hatred seep through, or my exhaustion make me look like a pleading beggar. I don't want the background muzac on an inoffensive background and script telling you how effective our approach is compared to the other guys. You know why what I do does or doesn't work? It's just fucking real.

You either set a goal that's specific, or you don't. You either dig into the vague language you use to describe your "love" or your feelings towards difficult circumstances, or you don't. You either believe you want to get "completely off everything" and you work through the psychological and bodily pain to do so, or you don't. You can do so alone, or you can do so with someone who understands the struggle of delineating and committing to tough decisions. That's it. That's all it is. Over and over and over and over and over again.

I can whine and complain and pretend to negotiate with the universe about how unfair and ridiculous my circumstances are. I can pretend any one of us "deserves" anything. I can cite a hundred reasons any one of my decisions might look questionable or unreasonable. You know what I do next? I try anyway. I spend the money. I show up. I work. I complain about how unprepared I was to deal with -30 degree weather under my two heated blankets, sandwiched between cats with a heated vest in the mail, utilizing the time to catch-up on subtitled movies.

Fundamentally, we have a very bad sense of what it is we "really" want or need. When we arrive at a relative conclusion, there's no guarantee that we're correct. There's little to no conversation about how to approach or discover this dilemma. I had to write for years before I recognized I want/need my time more than money. I wanted a "floor" to work from more than convenience. Those two sentiments alone guide my decision-making in major ways. I want to express myself creatively more than simply to amass "stuff." I want to spend time with anyone I care about doing just about anything before I'll pick an activity I can do alone.

I am standing deep within a well of my creation regarding discovered and cheered for desires. I defend my perspective line by line every time I get that sense of impending doom that suggests I'm lost in the forest losing my footing on the tree I'm climbing. It's work. It's time invested in a specific direction regarding what makes the most sense big and small decision wise with regard to what I profess to care about. I'm trying to shed one of the hardest taken-for-granted obligations we impose on ourselves that exists. I'm trying to reconnect to the dignity and ownership of my work. I'm trying to match the ideal to a practically felt reality. That shit is fucking hard for an infinite list of reasons outside my own hang-ups or perspective pitfalls.

Eventually I think the work will speak for itself. I don't "believe" it will like there's something magical about it. I'm literally the work speaking for itself every time I do. I'm sitting within my previously achieved goals. You can measure my progress day-to-day, week-to-week, year-to-year. I get more time and I use it to play more. I get a more stable floor, so I make balanced gambles in service to higher ideals and dreams. The tips of my fingers are back to catcher's mitt status. Anyone who even hints at the next show to see can assume I'm down or are invited in turn to what I'm doing.

And I know what's next. If we get a $5K or a $50K grant, I know the emails and calls I'm making that day. If we spend the next year getting turned down everywhere I attempt to invest in, I know how often I'll need to spend on the road Door Dashing or how much psychological shit I'll need to eat to take up something hourly. I know what kind of people I'll need to find to translate all of my cunty bluntness into roses people like to sniff regarding their own righteousness. I have over a dozen resumes of people who've expressed excitement at the prospect of working in service to our cause. I have several thousands left of damage I can do to the credit cards, or chunks of my land to sell, or pictures of my butthole for OnlyFans.

You might not need a therapist or counselor if you've been riding this train of creative disposition and accountable practice for decades. The vast majority of us haven't. And we don't even realize we haven't because it's normal to go with the flow and follow prescribed paths. It's normal to not kick up dust and fight and work through the incredibly shitty circumstances on offer. Our sympathies blind and comfort us just as much as any punishment. We are pummeled into submission, suffer indefinitely, and cope in any way we possibly can find. If it's with drugs, we then break the fuck out of the only tool that can reorient the approach and frame. If it's through endless busy-ness and faux-obligations, we rehearse distraction and disembodiment until it becomes normal.

One email. I'm one email away from having established a new floor. I'm one decently-sized grant for an amount of money some organization may not even sneeze at away. I'm a handful of decently-monied individuals partnering up. I'm a few hires of "This has deeply touched me" individuals away. The train is moving. Which one are you on?

[1098] Get What You Need

I want to talk about what I hope is the near future and this sensibility that feels old and familiar.

I'm the kind of person who would confidently assert, "I always tend to get my way." This was bolstered by a consistently demonstrated ability and willingness to do the work behind whatever that desire might be. It's a forgone conclusion that I'll spend the money, make the drive, deal with the weather, learn the skill, or reach out into an infinite sea of cold-calling waters to find someone to help me figure something out. I also feel like the range of my desires has been fairly-well tempered. I don't want obscene amounts of money, control, or pseudo "influence." I don't want a tired notion of power that builds on people's weakness or resentments. I don't want things in ways that need to deprive you of getting what you want as well.

The "bigger" I make my wants, the more glaring my social and financial circumstances become apparent. Everyone I know is poor and poorly connected. Everyone I know is busy, tired, distracted, or well-rehearsed in their memorized cliches for justifying conservative complacency. It has been that way since I ever voiced desires or dreams that went outside a norm. Even something as relatively straightforward as the party house got turned into a piece of resentment. Not because everyone wasn't drunk, high, fucking around, or trying to have fun, but because, at bottom, it wasn't their idea. They wouldn't have done it without my drive and desire. People love to be along for the ride when they get all the benefits, and flip immediately when something goes wrong, or it feels like work, or shines a light on their behavior.

I've never made the genuine investment to plug into the "bigger" world. I haven't hired the $100+/hr 30-year veteran to put me in contact with "the people who do your sort of thing." I haven't had the credentials or experience to really market myself in that most pleasant feel-good language about what I can accomplish. Regardless of my work ethic in blue-collar or white-collar realms, it's turned into a thing that has generated resentment and targeting and taking for granted. And no one's interested in your struggle or potential, so if you've spent 15 or 20 years killing it in areas people don't understand or don't find interesting, you're nothing.

Well, addiction is hot and going to stay that way as the miserable organizations in place trying to "reduce harm" compound the issue. Nonprofits are their own playing field of those good-looking stories and sympathies people dwell in independent of any real attention paid to precisely how the money gets used if the numbers and marketing reflect the right vibes. That's incredibly sad and ridiculous, for the record. I have no intention of wasting or playing games with donations or grants. But you read often enough, like super pacs, the nonsense people get up to.

I need $10,000 a year to live "okay." You're considered a "micro" nonprofit if you play with less than $1,000,000 a year. When I put up a post looking for a professional fundraiser, I get people with incredible resumes and dollar amounts I can barely conceive of how to use the money in a single year. If I pay them thousands to land tens of thousands I'm still wildly comfortable and free to be up and running working without looking over my shoulder. I don't have to "believe" in myself or my "mission." I just have to run with the basic boring fact of people's self-interest and financial stake in the success of my company. I have the leeway to offer/pay them more than the companies they may have already raised millions for.

I get those pieces in place, a major chunk of my long-term puzzle project is taken care of. For a good period of time, I felt like I had kind of…peaked? Mind you, I'm still first-world poor, spend nearly all of my time alone, and haven't taken the time to do things like properly insulate my house, but the major goal was to have my home altogether. It was made of dozens of smaller goals like getting water, electricity, drywall, air conditioning, extra rooms built, getting a driveway, fence line, and amassing the tools to do future improvements better and faster.

I wanted that for years, and now I've had it for years, so the wants started moving into entertainment and indulgences. I've been to 200 music or comedy shows in the last 2 years. I've upped the fanciness of the toys I buy like my computer (arguably more a need than a want with how old my last one was), instruments, or video game systems. There will always be something "new" or "next" to buy, and you don't need a degree in introspection to know that no amount of crap you buy is going to scratch the depths of a need for meaningful interactions itch.

Where do I find meaning? In spite of the resentment and blame, I like being the energy in the room or providing the space. Whether it's the space to get fucked up, or create and experiment, or to breathe and reflect. I like seeing people actually relax after talking with me. I like hearing excitement in someone's voice because I phrased something in a way they haven't heard of before. I like hearing what someone has accomplished because I got to play cheerleader cluing them into the awesome shit they did that no one is willing to acknowledge or grant them.

I reflexively want to help. I know the difference between being an appeaser and a real attempt to fix a problem. It's why I've been able to "peak" and feel stuck treading water for so long looking for a way to get to the next level that wasn't thousands more in credit card debt. It's not that I wasn't aware I could go look for these hopefully better connected and experienced people. I just had to exhaust previous attempts and narratives that hadn't concluded yet. I've only been a nonprofit for 3 months. I've talked about becoming one since day one. It's not cheap, and I hadn't learned nor been fucked enough to just start as one.

The years-long process I've never had to have "faith" in though. That's another big part of it. My "dreams" have rarely been that. I know it's going to take months or years longer than I want it to. I know the budget is going to be off by 30 to 50% depending on how desperate I am to get something moving "now." The lived experience is in my bones for how slowly "professionals" communicate or respond to things. I don't have to hesitate in knowing you are better suited to be the grease and point of connection because my exhausted blunt autistic ass is going to negligently burn something that it doesn't have to.

I don't know how else to really put it. Right now feels "fuller." That "Yes, of course, I expect this next" feeling is rounded out in a way that it hasn't been for a while. I didn't feel like this when I hired the junk insurance empaneling company. I didn't feel like this getting in contact with these loose "connections doing something similar" or who "might be able to help me." Literally, none of that shit has ever panned out. Every single time I've taken the reigns, spent the money, had the conversations, or "did the thing" we've made a little money, or upped our presence, or been turned on to something more explicitly relevant to do or ask for. Why should I think this time will be any different? It's just the next bite of a gigantic meal.

