[1214] Tooth And Nail

I’m in a bit of a weird space.

This morning, like I have for many months, I went outside to feed a neighborhood cat. I’ve spent over a year endearing myself to him, leaving food in my field before he would dare approach. He inched his way as time went on, to now he rubs against my leg and waits by the door. I’m fairly certain he’s the father of 2 kittens my friend decided to adopt recently. He and one of my other cats will, somewhat routinely, fight when I go to let mine outside. My cat started as an outdoor cat who was considerably more trusting and agreeable when he randomly showed up 5 years ago.

Today, this cunt bit me. He bit the top of my foot in such an aggressive and cartoonish way I imagine it’s what a director of a movie would describe he needs to see so it plays right on camera and you know who he bit got fucked up. I had already put the food down and wasn’t even moving the foot in some kind of accidental provocation situation. I go inside and proceed to get scolded by AI over my handling of how to treat the wound, and he does the cat thing where he pretends we’re all good and rubs against the door frame.

I proceed to the nearest ER, because I live in the middle of nowhere, so Putnam County Hospital it is. There’s a lady at a welcome desk who I tell I’ve been bitten. She makes a very confused face and then asks me, I kid you not, “So, what do you want to do?” Bitch, I’m at the doctor, you fucking tell me.

She proceeds to tell me the walk-in clinic no longer exists at that location and is up the road now a part of the YMCA. In my attempt to, I guess, figure out what I want to do, I ask her if she has any remote idea how much it would cost to just get serviced here. She points me to the billing department behind her. I tell them my situation and that the front desk woman said they’d be able to ballpark me. They say, “Well, it depends on what needs to be done.” No fucking shit? 8 people behind 8 computers and 1 asks another she’s on a video conference with who says, “It could be anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000.” I leave, narrowly avoiding verbally berating a series of confused middle-aged country Whites.

I proceed to the walk-in spot. Naturally, their system can’t find me and my issue is lower priority than 7 people who walked in after me. There’s a standard procedure for this kind of thing, so I get a shot, a new bandage and cream, and two prescriptions. They have me reach out to animal control, which doesn’t exist in my area, and the health department. No one seems particularly worried about rabies in this area, so it’s monitor and report and don’t bother trapping the cat. All told, about $400. Eerily close to the amount of money I’ve wasted on less reasonable things relatively recently.

I missed work. My foot now is beginning to throb. I’m navigating work chats about entitled and aggressive IOP clients while simultaneously am planning and organizing a step-down house.

The parallels feel striking. I get cat who I’ve spent a considerable amount of time courting, rewarding, and responding to and yet for seemingly no reason, acted on instinct and bit the fuck out of me. I feel my stomach drop at the prospect of punting him across the yard in retribution. I have clients, arrested in their development and acting on insecure instinct lashing out over the program expectations. You can spend years of your life learning how to teach and address their issues and any given day be shit on “because.”

Can I afford the doctor’s visit and medication? Not really. Not in a way that keeps this is the realm of “mild inconvenience” versus “another mark on existential crisis Bingo.” But I can’t afford the doctor in the same way I can’t afford my concerts, most-expensive Belgian beers, T-shirts, car repairs, debt payments, tools, or anything I’ve bought my entire adult life what wasn’t Ramen, in bulk. I can’t afford it because I’m not in a system that is designed for me to afford it. I’m extracted from. My fear of the worst consequences of being bitten is leveraged.

The great irony of designing a system that genuinely is concerned, informed, and trying is that it will be treated like just another that isn’t. Our broadest cultural context is of greed, pride, waste, abuse, excuses, “it is what it is,” single-issue ignorance, ideology, and general standing hatred. How could you believe, in your heart of hearts, that anything isn’t out to kill you? This is any wild animal’s instinct, not least of which because it’s true. Then, when I punt it across the field, welcome to your self-fulfilling prophecy.

You can’t treat clients like wild animals, but you’d be stupid to characterize much of their behavior as anything more complicated than that. I know a cat can’t be held accountable and anything I do for or to it is about me. At a certain point in our discourse, I’m going to feel inclined to blame you for being a bitey cunt.

[1213] Stupid Monkey

Part of me feels like what I want to say could fit on an index card. It’s a part that doesn’t need articulation. It’s the face a monkey makes when he sees he’s being paid unfairly for the same task as another monkey.

There’s a “common sense,” I find is rarely lost on anyone at the level of “feelings.” This isn’t to say that the feelings, in and of themselves, are “reasonable” or “justified.” But they bind what is an otherwise vast array of different cultural expressions or norms. It’s so common, even when a monkey does it, we get it immediately. No doubt you’ve seen videos of other animals who can also, not-so-miraculously, clock when they’re not treated fairly.

