I kinda wanna birds-eye my spot in life as I get ready to head to my 85th concert, Mother Mother, of the year. Earlier in the day, I did some back-of-a-napkin math on the amount I’ve traveled for shows or entertainment over the last 3 years. It was approximately 62,000 miles for 312 events, including flights to Phoenix, Seattle, Daytona, Las Vegas, and a drive to Niagara and Toronto. I have 18 shows set for the rest of the year, and if I get a job, it’s likely that will jump a little more.
The last 3 years have been a kind of testimony to one of my ideals. I felt like I was falling behind. I had a plan that I would “get rich,” so to speak, and spend most of my life doing exactly this, but from a more care-free place. There’s a world in which I went to dramatically less shows and have a marginally higher amount in the bank (read: am a little less in debt), but I wouldn’t resonate the same. I like the memories and ability to opine from first-hand experience. I like getting up and around the world.
Just being an American from a more or less middle class place, I know how much has been afforded to me. I know that I’ve practiced learning how to better appreciate my circumstances and options as I’ve gotten older. I know the work it takes to maintain perspective so that you’re not at the mercy of your feelings or compulsive insecurities.
Why bother saying that? What’s bringing up this, maybe true, maybe not, sentiment have to do with seeing shows?
I’ve spent the last few hours listening to some usual suspects from the “public intellectual” space. These people make careers and brands out of sometimes talking in circles, but appearing on each others’ podcasts and talking at length about topics most people don’t have the attention or interest in understanding any deeper than the intellectual who might begin talking outside of their lane. One person remarked that the whole exercise is “fun,” debating the theory of mind, for example. I agree.
I think it’s fun to stay curious and talk about things that often feel out of reach. I think it’s fun to try and resolve ideas that might be very sticky in inconvenient ways. I want a certain level of dissonance and to see how it maps to my behavior and words.
Sometimes I introduce dissonance in a way that feels less than helpful. It’s mostly inaccurate to call the feelings I have today as “panic” or even “anxiety,” necessarily. They’re just the closest or what I started out as before I learned to write. I have this desire to stay in this moment. Most of the time, right now, in spite of the little things wrong with me from a tight muscle or itchy face, is where I want to be. I’m either full or on my way to satiating my hunger fairly easily. I have the whole of the world’s information and entertainment a click away. I have air conditioning.
The dissonance, or drama, or angst, or “problems” that I introduce into my life are meant to shake things up. I worry about “comfort” as an ideal. It’s never been one I’ve adopted deliberately, but you’re probably a lot more comfortable than you’ll ever let on, and if you don’t look at how that influences you, then your perception of how to fix something or shake something up is going to be off.
I’m staring down the prospect of returning to a kind of job I won’t enjoy. Not because of the work itself, but because the types of people and types of companies that get involved with the work are fundamentally betraying the alleged purpose of their existence. You can argue “innocently,” to the extent we all feel stuck or forced to play capitalist games and logic, but it’s no less psychologically troubling for someone like me.
I know I’m as full of contradictions as anyone. I know how to describe when I “betray” my “best self” in any given moment. I also know when I’m not trying to, but am otherwise feeling unable to stop. That’s what working in shitty environments provokes. When I adopt writing to keep myself sane, and then work in an environment that won’t expect the same kind of behavior from its people, what am I doing? Shrugging my shoulders indefinitely and collecting a paycheck by doing the bare minimum and ignoring conflicts?
I can put a single goal like “get out of debt” at the top of my list and automatically filter those kinds of conflicts out. I’ve watched myself cut through mountains of cacophonous noise when I know what it is I want. Pain, sleep, opinions, money, the weather…I can best them all.
The problem is maybe being made a little clearer as I type this. I’m kinda over this “hero story?” Like, I want to vibe. I want to continue mostly on the road of what I’m doing, but have enough reasonable challenges lined up that I don’t feel I need to antagonize myself in some showy or dramatic way.
This last round had me applying to every kind of random job. The moment they call? The reality sinks in. Get your CDL and just drive around from time to time for cash? Pony up $5,000. Go back to school and get your Master’s? Northwestern is happy to have you for $135,000. Wanna “simply” do some manual labor? They’ll have you driving your truck farther than you were errantly driving to remote work as a counselor, and pay you less! Woo! The place I will probably land will be the 4th job I’ve followed a friend to or vice versa, run as precisely miserably as the places we’ve left.
I want to be “more okay” about that. It’s a bad situation fundamentally, but it would pay and pay consistently. That’s the “practical” “mature” way to “eat shit.” It’s not enough of a reason by itself. A big portion of the picture for why I come back around to joining those environments is what I’m doing otherwise. You can watch too much TV. You can spend too much time on your hobbies. I love having my own place and space, and getting out into the world and like, you know, interacting with people and feeling alive.
I don’t necessarily want an “easy” life, but I want it to feel real and possible to both handle practical adult business, and live as though I’m not an ignorant constantly justifying slave to my circumstances. I’ve tried the affirmative “live in service to my values” thing in one form or another, but if people around you don’t share your values, or can only do so in “accessible” doses, you don’t necessarily get as far as you’d like or need.