There are thousands of incredibly rich/robust entities doing all sorts of crazy to decent things. The money is out there. The problems never go away. I'm trying to occupy a frame and ethic throughout. I think that's incredibly important to state, restate, and build into every conversation about this. Anyone can raise money, go through motions, look nice and proper, and functionally or practically destroy and betray everything they claim to be about. It takes a very particular and consistent kind of cunt to say, "This is the standard regardless." I want to be that cunt. It's how I get, and will hopefully continue to give, what is needed for a meaningful existence more than what I merely want to distract me from how fucked we all are.

[1097] This Is Only A Test

I want to dig a little deeper into an old theme that's snapped into focus a bit recently.

Framing. How you frame your circumstances feels like it's taken heightened importance to me. You're never "right" or especially "perfect" in your perspective. It's the first fundamental mistake people make - believing your own bullshit too deeply. What makes it "too" deeply? Your words don't match your actions, your phrasing manifests as broad cliches, and you let the consequences of feeling stunted, handicapped, and terrible play out more than not.

I was listening to Sam Harris and Chris Anderson, of TED talks, recently. They seemed overly concerned with how to enlighten the rich techno-dorks to invest and do good after the Sam Bankman-Fried chaos around effective altruism. It felt detached yet familiar to me. They want to embolden the wealthiest to try to make large impacts. I try to get the hapless catastrophizing souls in my orbit to do literally anything practical and consistent to change how they talk about their circumstances. I haven't needed a billionaire to inspire me to get the land, try to be in business for myself, or defend my perspective on the nature of exploitative capitalism.

When your frame is actively cultivated for you through the media and algorithms, it's a wonder more people don't feel obligated and incensed to push back more aggressively. One of the reasons I write is to look for how often, and if it's too much, I'm blaming some broad conception of the world or sliver of history for why I have or haven't acted in some way. All things being true about "capitalism," "fascism," "greed," "laziness," "the world," "stupid people," etc. where's my time, money, and effort going? Am I 35 dreaming about owning land one day, or am I 8 years into the project? Am I letting my jaded anxiety prevent me from investing in ongoing creative ways to sustain an effort to do good social work? Or have I spent $2000 to become a nonprofit and hire people to fundraise and write grants?

I've been as "lazy" and "directionless" and "bored" and "lonely" and "wanton in my spending" and "disorganized" as I've ever felt or been the last couple months. And yet, somehow, I've reignited my capacity to be an exceptional guitar player, achieved nonprofit status, hired people to submit grants, done more squats and completed more books than I have in years, won a court case, and have continued to build, at least 35 so far, more shows into my future to look forward to. A majority of my focused actions speak to my values and what I continue to want for my future, even if there's an infinite void of space between what feels like "progress" or "hope."

From the moment I uttered my plans or dreams for the land, I've fielded dozens of what I consider "empty" sentiments of, "Oh my God! Me too! I want to do…."whatever it is that inevitably calls for a garden, raising animals, focusing on artistic pursuits, and fundamentally eschewing the grind or rat race or money for its own sake. I hear it constantly. They follow so-and-so on Tik Tok. They have a Pintrest dream wall. They know of some land in the best location and their friend is totally going to help them once their job… Like, I have to stop myself from getting judgey and condescending when I think about it. But it's the cliche. You dream and do nothing, because the story is meant to placate taking responsibility and sacrificing.

I don't even think that's a particularly blunt or cunty way to state it. The habit is to begin listing current or other responsibilities. This is done as though every remotely functional adult doesn't have similar conditions they're working under. It's also the time to dip into an infinite list of "what ifs." This is done to obscure more fundamental obligations that get ignored or dismissed because the metaphorical equivalent of a screaming child needs to be attended to indefinitely, so all of your questions about whether or not it's vaccinated or well-fed are kind of, "Inappropriate, don't you think?"

I think the more I developed a habit of describing every moment as "both and" all at once, the more I discovered what it even meant to take responsibility for my actions, words, or ideas about how or whether to achieve something. It's always complete shit, and always amazing and as good as it can ever get, all the time at once. "You" then consist of your choice to frame that reality. Every moment you drop the frame, you're at probabilistic whims. Every moment you defensively assert the privilege and power of your infinitely compelling snapshot frame, you'll undermine your capacity to escape the hollow space it carves for your existence.

I know I'm going to spend the rest of my life hearing people's empty professions and appreciation for what I'm attempting to do or am doing. I know it has nothing to do with me. I know that what I hope to achieve has nothing to do with them either. For the sake of my project, I have to return to the 3 things I listed initially. Do my actions align with my words and values? Am I more shitty than contented? Can I offer an informed and comprehensive view of what I'm doing, or can I sweep it all under a cliche that's wildly too positive or negative?

I don't want to be miserable. I don't want to act happier or better off than I am. The lesson is to be flexible, comprehensive, and consistent. Bitch and moan, but then go do something about it. Grieve, and then throw a party. Cite all the reasons not to, and match and exceed them with what it takes to do the thing. I've never been more convinced at how aggressively we get in our own way than as I've achieved more and more of what I want, and can't even give it away. Because it's not up to me how and whether you allow your perception to receive, accept, and work with what it takes to get the same things. No one gave me land. I've offered it for free since the moment I've had it, and one person has chanced creating something on it in 8 years. I got my fucking spine tapped twice to afford it in the first place.

Everything I get or pursue is in service to something larger. I didn't want land, per se, I wanted affordable stability. I wanted to play and experiment and make big fires. I wanted to pursue entrepreneurial ideas and own the tools and learn the ways to be more sustainable. Do you really want your little cabin and a garden? I bet the dream stops there. Do you want to exercise? Because that's gardening. Do you want to sell the food or get better at making healthy meals? Do you want to genuinely practice some craft or hobby? Do you want to use your extra funds to come to more shows with me or travel? You don't actually know what you want, so you stick with whatever you have. I want a constantly growing list of things, experiences, chances, and options. I know my effort isn't wasted, and I know how I feel before, during, and after I fit another piece of what I want into my perspective.

I've said it before, but I'd argue most of my clients don't struggle with "addiction," broadly conceived, but with their self-conception. Once you get the cravings at bay, you are presented with the obligation to form the story of your self worth. You have to own your past decision making, figure out your true motivations, navigate complicated emotional ties with people who might, in the long run, get you killed if you don't break away. You're not hopelessly at the mercy of your drug/s of choice. You're at the mercy of yourself. Do you accept the contradictions and work to prove them as compliments to iterating states of being? Most people most of the time, implicitly or otherwise, say definitively, "No." Cue the excuses and apologists.

Your problem, when less explicit than heroin, is the same as everyone's. It's existential. Why are you here? Is there a moment you decided to live for something, yourself, your values, your truth, or are you flailing at the end of dozens of stories about how you "should" be? You need to get married and settle down. You must work (x) amount of hours at a respectable job and play nice with every emotionally abusive and soul-draining relationship you've ever been offered. Take on school, home and car debt. Have kids, say the right things, but stay silent most often. Heed the advice of the most willful or talkative and who you, incorrectly, perceive as most powerful. Give it up to a god. Grind. Love or hate this or that. Buy now.

[1096] Your Turn

Whether I wanted to or not, the moment calls for writing. My friend and business partner’s wife was in a bad car accident. As of this writing, whether or not she is alive is uncertain. When these kinds of tragedies hit, for me, certain things snap into focus. Major questions about our working assumptions rise straight to the top.

It’s freezing. Whatever else I may discover to say while writing this, most of the country is cold as fuck and I’ve been particularly so with my poorly insulated fort house. The roads aren’t great, and I’ve had just enough slippage while driving my country roads to remind me of the standing precarity of winter. I’ve slowed down to let several, bolder idiots, pass me, invariably in Jeeps, “4-wheel drives,” or SUVs. I’ve had enough scares and slides off the road to build the extra 20 minutes into my patience.

Many people drive as though black ice, hills, or other drivers aren’t a thing. I’ve dipped my toes into a few days of Door Dashing, and I swear the general behavior of cars on the road is hard to believe. I’ve been a delivery boy in the past. I’ve driven a cab. I’ve driven all over the state of Indiana in service to visit supervision and my DCS responsibilities. I’ve spent an obscene amount of time behind the wheel, and I’ve never felt more under threat than I do today. I also watched a documentary recently that seemed to back up my instinct showing an increase in accidents and death due, in part, to disingenuous oversized car designs.

We all, myself included, treat driving as “just another thing.” We’re in the U.S. You have to drive everywhere for anything. For all the people who instinctively say “Well you’re so far away from everything!” about my living conditions have never timed themselves in traffic heading to the mall or work that’s “just up the road.” It’s the kind of thing you build instincts about that you don’t even realize unless someone points them out to you. It’ll speak to your budget, how much time you think you do or don’t have, jobs you can take, or if you have a truck, things like moving tasks and preparing for winter by weighing down the bed.

It would take a major catastrophe or revolution to get you to think differently about your life in a way that genuinely considered not having a car. You’d have to be plugged into a system with robust, safe, and clean transportation or where most of your needs were within walking distance. If you hit a high financial status you could ensure someone was transporting you or transporting things to you. The benefits and pitfalls of car ownership are a quasi-universal accepted norm. We accept the pollution, how many people die, the unfair and unreasonable costs of insurance, and the insane price tags for the concurrent status and head turns.

We don’t imagine every time we hop in our car that it might be for the last time. It might even be considered a kind of pathological thought pattern to concern ourselves with that thought too deeply or too often. A tire popping at the exact wrong time or a swerving truck or drunk speed runner might be modern analogies for the dangerous animal lurking in the bushes waiting to pounce and eat us. If you’ve watched any nature documentary, the second the prey escapes, it’s back to life as usual. We might have considerably better odds of surviving our encounters, but we falter through the same slack in our awareness, bad lack, or along lines of thinking that take a world of things for granted.

In and of itself, to take something for granted is simply how we operate. Your brain makes shortcuts to condense and map the world. If you haven’t died in a car accident for 35 years, you’ve got tens of thousands of times and hours suggesting today won’t be the day. It doesn’t mean you forgo your seatbelt, or that you make it a point to venture out in the shittiest of shit weather, but it does mean that you may have drifted into a space that doesn't keep your guard up. Combine this baseline disposition with any other thing that’s going on that day like stressors, a phone call, bad weather, you’re tired, the kids screaming in the back, etc. and it's a wonder we’re not crashing more often than we already do.

How do we treat the crash when it occurs? It’s almost a statistical inevitability, at least as much as heart disease or cancer. Are we left in shock? Did we believe it was a real possibility all along, or are we paradoxically now demanded to wrestle with a previously inconceivable reality? In fact, there are decades of industry and oversight designed to make thinking about such a reality increasingly hard to do. What did we think about our car, or loved ones in it, before the crash? Here is where my sensibility of the world comes to a head.

I think about death constantly. I don’t do 90% of the things I do unless I’m asking myself what example I’d wish to set if I died tomorrow. I’m asking myself if I’ll give a shit about a decision 60 years from now presuming I’ll make it to 100. I’m entertaining contingency plans for when the ideas or people I attempt to invest in inevitably flake and metaphorically die. I think about why you do or don’t choose to be bold and direct and honest as though you have forever to find a space that you can share and celebrate or draw strength from. When I think about my friend’s wife potentially dying, I’m worried for him, because I think he’s afflicted with the same assumptions almost everyone carries - that we’ll live forever.

I can’t help but to speak to reason ten million I hate religion. It’s an emotionally salient training mechanism to pretend that right now doesn’t matter. And every time it betrays you or its adherents betray when they allegedly believe, like magic, it turns into an excuse to double down and profess that much harder. I can’t look away from the hundreds of believers I’ve witnessed losing someone who just don’t seem convinced they’re gonna see that loved one again one day. It’s not in their face and eyes. It’s as if every wasted opportunity while they were alive becomes a basin of infinite guilt. Should you not rejoice knowing they made it “home” before you? Aren’t you relieved that cosmic/karmic justice came for your bubble? Of course you aren’t.

We want it both ways. We want to feel good when our support systems support us and we want to feel good about taking for granted and taking advantage of those systems. We want the comfort of our good nature and good deeds to overrule the alligator capitalizing on our innocent drink. We act as though the ambivalence of nature or existence isn’t the thing to contend with. We act like we’re not in a constant state of flux, neither good nor bad, and none of us gets out alive.

My friend is as hard-working and self-sacrificing of a person as I’ve ever met. As if anyone “deserves” tragedy, he’s not the one you’d wish it on. He’s still under a spell of bad assumptions. It manifests as stress his doctor has warned him about. It manifests as a kind of trolley losing more and more control as it barrels down the rails. It’s still on the rails, but no one on board believes they're going to survive the dramatic stop. I worry that whether or not she survives, he isn’t in the place to take the example as a cue to slow down and smell the roses. How can you? How can you think that in the wake of tragedy, or losing the love of your life, that it’s the time to root through reasons to keep going? There’s “romantic” schools of thought that would powerfully assert he should follow her.

One of the themes of many of my clients who struggle with addiction was an inability to effectively grieve. People they lost years ago might as well have been yesterday. Every year around the time the person died was difficult for the months leading up to it and for weeks or months after. They were essentially stuck in the pain and confusion of what that person represented for them. It’s easy to get stuck in those places when you’re lost in the story of your relationships versus the practice and exercise of them. How do you resolve something that, maybe in a deeply important way, doesn’t actually exist save the story you’re telling about it? What if you don’t even realize that until the story is ripped away from you?

[1095] Push

I truly haven't been able to silence my brain for the last 4 or 5 blogs and they've all been striking chords with me that I've been searching for for a while. Today, I want to lay out thoughts related to next steps after being granted non-profit status. Just as with despair, I allow myself a touch of celebration and positive emotion, and now I need to return to center.

The first thing I think about is the cynicism involved with "helping" people. That's the game I get to play now that I can make it financially worthwhile to potential donors. I'm not necessarily knocking this because I think the systems exist the way they do for many reasons, but I do recognize that no one wants to give me money to counsel people or provide any real social service. Not that plainly. Not without strings attached. The giant corporate entities that purport to do what I do had zero interest in whether or not I was any good at my job, and the even larger entities that enable them don't either.

As a species that is hell bent on cultivating and believing stories about itself to combat all the troublesome evidence of our darker natures, the tool I have helps that story. That I practically get an increasing chance to actually get back to work means nothing to no one, and never will. I think this is a deep, bleedingly obvious, truth that most people need to accept regarding their better natures or even demonstrably good work. No one cares, but that's okay.

I literally now sit at the precipice of being able to offer "free" services. Whether or not you're as ambivalent to my effort or ability as everyone I've ever worked for, I'm personally interested and invested in showing and recording how much can be done when you cut out all the bullshit and bureaucracy between doing good and getting paid for it. I have a strong intuition about how I can blow up and impact the field upon connecting with those who share my understanding of the corrupted landscape and real potential for change.

I'm a grant away from being independent. I'm a, perhaps relatively small tax-deductible donation, away from being able to give someone support that they might otherwise not be able to afford to believe they are worth receiving. Every time I think about how hard it is to do that and still maintain my own life, it's hard not to think we need a biblical flood-level reset in how we've organized society. Especially because I've organized my entire life to be more than fairly comfortable on $5,000 to $10,000 a year depending on how much I drive or wish to eat out.

As excited as I am about the potential, I want the consequences of scale. I want people to feel it. I want to build a culture around what I'm doing. Long time readers will know that was a drum I beat a lot when I was living the culture in college. I want to impact the conversation on viral levels. I want money to shift in major ways towards people committed to doing things like I do. What feels "obvious" to me about how to strip away noise simply isn't to many people regardless of their good intentions.

I say how often your life can change in a moment. It's interesting to hear actors talk about the phone call for pivotal roles in their careers. Before they became a cultural icon, they were waiting tables or being really bad at some in-the-meantime job. But they were working. They kept auditioning. They kept the message "I'm an artist first" in mind. I try to continually remind myself in the same fashion that what I'm after has always been bigger and simpler than any headache along the way. I want shit to make sense. I want to show, by the numbers, by the method, the consequences of the right focus and continued work. That's it.

 
A couple days ago the work resulted in non-profit status. It represents the work of staying open and creative to exploring ways to run a company when a dozen routes over the last 2 years have proven intractably arduous. I think my head is in the right place because I'm excited about the prospect of more work. I'm excited at the idea of crafting the emails explaining what I made and how I operate. I'm excited to hear the relief in people's voices when they get a chance to help maintain their sanity and sobriety. The world is perfectly ambivalent and vicious, but also, you can choose to keep working with what you have to set the counter example. That's not a "brand" or a "lifestyle." It's a moment to moment choice. It's work. I'm one step closer to more fluidly embodying the consequences of that work.

[1094] Money, Please

It's time to, again, explore one of my most persistent gripes.

"Professional" "polite" bullshit

From the second we started selling our time instead of our expertise, the rotten heart of working together started pumping. You hand me an expertly crafted shoe, charge something equal to the amount of time, effort, and respect and knowledge you have for your craft and self then when I buy it, we both get to walk away with something mutually understood as valuable.

When I have to buy "hours," especially when I may be completely unfamiliar with what you're working on, it makes things incredibly difficult. There's no amount of conversation that's going to give me an intimate understanding of the work you're doing. I've seen dozens of episodes of "How It's Made" and leave just as dumb as when I entered.

I'm attempting to hire-out people to help me get my addiction counseling business running. Words like "marketing" and "promotion" and "content creation" are infinitely vague. "Lead generation" can mean people who have money that have used it as you want them to use it again, or it can mean a spreadsheet of mostly fax numbers and defunct organizations and information. I'm using Upwork to approach my task. One of the first people I hired, with the lowest hourly rate of the bunch, began racking up higher bills than anyone else.

When I hit pause so we could discuss more explicitly what she was working on, I received a "professionally defensive" diatribe that signaled to me it was time to part ways. From my perspective, she's made almost $400 to, incorrectly, toy with my website, change a few colors, not get me verified on Google My Business, and was starting to compile a list of "resources" in the area I'm attempting to expand beyond. Throughout our time together, she would claim to have accomplished something, but it didn't, and still hasn't, necessarily translated. Me asking to get granular or more detailed was not received well. My explicitly stating I don't wish to be paying for "googling it-"level work there is no great way to phrase differently when that's explicitly what you told me you were doing.

What makes the situation worth writing about is that when we had our initial Zoom call, it was a great conversation. I liked her vibe and understanding. I appreciated the template she provided to follow week to week. Her feedback from previous clients is at 100%. That suggests she's got a solid head on her shoulders and I could more-or-less give her the reigns to work as she sees fit.

Now, as I went through more of her feedback, it was from people with very small budgets for very different kinds of work, or unlimited budgets with probably the same lack of knowledge as me, but hopped on her ride and smiled politely for the duration. I have good reason to pause and ask questions. Especially when she appears to have moved on to a new task before completing the last on her little template. If I ask you to define the "funnel" you want us to create, "a funnel takes some time" is not a definition. It's an invitation to spend more money on something I don't understand and you're not defining.

In contrast, I have a high-dollar person who provided 500 previous donors to causes like mine. I have grant writers who've submitted grants, or compiled ones to apply for if/when we get the non-profit status. I've had copy-editors give me explicit notes to change certain wording or add things for SEO or that check-writers like to see. It's a night and day difference, so I don't feel unfair or unkind in levying critical feedback about where my debt is going.