There’s a framing of my circumstances that lets me feel like I “finally reached a point” and found some relative peace with the idea of repeating a bad pattern. But it’s the same story of victim of circumstances. I capitalize on my free time, for sure. I don’t find a place that’s as elevated and motivated to achieve as consistently. I need structure. I need income and future planning. I’ve only recently trained my brain to believe I won’t be “somehow occupied” months in the future in order to go to all of these shows. I literally couldn’t imagine buying a ticket a year in advance, my underlying unstable psychology couldn’t pretend to guess who or what I’d be that far away.
Well, now I kinda know. Barring a certain tragedy or improbable unknown unknowns, I’ll be more or less about the same income or debt. I suspect my friends will be about as available as they’ve been. I may be a little more developed in my songwriting or woodworking. But much as it’s been for the last 7 or so years, I’ll probably be right here, writing something about how basically good I have it.
I think in the past, I was mostly on that tip and taking for granted I could incorporate the people in my life into the grander plans and schemes. I didn’t think it would take “bravery” or a particular tolerance for risk. I thought we all kind of knew that we had it pretty good and it was more just a series of conversations and pooling of resources that would allow that story to compound. Instead, everyone splits up, stops answering texts, and gets incredibly busy with whatever they’re doing.
One of the themes on today’s lectures was talking about the denial of death. How so much has been invented and exhaustively professed today as old-world concepts of religion have died and new ones rush in. People need that cause to believe in that transcends them. They have to have a story about their place in the world that outlives the heat death of the universe. I’ve never had a gun to my head, exactly, but death has always felt close. Part of my fuel to do what I do is the very real exercise of wrestling with what happens when the semi doesn’t notice me or I cross the wrong crazy person. There’s literally no reason “life,” in its ambivalent abstraction couldn’t take what’s left of mine.
That informs how and why I speak at all. That informs the guilty conscience of complicity. That informs the sense of urgency and hope and math behind why I think I can or can’t do something. I’m healthy. I’m fed. I’m on my way to my church of music and artistic expression. I’m spending time with friends and family tomorrow, and not in a way that’s like tongue-in-cheek or because I “have to.” I dress like I listen to the bands on my chest and play the instruments they play. I’ve never thought “tomorrow” about anything I’ve genuinely wanted, for everything that might get ignored or procrastinated otherwise.
I want peace of mind. I want to know that if I go down swinging, it’s because I wanted to swing and not because I was flailing in desperation. I want the vaguest approximation of a consistent paycheck that’s actually consistent, but doesn’t require me functionally donating my life in service to it. 9-5, 40 hours a week, not including a commute, and time spent thinking about it does not comport. Odd job door-to-door “What’s this guy doing here?” doesn’t either. Constantly gambling or going extra broke trying gate-kept or monopolized sources of income proved infeasible as well.
Like the last job, I’m only going to work it until I can’t anymore. I’m going to document everything, get it in writing, and patiently watch how things burn. I’ve ran this play dozens of times. I’ve lived this pattern for 20 years.
There’s things I dream about that I don’t think I have the will and attention to do. I’m probably not going to be a touring musician. I doubt I become a “master” wood-worker. I don’t know how I would ever afford my license, let alone actually run my own company, particularly with what I’ve learned about who gets the money and why. I think it’s fairly unlikely I find a particularly robust social network where we all just continue to enable our higher and higher goals each year. I doubt I go viral or build a culty brand around my personality.
All I really want is to keep going to shows, maybe with better seats. I want to go, on a whim, to some restaurant I see on a cooking show. I want to feel the inspiration I had last night composing and mixing a song, and know I have the time and freedom to stay up all night watching tutorials and cursing those same tutorials. By the numbers, it’s not an incredibly expensive or unreasonable series of goals. It’s aspiring to “more” that has cost me money. It’s been trusting the wrong people that has help keep me secured in debt. It’s been perhaps not owning how much I need to modify my previously idyllic concept of “owning my own business” or something in that vein.
Is it impossible to find peace of mind in these social work jobs? No. I worked for 2 years at DCS and quit over the dumb cunts in “leadership.” The work is never the problem. The clients don’t keep me up at night. It’s when I try to more sync up the higher-order values with my day to day that I get into psychological trouble. Does that make them less worthy of attention? Should I be resolved to a kind of middle? I’m struggling to feel a full-throated “NO!” Do I want “followers?” Is anyone appreciating the example I’m setting? Again, I spend 95% of my life out to sea and alone.
Certain stints of positive feedback aside and pretending it’s not been empty or superficial, the examples I try to set often seem to mean something mostly just to me. I know that story isn’t complete and I do trust some people some of the time, but if I don’t know where I’m trying to go, why, or what doing one thing or another does to/for me? It’s game over. It has to be for me. I have to make sense for myself first. On the whole, people are silent and afraid and waiting to get drunk before they tell me they read or like something I said. I feel like I’ve drowned myself in those kinds of people, and thus am shopping around the narrative for the proper cloth under which to be water-boarded.
There’s still a lot of life left. There’s still hours in this day. There will be thousands of decisions I make over the next few months figuring out how to either cope or accept. I want the right kind of challenge. I want the option to sleep and wake when I please, even if it’s approximately at the same times. I want to enjoy the craft beer and burger wherever I smell it coming. I don’t want to continue pitting my practical needs against some story of indulgence or privilege. We’re all privileged, and have been. It doesn’t mean hate or punish yourself in stupid ways. It doesn’t mean swallow shit indefinitely and pretend it isn’t shit.
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