The seething civility subtext I find exhausting. We don't fundamentally trust each other, and when we act like we do, we build in this drama and catastrophized feeling of betrayal if we get less than we'd hoped. I didn't say "Bitch, you're wasting my money!" Not even close. I said I don't need someone redundantly doing something and I don't have a deep understanding and appreciation for what's been done so far, or needs to happen next. If your instinct on that is to respond with anything less than, "Oh, well here's another way I can try to explain it, and would you like to confirm a new budget to (x)?" I don't feel I can trust you or you're hearing my concerns in good faith.

The polite professional bullshit obscures the route to self-respect and shared dignity in approaching work. I think the problems I can experience one-on-one only scale and become the reason large companies adopt the policies they do. Don't you want a mythology about family or caring about one another to prevent your people from scrutinizing their circumstances? Don't you want to pay "minimally" so that you're not bleeding funds in service to people who, on any given day, you might not have a remote clue what they're actually doing. On top of that, you know first hand your own behavior or the hundreds of people you've worked with, and nearly everyone is happy to get paid to do functionally nothing.

I'm genuinely confident in the work I do, particularly when it's for someone else or I've got something larger in mind that I'm trying to service. I'm not going to get defensive if you start questioning what I'm up to. I'm not going to get angry if you ask me for details. I'm not going to even flirt with popping off if you've already paid me!

 
I learn with every interaction what constitutes "professional" or "worth it" or why things, big or small, do or don't happen. I have severely underestimated my professionalism or capacity. Honestly, as I reflect, I've probably fucked myself and taken too many notes on what passes for professionalism and allowed myself to accept worse than I should have. This, of course, immediately runs up against, do I want it done well, or want it done at all? I've tried to stay cognizant of not desperately reacting from feeling trapped to move on "something" or in "any" direction for the sake of it.

It's the seedy insecure underbelly that triggers something in me. I don't want to adopt the same defensive place of the message I received. I want to believe in and acknowledge fellow professionals to hear and see the same things and work to find a shared space. Increasingly, I feel like this is a character thing that can only be born out over time. I think it's why companies that cultivate and pass on legacies from within tend to do better than appealing to, in theory, the "options" of the market. "It's so hard to find good help these days," is an aphorism for a reason. It's not just because people aren't paid enough, I can tell you that much.

[1093] Doom Forecasting

I'm confused again. I can string together a series of arguments or read a few books that provide reasonable explanations. I can look inside myself and explore how I arrive at "irrational" conclusions. It doesn't terminate into a sense of being that I can sit with and resolve. I'll start with the political climate.

I can't really understand a bigger difference between Trump and anything else you wish to state about a corrupted democrat or imperfect and failing democratic system.

I understand disillusionment. I understand being mis or deliberately ill-informed. I understand outrage, anger, and resentment. I understand tribalism. I understand "fuck it." I understand the desire to destroy. I understand the quiet desperation of being punished for your values or when you muster up the courage to advocate for yourself. I understand the exhaustion of working endlessly and feeling like I'm getting nowhere. I understand trauma. I understand the difficulties in translating or marketing a message. I understand the frustration of feeling stuck, targeted, and undermined. I understand being betrayed, isolated, and ridiculed or gossipped about. I understand being ignorantly proud and brazen and certain. I understand wanting to hurt yourself and the exhilaration that can come from doing so.

I don't understand persistently, and forthrightly, declaring moral bankruptcy.

I understand respecting certain cultural differences. I understand the differing relative weight the connotative impact of words can have. I understand the superficial contradictions of seemingly in-conflict value judgements. I understand the myopic subjectivity of preferences. I understand the in-built genetic predictable brain differences. I understand the myriad reasons one might be ambivalent about death, their own or anyone else's. I understand how pride manifests in who or where you came from.

I do not understand persistent personal denial.

I understand the "utility" or "pragmatism" of suppressing the truth broadly. I understand a pull or inclination to leave out details. I understand being plagued by a guilty conscience. I understand feeling like you don't have a choice. I understand feeling obligated to one thing at the expense of everything else. I understand how fragile an understanding of ourselves can be. I understand how compelling a desire to fit in or belong is. I understand the catastrophes that have been brought by "good intentions."

My head is a flutter. I've read an opinion article trying to explain to the "youth, who definitely read The New York Times, that allowing for a second Trump presidency is cutting off your nose to spite your face. I'm watching "Top Boy" where the values of gang members are tossed about as loosely as the cash they can never get enough of or the dramatic scenarios that never offer peace. I'm working against a poor-sleep-posture-induced headache.

For the infinite amount of things I don't know, I am "saved" by a relatively small series of questions and practices routinely. I don't need to know precisely how or whether I would murder my problems away when watching gangster fiction. I do need to know how to examine myself were I to end up in that situation. I'm perfectly capable of murder, and there's certainly people I feel, in the right circumstances, I'd feel incredibly great about getting the chance to do so. Big but, that's, in no way, representative of my value system. It doesn't represent what makes me feel good over time when I imagine myself having done so. I want a world where no one is getting murdered.

Snap back into the, allegedly, "political," environment. Millions of people think abortion is tantamount to murder. Millions of people are concurrently perfectly content to explicitly ignore how to define "murder," "abortion," "fetus," or "rights" as they pertain to women or children born to those who don't want or can't handle them.

I think there's no bigger moral behavior that you can engage in at this moment. You either define the words and share a perspective, or you break the foundation of understanding anything. Words have to matter. Definitions have to be true and reliable between beings that perceive and share the world. We, literally, all die if that can't prove to be true the vast majority of the time.

Every single thing you can ever talk about operates this way, or it doesn't really operate at all. If you refuse to define "child welfare," you'll lie to a judge and steal someone's baby. If you're in charge of oversight of that person and you forget to define "trust" or what constitutes "oversight" altogether, you'll find yourself complicit in behavior that no sober-minded reasonable person would accept from themselves or others.

It starts with the definition. If the definition isn't clear, you can't act in defined ways. Any temptation to smuggle bad behavior into how you operate can be entertained indefinitely. This is one of the most utilized ways I can tell immediately who is or isn't full of shit. You either are driving towards trying to better account, define, and find the angle your behavior is contributing to a situation, or you move away, keep things obscure, blame, and provide excuses.

I get panicky when I can't define something. That doesn't make me what to double-down and experience compounded panicked feelings. I said above that I don't understand persistent personal denial. If I'm feeling panic or my stomach drops, there's no pretending otherwise. I have to engage it, or it takes over my system. As a kid, I didn't feel I had this choice to engage or suffer. I'm not a kid. I'm a 35 year old man. It's not a "new" feeling. It's not your fault when I feel it. Whether or not I want to label it "irrational" or "justified" or "confusing" or "complicated" is up to me. Whatever series of definitions I choose, what's important is that I choose them.

I may never be able to define something. I can always define something "well-enough" to apply a behavior. Even if that behavior is abstending or stopping. I don't think there will ever be enough words written to capture the economy of cultural psychosis that portends self-destruction. I do know we have a robust history on different scales of how destruction plays out. I can create a framework of those demonstrations and choose to behave like that, or not. I can acknowledge there's a robust history or not! That's part of my moral system. I allow relevant basins of information into how I form an idea of how I should behave.

I think the word "evolution" is used so routinely and inappropriately we've forgotten that we are merely "best-suited," not "actually the best." We're playing dress up with values we don't know or don't care how to demonstrate. We claim we want "equality" as we attack comedians for making light of how genuine bigots or terrible ideas and forces of evil keep us apart. We claim we want "freedom," but refrain from the conversation about the consequences of exercising it irresponsibly. If you've "evolved," like an Ayann Hirsi Ali, who's so exhausted and afraid of defending a universal moral value that you give up and accept merely what makes you feel better, you've suited yourself to an intellectually-deficient value system governed by mob-rules and propaganda.

I don't understand not wanting to get better.

I understand complacency. I understand feeling lazy, sick, or tired. I understand being distracted or resource deficient. I understand not recognizing or respecting the roads offered to "better." I understand the difficulty, at least initially, in defining "better." I understand how hard it might be to believe someone you're engaging even cares to do or get better. I understand self-sabotage. I understand low self-confidence or self-esteem. I understand the pitfalls of extremely context-specific advice.

I spent years "debating" and "persuading" religion vs science. That framing, now "obvious" to me is miserable, incomplete, and inadequate. It took me years to figure that out. I "sincerely believed" I was "helping" or "working" to "change things for the better" in the broadest cultural zeitgeist conception as I needed to excuse my behavior. My behavior was to engage reading, lectures, and online pissing matches obsessively. I persuaded no one. I "won" nothing. All of the information I used to recall like a robot with a bad itch to refute is barely remembered, now a stack of dusty books I haven't opened for 15 years.

It happened interpersonally as well with my "best friend." Honestly, the moment he first said that to me I got suspicious, because we weren't the kind of friends who got into the hokey bullshit. He could abstract-out his behavior towards a "best friend" in a way that were he to contend with the real basis and dynamic of our friendship, would have suggested we needed to part ways sooner. His growing capacity for laziness and lies resulted in escalating damage to my time, bank account, and eventually personal safety. I kept showing up, trying, speaking to how I was getting fucked, and believing the foundation was there. There's no "right" amount of time or rope you're supposed to give someone to still hang you, but your decision-making can still take place while there's oxygen left going to your brain.

I want to do better than friends that exploit me. I want to do better than friends that don't talk to me or invite me to things. I want to do better than "family" that financially and emotionally undermine me. I want to do better than scream at ideologically possesed animal-look-alikes genuinely considering themselves to be upstanding moral and righteous humans. I said earlier that I don't understand persistently, and forthrightly, declaring moral bankruptcy. It's morally bankrupt to lie to yourself.

There's not a single example from my life in which outright bad or remotely questionable behavior I can't acknowledge, speak to, articulate my perspective, and accept that someone else's was different, even if I don't agree with their conclusion or word choices. My ex-friend's kid pulled a gun on me. I triggered the kid after yelling to slow down from 130 MPH after hours of appealing to my friend to take over driving and getting ignored. When the cops call asking if the kid pulled a gun, the answer is yes. Then you tell them you think it was an airsoft gun - one of those extremely realistic high-powered ones, and that the kid has access to real guns with his wanna-be gangster cohort, and that the kid has pulled real guns on people in the past - not ignore the call.

Like any idealogue, they don't want to do better, they want to feel better. Better in the moment. Better about shirking responsibility. Better about keeping things blurry. Better insofar as they mash it into a box called "justified." They want to feel "just." How many times do you hear, "Well I just wanted!…" "I was just trying…" "I just don't understand!"…"You just seem" It's linguistically fluid to seek and adopt justification and reduce detailed complexity into liquid "justice." You don't have to engage someone's actual argument or perspective when you can caricature them as acting the same as you, from a righteously-indignant hole of self-justified emotion. I know you are, but what am I?

I don't really know how to define my current moment, in a manner of speaking. It's part of why the panic sets in "randomly" and I must write if I'm going to get my head and gut back. I'm in debt, unless you weigh my total assets against it. I have a company, provided you respect my handful of clients over 2 years and thousands I've spent trying to get it established in a more self-perpetuating way. I have land that I occupy or do anything on maybe 10% of, increasingly occasionally given the endless rain or cold. I think I need a job, but not enough to take one just because it's hiring. I don't regularly see in person, literally anyone, in my life if "regularly" might be constituted as even once a month.

I'm adrift and alone and that's not your fault. It's not an invitation to myself to get spiteful and judgemental given all my so-called dreams or desires unrealized. There's as much to say about my deliberate decision making as there is the cultural context I'm operating within. I can ask an infinite series of unanswerable questions and set myself up for failure about how to think about my circumstances or potential. Instead, writing is my first, ongoing, pass at defining my perception of those things. It's incomplete. I've succeeded when I feel better, not having denied or downplayed that I had the feeling. It doesn't dictate the future nor justify lashing out in continued panic, insisting you accept my behavior as a "different opinion" on how we should engage the world and our feelings.

I never deny the potential. I can be the worst or best, so can you. My circumstances can change dramatically in an instant, and so can yours. I think this obligates me to practice whatever I can to squeeze as much predictable and consistent well-being as I can from my environment. My messy, ridiculous, irrational, superficially contradictory, deadly, gracefully limited yet infinitely iterative environment.

I don't understand how you can grasp that sensibility for even a moment and ever choose to return to a time when you didn't.

[1092] Another One

I went out tonight. I didn't just see a show and rush home. I went out, then I went to bar after bar, nursing a beer while listening to the different crowds.

The first bar I sat next to a couple that pushed me to develop a comedy bit in my head. An "artsy" type was talking to a girl who was practically playing a character in her flirty responses to the things he was saying. You might imagine a normal person saying something like, "It's funny how you say that." This guy said, "I'm thinking about the comedy and introspection with which you responded to what I said. I'm picking up on…." I can't make that up. The bartender at that bar is why I go. He's a jovial, but tactless, generally enthusiastic person who appreciates music and quipping on pop culture. He was particularly displeased with a number of the clientele while I was there.

I left and went to the bar I would normally go straight to if I had an inclination to be out. It was packed. I didn't talk to anyone there either, but sat next to a group who, on their best day, I would have been annoyed with. What I describe as "pedo clothes and look" types who don Jeffrey Dahmer glasses and mustaches that certainly invented the concept of irony. I saw too-drunk types I reasoned I wasn't in the mood to ingratiate towards. There's always a group of insecure boys who eye pretty girls for too long that just didn't register as "fun." I nursed my beer, and left pretty quickly after, offering my salutations to the still-alive door man Mike.

I hoofed it to what was previously my primary bar back in the day. It's evolved, having renovated its bathroom and expanding its outdoor porch space. Here, I started talking to someone.

David is a 43 year old who considers himself something of a second fiddle to his girlfriend of 5 years who he thinks will be president of the university one day. He spoke about anger towards his father, now deceased, and his mother's fascist behavior. He was clearly intelligent enough to engage in a fair amount of introspection, but as dodgy as it gets when you attempt to nail him down to explore a specific feeling. I got him to do every single thing people do when they register you're smart, listening, and dialed in to the explanations they're offering.

At one point in our conversation, I asked him whether it was ADHD or a practiced habit to introduce some random thing to talk about when I make the offer to extrapolate a feeling. He made that face people do. That, "Oh, hmm, fuck, I never considered that, but ya know…hmmm, I don't know." He claimed ADHD, but it was avoidance through and through. He's angry at his dad. He doesn't know why his mom advocates for Trump. He's smart enough to entertain and understand my evolutionary psychology explanations, but, in his heart of hearts, he doesn't trust himself to accept and work with any given answer to a question, let alone the correct ones.

He dropped his glove off the porch and I had to pee. The conversation naturally concluded and he shook my hand, speaking to his deep appreciation that we spoke. I can only hope he doesn't return to his girlfriend provoked and insecure about the questions raised, but she may be better off if he doubles down on his worst tendencies.

This morning, I was contacted by one of my old Groups members. Some form I filled out for her needed tweaking or updating. I asked how the new counselor was doing and I got, "She's not you." This is from a client who was one of the more over-the-top professions of her desire and "definitely going to" sign up with me. The thing is, I believe her. I think she knows and believes there are plenty of polite, educated, nice-enough counselors who are not, and will not, do what I do. I don't think that is compelling enough to pick me over them.

Still, whether it's guys like David at the bar, or the tone of voice from a former client, I can't help but to think, "I'm good at what I do." I have tens of thousands of hours introspecting, asking questions, and studying psychological and philosophical schools of thought. I'm genuinely curious and literally have little voices and instincts that come up as people are talking to me. I've seen the pattern, or a fair version of it, I know the next question to ask, and I know the consequences of not doing so.

I didn't want to get wasted and crash into people's conversations tonight. I did want to be engaged in something more than passively watching a show or drinking for its own sake. I took my time. I waited for the person who organically was drunk/conversational enough to flow into my space, and then I went to work. If I'm "meant" for anything, it's articulating these patterns for people. It's making you make that face.

I also thought, this morning, as I was marathoning my movies and shows, that that's precisely what I wish to be doing. I want to watch the next thing as earnestly and consistently as I've wanted to do anything. I want to watch all of the Jackie Chan movies, and 007s, and foreign films on lists only cinephiles give a fuck about. I want to do that more than pay off debt or work a job. I want to play my instruments and fuck about on the land more than resemble "responsible adult" slogging away at a job he hates to keep the bills paid.

I felt like I was finally getting the order of operations correct. Keep watching, sleeping when I feel tired and waking up when I wish, and then working just enough. I'm not looking for a useless commute and 40 hours. I'm not looking for overtime. I'm looking to be left alone to fuck about as I see fit. If right now that costs $500 a month, that's 3-5 days Door Dashing and 25 days fucking about as I see fit. Meanwhile, I'm still investing in Upwork people to market, fundraise, connect me with people I'd never find alone, and work to build the environment that more monetarily substantially allows for me to fuck about.

They don't tell you that once you arrive, the responsibility and conversation shifts. You get the goal, now what? I have a very opaque idea of what constitutes "winning" while I'm doing it. My tolerance for risk and debt are pretty goddamn high. I'm not obligated to feel guilty that I'm doing what I enjoy with my ever-fleeting time. I'm not in denial about the practical waters I must dip into to sustain, but I feel I'm getting used to having broken the psychological chains trapping me to certain narratives on which thoughts to prioritize. It's liberating if you can trust you're not just going insane.

I mind the idea of Door Dash less when I think about what I'm focusing on when I'm not doing so. I mind debt less when I know it's going to be to see shows I might have a once in a lifetime opportunity to see. I'm already home. I don't need to get blackout drunk to find the conversations I'm good at. I don't need undue or naive validation to trust what I can provide is valuable. I'm not looking for someone to show me the door I'm unwilling or unable to find or walk through myself. I'm exactly where I've chosen to be, and continue to choose to be, every day, and I'm seeing how it plays out as a dramatic contrast to literally every other thing on offer. Of course it feels "off" or "wrong" or "incomplete." You're not here with me as a sounding board, or when you are, you don't tell me I'm wrong.

[1091] To Infinity And Beyond

I don't know if my head is feeling particularly random or if I've just got too much time on my hands again.

I watch so much TV. I get my stats sent to me at the end of the year through Trakt. They look more insane given most of it is sped up, but even if they weren't, I can easily sit with it on for hours. 6.7 hours a day on average, according to Trakt, so 3.35. It feels like considerably more than that, but what does that mean? I spend huge portions of time in metaphoric realities.

My brain doesn't care. It needs stimulation. I can only play an instrument for so long before my hand cramps. I can only "grind" in a videogame for so long before all of the years that built up behind me quitting playing for over a decade start to bubble. I don't have the social group that's doing something every day or calling regularly. I'm not obligating my time towards family. It's cold and I'm not inclined to work outdoors in it.

I have no more practiced a habit than sitting around. Of course I'm fidgeting and ADHD-ing, and rearranging furniture or books. But I'm an isolated, sedentary indulger more than anything. The TV show is paused while I write this, but whether it starts up immediately after, or while I'm driving, or while I'm waiting around before a concert or comedy show, something is on.

I almost use it to mark time. I've always been suspicious that we've got an incredible amount of time, and yet most of us will claim how much of it is lost, never to be found. I feel in some ways I've practiced slowing down so much, that it makes sense to not only watch things sped up, but fit as much as I can into all of this space that's in the here and now. It makes me happy to think if it takes you a month to watch a season, I can get it done in a few hours.

I've always been that way though. I was perfectly comfortable cheating on old video games if it would help me get to the end. I took pride in speed reading. I would get my homework done as quickly as you told me what was required for that day, then become a pain in the ass the rest of the day with nothing to do. If it's a physical task, like moving hundreds of bricks or pallets, I'm going until I start shutting down and hurting myself because I can't focus anymore. I used to speed constantly. Even if it doesn't sound particularly musical or show up in any song you care about, I like seeing and hearing speed picking and El Estepario tapping drum sticks like hummingbird flaps.

Almost married to this preference and propensity is a desire to be "comprehensive." To this day, I feel a sense of injustice, I even think I've written about this before, on a 3rd grade report I was assigned to write about a U.S. State. I was told, explicitly, not to provide every town and city. That just didn't make sense or sit right with me, so I printed one anyway for the state of Texas. I had all the other stuff she asked for too, but you and I both know you're not reporting on a state if you don't even know what towns and cities are in it. Duh. I got a C, and note in red that said "I told you not to give me a list of cities."

I watched a video recently explaining the difference in the sizes of infinities. Not all are equal or "as infinite" as the next. I don't know what sense can be made of the sentiment, but I feel like I hop between different infinities. It can simply be a matter of descriptive word choice categorizing what I'm engaging. The broadest concept might be "media." If I can watch or listen to it, I could plug in to that infinity and keep a rather opaque resolution on what all that noise is doing for me. Distill it down into movies, shows, books, podcasts, news, music, lessons, lectures, clips. Break all of those into genres. Each one provides a lifetime. An infinite sea from which to draw inspiration or distraction.

I think I seek both simultaneously. I notice the duality across a lot of these infinite spaces. I'm both full, comfortable, safe, and warm, yet my muscles are tight; my head and eyes are begging to start hurting. I'm full of salt, fat, the wrong carbs, and I'm protected only to the extent of my proximity to dangers I can't see coming. I'm mostly warm provided a given part of my body is against a heated blanket. No one state is in the extreme, and no one shift to a little bit more or less in either direction suggests something "meaningfully better."

That is, I'm "comfortable enough" to continue to sit here and type. I'm lucid enough. I'm TV-satiated enough to keep it paused. I'm satisfied enough with my body to not think more closely about what I'm feeding it. I've got enough of an ambivalence towards my debt to work just enough to keep its minimums paid on time. In turn, that's enough for the credit card companies and capitalist machines that want nothing less than me to never feel satisfied enough with the amount of things I own.

I think we employ the language of "enough" miserably. "Why can't I be enough!" we might scream at our romantically idealized notion of the person we claim to love. They cheat. They grow distant. Instinctively you might feel like it's about you and everything missing. It seems like it's only when we've had enough misery, and not just enough misery, but enough misery with the right prerequisites and under specific conditions, that we move to change something. Could we change sooner? It's a question of what resolution your infinity is dialed into. If you're a big corporate monstrosity who deals in "data" or "information," which can be indefinitely mined, tweaked, and reinterpreted, it doesn't interest you to curb greenhouse emissions until a more specific descriptive number threshold from outside your preferred genre makes a compelling impact.

The presence of so many infinities suggests to me that they are the rule and so by definition, nothing, ever, will be "classically" enough. Enough doesn't exist that way. All the self-esteem genres telling you you're beautiful enough or smart enough or worthy of love just as you are are lies. Not malicious lies, mind you, just lies that don't understand the nature of the game we're stuck playing. No one idea is meant to account for the whole of anything. Innocently, you might just consider it a mathematical impossibility that you'll ever be complete. You will instead be enough to suffice across a different set of infinite domains.

You might be fuckable to a lot of people, including your designated "soulmate." You might find yourself entertained by Star Wars AND Star Trek, or all of science fiction AND sports, or find the requisite levels of continued enjoyment in studying quantum mechanics and vibing with Bluey. It's never either/or. There's not conflict or contradiction. There's different levels of your experience you can access an infinite amount of ways.

From the outside, you can't necessarily tell if anyone is actually doing that or just adopting the infinite linguistic disguises that claim to. We peacock values we don't know how to practice. We're a beleaguered and confused "middle" who lazily votes for fascism, or downplays how fascism happens, because we literally don't know any better. We can't see our infinite capacity for destruction anymore than we regularly entertain ideas of our infinite potential.

As I was cleaning up old emails I came across old fights. There's math breakdowns I've sent former supervisors of how much money and time I'm wasting working for them. There's back and forths with me and one of my exes. There's exchanges I've had in pissing-match format with people online. I save this stuff for the same reason I keep almost all of my writing from back when I started at 15. I have new eyes at 35. Infinite gaps in my perspective are sometimes traversed by a more infinite truth. Was I arguing like an entitled immature cunt? Or had I figured something out, and now it was time to die nobly on the hills of my choosing instead of at the mercy of my combatant? As time goes on, I'm thankful to discover far more of the latter.

I think there's something of an inevitability towards people seeking "spiritual" or "religious" scape-goatery with its embodied allegory for the infinite. This especially so when paired with the sense of never feeling like you're enough. Fancy that, here's a thing that calls it "sin," and conveniently lasts forever to match the infinite sea of whatever you need it to in any given moment. Infinitely insecure? No worries, these paring rituals are blessed and divine. Infinitely attracted to children? Check out these power dynamics and forgiveness concepts. Righteously indignant and protective of your ignorance? Brother, we'll point you in the direction of where to blow yourself up straight into the arms of the infinite reward that matches your commitment.

My only excuse, at least when I've slowed down, written, picked a direction, and decided something is worth fighting and biting about, is an ongoing infinite conversation that ends the moment the decision is made, and starts up again the moment the decision is being evaluated for change. I don't get to pawn my failings off on Jesus and claim forgiveness. I have to weigh the evidence. I have to describe what I can make of the context. I can count the amount of people who seemingly never want to talk to me again or the extreme limits of my network. I have to see who keeps coming back and wrestle with why. I have to make sure it's not because I'm taking advantage of their infinite capacity to feed something I might disingenuously or greedily eat indefinitely.

There's peace in attending to this duality. But the peace doesn't feel like anything more than potential. I don't feel "good" or "bad." It's still hard to use the word "hope" without sarcasm dripping off my tongue. If I "hate" something, it's really just the same thing over and over, the seeming lack of sense, awareness, or accountability, playing out across genres of situations. Will I be "happy" if every one of my dreams comes true? Hundreds of my dreams have come true, and continue to remain true every day. I would not describe myself as "happy" lol.

I'm happy when I can share something. I'm happy when I feel like there's a real connected intention brought to the same space. That's why I don't get along with people who are "just doing their job" in realms like counseling or DCS that require far more personal responsibility and integrity for them to meaningfully represent their impact. It doesn't mean they'll be conducted that way, but it does mean when you fuck about, we all get to experience the infinite cascade of finding out. That's how a 5-10% minority eats 80% of the time and space we pretend can't exist in service to anything else.

We can ground that specifically. It's every abusive family member one of my clients "can't help" but wrap themselves around. That's the frequent flyers of our prison and healthcare systems. It's any monopoly of power and wealth. It's the job, family, or hobby you know someone is abusing to eschew a conversation about balance or the real extent of their responsibilities. It's the jaded cynicism of pundits and influential personalities beating fear and hate drums. It's virtue-signaling language you try to stuff every conceivable, especially its opposite, idea into. You know, because pumping gas can be "green" too and words are "violence."

Whatever scale or frame we choose to adopt has to start with the acknowledgement, acceptance, and voluntarily adopted responsibility for the choice altogether. You choose to respect and weigh evidence, or you bolster the strength of errant faith claims. You choose to "stare into the void" or touch the infinite capacity of your potential, and you can allow yourself to feel diminished and helpless, or emboldened to carry on more deliberately in a manner you can increasingly see fits. Fits what? Fits your given moment. If you see the same things I do, maybe we start manifesting things we both wish to see verses a random array of noise we struggle to cope with.

I care very little, if at all, about what I'm watching if I have someone to watch it with. We can share in how bad it was or jokes we make about it or references years later. The parties I threw weren't about collecting hangovers. The business I want to run isn't about being catastrophically rich or irrational defiance to conformity and oversight. The access to the freedom and headspace to enjoy my time isn't so I am always available to tend to another cat. Insofar as the vast majority of the people I'm connected to aren't coming or inviting or speaking at all, it's easy to believe you're meaningfully different, and maybe not in ways you really want to be.

But I write. I search. I try. I work. I invest. I continue to acknowledge the infinite ways I can describe my experience until I find a frame that allows me to choose, and feel like it was a real choice, a step in a direction I want instead of a direction I "have to." If that practically translates into all I can really do is keep picking my words and hills to die on, that's what I'll do. If I must be in debt, I want to know it services experiences and things I can hide from repo men or the consequences of bankruptcy. If my writing has no capacity to "wake up" others in the way different authors have helped me to, I can trust it will at least continue to help me to when I've drifted too far into the wrong infinity.

[1090] Chain Chain Chain

I'm in something of a somber mood. I want to expand on some ideas I've alluded to on a few posts or blogs over the last few weeks.

It happens often enough when I've too much time, but a pissing match online will ensue. This latest one over the immensely tired "controversy" of Dave Chappelle. Comedians serve as kind of a canary in a coal mine for me. You literally don't get a more immediate piece of feedback on where we are culturally than when someone, lauded for crafting humor, observes and reports the landscape, then everyone piles in afterwards. Sometimes they do so in a way that makes you think they believe the stage was really theirs and it's a sham that anyone would be allowed to take it and say what's been said, let alone laugh.

The person I reacted to, proudly, said they didn't even even watch the special. They called Dave a bigot who spreads hate and misinformation. They epitomized what I suspect a conservative thinker would describe as an angry "woke" cliche with arguments centered around ideas of "punching down," who does or does not have a voice, what even constitutes "comedy," and above all else how deeply they feel regarding, and this is key, the intent to harm. Words are still violence for these types of people. And any word they feel violently assaulted by, well, what kind of civilized society would allow that?

So much enters my mind at this juncture. The overwhelming ego and narcissism of modernity creeps in. The perfect ambivalence to using, about as simple of words as we get, like "violence" incorrectly. The absolutely exhausting compulsion to exude a flood of feelings to circumvent even the concept of a coherent discussion. It's the lack of irony or self-awareness. It's the energy spent functionally barking as though you're unwilling, incapable, and indignant about the prospect of being responsible and accountable to context. It's a perfect engine for feelings of hopelessness.

That posture. The confidence those who are "right" have is shaping up to be my capacity for emotional well-being's nemesis. I can't wrap my head around it. It manifests in so many ways. My trial-by-fire introduction was arguing religion. As I've gotten older and spent time in places I hardly imagined I ever would, I've seen it manifest constantly.

You don't lie to a judge about the health of someone else's family unless you are "religiously convinced" of your own righteousness. 

You don't get intractably indignant at your caseworker for your failure to protect a foster child from your son molesting her unless you were under a powerful delusion about what the picture of Jesus on your wall really meant about the likelihood of said molestation.

You don't sacrifice every waking minute of your life to work unless you've adopted unshakeable notions of nobility that comes with being exhausted, away from family, devoid of hobbies, friends, or a perspective on anything that doesn't pertain to that work.

You don't blithely accuse strangers of every terrible sin or behavior imaginable, without evidence, in precisely the opposite forum, like a comedy show, for your perspective to make sense.

You don't do things like "I know you are, but what am I" when someone challenges you with your own quoted words in disbelief that you seem unable to see what you've said.

You don't stay in abusive dynamics unless you are absolutely convinced there's something "greater" or "nobler" in trudging through a practically miserable existence whitewashed by the words "family," or "love."

You don't ignore and bankrupt efficient accountable means to fix problems to preserve your power or sense of control.

You don't cheer fascists and vote down measures to help the poor unless fundamentally, you and yours, by whatever means necessary, are correct.

It's not a "want" or "need." It just "is." Jesus is. Muhamed is. The power of crystals is. The inevitability of markets and capitalism is. The power of the state is. You being powerless is. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and fucking over is there someone there telling you how it is. This show is good. You want to buy this. You have to work. People are this or that. Your attention belongs here. My side is obviously right. It all has to be and is always about sides. You are the extent of my judgement, and my judgment is based on my judgment, so let's spin-round, vomit, and repeat forever.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a blog titled "Dead Kids." The main idea, if these ever have one, is that you don't care about dead kids. I don't consider that speculation or a moral judgment upon you. I consider it a practical fact. I don't care about dead kids either. Intellectually, of course I do. Emotionally and practically? They're not dying at my front door. I'm not dropping the bombs. I don't exert an immediate control over the circumstances under which children are dying. They are less important to me than my next meal. There are billions of people, living and dying constantly, and none of us really care about that until it's personal.

We ignore this at a our perpetual peril. As we ignore it, we allow ourselves to believe a story about our inherent righteousness. We start to think we're the good ones. As anyone who has genuinely attempted to do something good can attest, your intent, when it doesn't align with practical reality, doesn't matter. You get ignored. People don't care. Neither you nor I am a good person. We're just people. And people are animals. And animals don't give a fuck.

"Human" is a scientific intellectual construction. You don't get to be human by default. You have to learn and adopt rules. You have to sacrifice "merely animal" instincts and habits. To the extent any one of us is pulling off "human" versus "ape" can be fairly well assessed. We build what we seemingly aspire to in our mythologies. We carry on like a "godly" standard is flashing its naked ass in front of us at all times. We've built incredibly complicated systems of laws and bureaucracy to deliberately slow down our impulsivity and propensity for violence. The less you concern yourself with the hows and whys those systems operate, the less we should be obligated to consider you as anything but a noisy animal.

How we decide to treat that animal says a lot about us, but to treat it as an equal to those who work to actually practice the values of being human? Our cultural psychosis is so entrenched, we literally mythologize sacrificing those people and crown their martyrdom as a peak achievement.

While writing this, I got a response from the person in my latest pissing match.

"Touché. You have my respect. Please appreciate that my assertion that you were trolling was based on my perspective that a nameless, faceless, and apparently 98 year old man was, unprompted, attacking my expression of my views on somebody else, because I am assuming that you aren't Dave Chappelle himself, and I felt it necessary to defend my position because historically I have had to justify my very existence to what at times feels like everybody when the media and politicians are pushing a transphobic agenda on the initially largely-apathetic public, and as such I am naturally incredibly defensive.

When I can gather the emotional energy to do so, I will sit down and watch The Dreamer, make notes, and pass them on to you, it's only right for me to do so." Exactly. Green Day's, "Know Your Enemy" plays in my head. I'm not their enemy, and neither is Dave.

Wherever you find yourself on any position, when you occupy "have to justify" space, you're doing it wrong, noble intentions or otherwise. The less you concern yourself with the motivated reasoning of justification, the better the chance you have for understanding the multi-faceted, indeed infinite, nature of everything. You can take the fire out of your belly by honestly observing and evaluating. It's not actually a fight with anything, ever, but yourself. And, barring consistently demonstrated evidence to the contrary, you probably have a miserable idea of what you even are.

I can describe myself in less than admirable terms because I'm looking for who I am. I'm not convinced. I am every single example, good and bad, rolled into this ongoing moment. That can operate as the power of perspective, or it can be an infinite sea of obscurity to hide behind and justify whatever comes next. Who I am has been on my mind as I continue slogging through trying to be my own boss. I'm not the same person that started the coffee shop. I'm not the teenager who was readily primed to fixate on a singular agenda or idea until I got my way. I'm not that old, but I can certainly distinguish myself from younger people. My motivations have changed. My priorities have shifted. It's impossible to say to what degree any of it is good or bad. It obligates me to explore and reassert what needs it and let die what doesn't.

I remark on my relative wealth a lot. I don't know if I've heard half a coherent conversation about "priviledge," but I do know pretty much everyone I've ever met has had access to nearly everything we could ever need to live a decent life together. My cohort is educated. They were born in a, barely, still free country. They're fed. They have, most often divorced, but homes nonetheless. They are their own worst enemy. They are up against competing narratives or individual pathological behavior or particular illness.

I'm gathering that it's dangerous to acknowledge this. You don't just do so and then die having completed the game. You have to carry on the rest of the day doing whatever it is you do. Maybe that's a job you hate for not enough money. Maybe it's spending time with family who don't recognize you or you can't trust. My ego likes to believe it's getting antagonized by me and what I suggest we do with all of our time left and debt. We have an incredible amount of time to suffer or celebrate our circumstances.

The suffering is familiar. We've learned how to glorify it. We are slaves to the imposed narratives trying to stuff a bored, confused, angry ape into a human construct. This builds that inherent tension and "contradiction" into what it means to exist or why you should even bother. You're not actually a contradiction. You're an ongoing sum total and set of probabilities. We may never understand the mechanism that predicts this word or that word comes next, but I acknowledge that I'm doing something peculiar, specific, and different in relationship to my experience by writing and slowing down than in the moment I scream at someone who pulls a dangerous driving maneuver.

That's the terror of staying alive. Every moment there's someone poised to run you off the road. If they were exhausted having worked themselves to death for years in an exploitative and unforgiving environment or if they were distracted texting, the result and dramatic consequence for you remains the same. Either of the causes, or any imagined one that doesn't involve wildlife or the environment crashing in, requires the same obligation towards taking responsibility and exploration on comprehensively accounting for how to lower the probability of it happening again. You can have that discussion upside down in a ditch, or somewhere in the years before a predictable seemingly inevitable tragedy takes place.

This is often my counsel with my clients. You don't practice crisis management in the throes of a crisis. No professional waits until they meet someone choking to see if their understanding of the Heimlich maneuver works. If you're not practicing in the meantime, when the crisis hits, you'll default to whatever coping mechanism you discovered along the way, if that involves a deadly drug or other form of self-harm, that's what you'll do. Agency has left the equation. Choice is an ideal. The situation actually "is." To the extent you suffer your experience of it is what you can learn to navigate.

Humans can see things coming, prepare, project a series of consequences into the future, and do better exactly right now. Animals project their incomplete and irrational feelings onto every possible future in every single moment, pretending to have done the same work, finding conviction to double down and destroy whatever potential exists right now. They conserve their opinion into a dense weapon used to knock you out.

A lot of my behavior, and for the matter what I can gather from Hussain's, is driven by a sense of helplessness and anticipation of suffering. That's what was physically beaten into me. My baseline disposition is disproportionately informed by my abusive upbringing. I can't completely erase, reconfigure, or deny how stomach-dropping, shivering, flinching child is the foundation. I didn't have a choice in that. I suspect no matter how old I get I will resonate at an "irrational panic" level as though I've actually done something terrible or that the principal is going to expel me. It's a simple choice to acknowledge that, joke about that, write about it, or talk about it in a way that doesn't leave me perpetually victimized. That doesn't mean we're not victims or that we can't victimize. That doesn't mean we're not still at the mercy of forces that bring us to our knees. As intimately as you might eventually understand yourself, it doesn't mean you have someone else perfectly nailed in turn.

I find my life fascinating how much I've achieved in a relatively short amount of time. When I really sit in how much I've invested in learning to play instruments, how many books and shows I've consumed, how many projects i've completed, how much crap I own, and how much I'm looking forward to, it's impossible to take that exercise seriously and claim anything but the most naive sense of despair or hopelessness. What is debt when you have the capacity to pay it off? What is "stuck" when your fingers, feet, and voice aren't broken?

Every year you're alive is a smaller and smaller percentage of your existence. But every year your potential grows if you're acknowledging, incorporating, and moving with the changes. Staying defensive, quiet, and reactionary is shameful if you profess to be human. Burrowing into self-imposed guilt predicated on someone else's dogshit narrative is shameful too. You may not have all the words or even close to the best ones. You either own the life you're leading or we stay trapped in this place that pretends tomorrow will get better in spite of ourselves instead of because of it.

[xx-25] Attended Shows and Trips of 2023

Stewart Huff - Jan 7th Bloomington	comedy
Louis C. K. - Jan 15th Louisville	comedy
Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra - Jan 20th	music
Unwritten Law, Zebrahead, Mest - Jan 22nd Phoenix	music
Tom Thakkar - Jan 28th Bloomington	comedy
Trae Crowder, WellRED - Feb 4th Indianapolis	comedy
Joe Pera - Feb 5th Indianapolis	comedy
Winterfest - Feb 11th Indianapolis	beer
Maria Bamford - Feb 11th Bloomington	comedy
Anthony Jeselnik - Feb 18th Louisville	comedy
Nikki Glaser - Feb 23rd Bloomington	comedy
Mat Alano-Martin, Joshua Murphy - Feb 24th Bloomington	comedy
The Foolers (of Penn & Teller) - Feb 25th Indianapolis	theater
Prince Daddy & The Hyena, Drug Church, Anxious - Mar 1st Indianapolis	music
D.R.U.G.S., Varials- Mar 2nd Cincinnati	music
A. J. Wilkerson - Mar 3rd Indianapolis	comedy
Bobcat Goldthwait - Mar 4th Louisville	comedy
Muse, Evanescence, One OK Rock - Mar 5th St. Louis	music
Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra - Mar 10th	music
Jordan Jensen - Mar 11th Bloomington	comedy
William Shatner - Mar 12th Indianapolis	theater
Brad Upton - Mar 15th Indianapolis	comedy
Eric Neumann - Mar 16th Indianapolis	comedy
Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra - Mar 17th	music
Big Jay Oakerson, Jon Harden, Will McKenzie - Mar 18th Louisville	comedy
Corey Holcomb - Mar 19th Louisville	comedy
Steel Panther - Mar 24th Indianapolis	music
An Evening with Spinx - Mar 25th Indianapolis	music
KC Shornima - Mar 25th Bloomington	comedy
Real Friends, Knuckle Puck, Bearings - Mar 26th Indianapolis	music
Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra - Mar 31st	music
Polyphia, Unprossessed - Apr 6th Indianapolis	music
Borgore - Apr 7th Indianapolis	music
The Bouncing Souls, Anti-Flag, A Wilhelm Scream, The Venomous Pinks - Apr 9th Indianapolis	music
Michael Winslow - Apr 14th Fort Wayne	comedy
Nickel Creek - Apr 15th Cincinnati	music
Lewis Capaldi, Em Beihold - Apr 17th Cincinnati	music
Steve Hofstetter - Apr 23rd Fort Wayne	comedy
Origami Angel, Pinkshift, Sweet Pill - Apr 28th Cudahy	music
Finch - May 3rd Chicago	music
Dan Cummins - May 4th Bloomington	comedy
Gary Clark Jr. - May 5th Louisville	music
David Koechner - May 6th Fort Wayne	comedy
Troy Bond - May 10th Chicago	comedy
The Killers, Palm Palm- May 11th Gary	music
Waterparks - May 12th Chicago	music
Jeff Arcuri - May 16th Louisville	comedy
Rockville - May 18-21st Daytona Beach	music
Rockville - May 18-21st Daytona Beach	music
Rockville - May 18-21st Daytona Beach	music
Rockville - May 18-21st Daytona Beach	music
Cold - May 25th Indianapolis	music
Beartooth, Trivium, Archetypes Collide - May 26th Indianapolis	music
Godfrey - May 27th Louisville	comedy
Death Cab for Cutie - May 31st Indianapolis	music
Gary Owen - Jun 3rd Fort Wayne	comedy
Paramore, Bloc Party, Genesis Owusu - Jun 5th Indianapolis	music
Grandson, K. Flay - Jun 6th Indianapolis	music
Brad Williams - Jun 8th Indianapolis	comedy
All Time Low, Mayday Parade, Games We Play - Jun 9th Columbus	music
Franz Ferdinand, Pixies - Jun 14th Cincinnati	music
Eddie Pepitone - Jun 16th Bloomington	comedy
WonderRoad - Jun 17-18th Indianapolis	music
WonderRoad - Jun 17-18th Indianapolis	music
Pierce the Veil, The Used - Jun 21st Cincinnati	music
George Wallace - Jun 23rd Indianapolis	comedy
Jeff Foxworthy - Jun 24th Indianapolis	comedy
The Native Howl, Joe Grudge - Jun 26th Louisville	music
Dead & Company - Jun 27th Noblesville	music
Zella Day, Okey Dokey - Jun 30th Chicago	music
Cubs at Wrigley Field - Jul 1st	game
Martin Urbano Jr. - Jul 7th Bloomington	comedy
Yungblud - Jul 8th Indianapolis	music
David Cross, Sean Patton - Jul 13th Chicago	comedy
Green Day, Foo Fighters - Jul 14-15th Milwaukee	music
Fall Out Boy, Bring Me The Horizon - Jul 16th Noblesville	music
Sad Summer Fest - Jul 22nd Indianapolis	music
Impractical Jokers - Jul 28th Indianapolis	comedy
Ron Funches - Jul 29th Bloomington	comedy
Matchbox 20 - Aug 5th Noblesville	music
Rufus Du Sol - Aug 8th Indianapolis	music
Yellowcard, Mayday Parade, Story Of The Year- Aug 10th Indianapolis	music
Ophira Eisenberg - Aug 11th Bloomington	comedy
Michael Blaustein - Aug 12th Indianapolis	comedy
Seattle	trip
PVRIS, Poppy - Aug 18th Seattle	music
Tattoo Expo - Aug 19th Seattle	expo
Seahawks - Aug 19th Seattle	game
Akaash Singh - Aug 23rd Indianapolis	comedy
The All-American Rejects - Aug 24th Indianapolis	music
The Offspring, Sum 41, Simple Plan - Aug 25th Noblesville	music
Bastille, Chic, Duran Duran - Sep 1st Chicago	music
Disturbed, Breaking Benjamin, Jinjer - Sep 2nd Noblesville	music
Wargasm - Sep 3rd Indianapolis	music
Houndmouth - Sep 7th Indianapolis	music
Jessica Kirsen - Sep 8th Indianapolis	comedy
Ms. Pat - Sep 9th Indianapolis	comedy
Bayside/Hawthorne Heights - Sep 13th Indianapolis	music
Bowling For Soup - Sep 15th Cincinnati	music
Tony Hinchcliffe - Sep 16th Indianapolis	comedy
Seeking Nietzsche - Sep 17th Indianapolis	theater
Shane Gillis - Sep 21st Bloomington	comedy
Joshua Bell - Sep 23rd Indianapolis	music
Louder Than Life - Sep 24th Louisville	music
Eric Johnson - Oct 5th Indianapolis	music
Dave Chappelle - Oct 6th Chicago	comedy
Jeff Leeson - Oct 8th Indianapolis	comedy
Tommy Emmanuel - Oct 11th Indianapolis	music
Andrea Jin - Oct 13th Bloomington	comedy
Broadripple Beerfest - Oct 14th Indianapolis	beer
The Darkness - Oct 14th Indianapolis	music
Sum 41, Plain White T's - Oct 20th Las Vegas	music
Vegas	trip
When We Were Young - Oct 21st Las Vegas	music
Penn & Teller - Oct 22nd Las Vegas	theater
Carrot Top - Oct 23rd Las Vegas	comedy
The Punk Rock Museum - Oct 24th Las Vegas	expo
The Sphere - Oct 24th Las Vegas	theather
The Mob Museum - Oct 25th Las Vegas	expo
Haste The Day - Oct 27th Indianapolis	music
Pete Holmes - Oct 28th Bloomington	comedy
Sam Morril - Oct 29th Indianapolis	comedy
Tchaikovsky's Pathetique - Nov 3rd Indianapolis	music
Ari Shaffir - Nov 4th Chicago	comedy
Tim Meadows - Nov 9th Indianapolis	comedy
Liz Callaway - Nov 10th Indianapolis	music
Pink, Grouplove - Nov 11th Louisville	music
Adam Sandler - Nov 15th Indianapolis	comedy
Kingfish - Nov 16th Louisville	music
Nimesh Patel - Nov 18th Indianapolis	comedy
Troy Bond, David Brooks - Nov 25th Indianapolis	comedy
Bush - Nov 28th Madison	music
Blue October - Nov 30th Gary	music
Pete Lee - Dec 1st Fort Wayne	comedy
Todd Glass - Dec 2nd Bloomington	comedy
Bryan Callen - Dec 8th Indianapolis	comedy
Rachel Feinstein - Dec 9th Bloomington	comedy
Jamie Lee - Dec 15th Bloomington	comedy
Drew Lynch - Dec 16th Indianapolis	comedy
Michael Blackson - Dec 22nd Indianapolis	comedy
Matt Rife - Dec 28th Louisville	comedy
Foxy Shazam - Dec 31st Cincinnati	music