I think this is no small point to linger on. As we’ve psychologically fractured into individualized scrolling-hellscapes of errant opinion and trolling hatred, it’s the hate that binds. It’s the confident ignorance that universalizes. It’s the fear, insecurity, and desire to control that gets fed.

Today’s reddit scrolling felt acutely dismal. I’m on team, “we’re literally trotting down the road to fascism.” I don’t read headlines about “jokes” about cancelling elections or redistricting as “just politics.” I see and listen to the death by a 1000 cuts nature of decline every day. I’ve made comments for years that I always hoped to be “the first Jew out of Poland” when the next global war takes place. History rhymes, and there’s echoes all over the place if you’re one of the handful of people still reading books and studying reality.

I’m like most people my age, first-world broke, but incredibly rich relative to the rest of the world. There’s a version of my life that ducks and covers as more and more suffer, and I, probably, remain one of the ones who talks about the camp they set up just down the road in Shoah 2. I’m not pretending they won’t or can’t come after me, but I’m decently far down the list if I don’t pop my head out.

I think a lot of people in similar circumstances are making that same calculation. The problem, of course, is that is precisely how we all end up dead. I’m also very loud, angry, and want to fight wherever a I can. Practically, this often translates into exactly this. I’m using my voice where I see relatively few others doing so. I’m trying to capture the contradictions in my behavior, goals, and perspective so I don’t sit paralyzed and making excuses.

While “the world” feels like it’s burning down, I’m sitting on the edge of an opportunity to distance myself from it even further, potentially making a lot of money starting a sober-living house. I’ve never needed that much money to conduct my life in the first place, and this opens me up (at least my thoughts) to levels of luxury, security, and indulgence I dreamed about as a greedy kid. It’s hard to square that with my deeper desire to just exist in a state and country that even pretended to have “common sense.”

Instead, I feel baked into a cake of helpless ignorant hatred and excuses. It feels like “natural license” to exploit and extract as much as I can before I run away to somewhere “safer” or “better.” To me, the “homeland” is wherever the ideals are being expressed and defended. “America’s,” alleged, ideals are often in considerably better shape and display elsewhere. I’ve never felt like the kind of person who would just go along with being drafted into a war I didn’t choose.

At the same time, again practically, I’ve felt for years the disconnect between what I might be able to do on any given day that meaningfully accounts, combats, or changes the overall circumstances I’m embedded in. I vote in every election, and it’s meant what? I get the consequences of ideological capture of institutions and redneck pride indefinitely. I listen to dozens of podcasts and used to read a minimum of 30 articles a day, for years, about the world. What did it get me? Low-grade depressed and ever isolated as I struggled to clock why no one wanted to talk to me.

I think my confusion, outrage, and sense of helplessness in spite of the growing localized evidence of my capacity and nature is something that can be universalized. I think if I, of all people, am calculating I need to extract and run, your “average” person with myriad more obligations, mental health struggles, and financial woes…I mean, they’re so tortured and lost they’re cheering on a fascist takeover, environmental destruction, and every attack on science and history they can muster. In addiction-speak, millions of people have caught the “fuck its,” and are burning everything down around them.

The ”non-voters” win every election. The people who are looking to be led around by the nose. Most days it feels like the best I can do is ensure I don’t get trampled and try to pass along more than an enfeebled joke to the next leading farm hand. I don’t actually think, my pretentions as they are, I’m actually licensed or called to exploit people. I don’t feel good about the prospect of abandoning ship, but I’m not going to pretend I don’t know how to swim. Millions and millions of people until the end of time are going to deny we’re in the same boat as we all slowly drown.

The monkey will scream and fight and struggle against someone trying to drown it. You’ll tell me the researcher was joking. You’ll tell me it’s normal to drown a monkey from time to time. A majority of onlookers will then say something like, “I don’t get political about monkeys or water.” I feel like it doesn’t take a big brain or moral courage to figure the absurdity out and why you don’t want to be a monkey-drowning cunt or lazy apologist for the ones that do.

[1212] Make A Wish

Superficially, I have a problem with a refund.

On July 4th, I pretended I had a nephew that made $436 worth of purchases on the game Last War to unlock a gorilla. It’s over a month later. None of the attempts to get the money refunded went through. There’s been some miscommunication between Google Play, the game developers, and maybe the credit card company. I’m now locked out of the game. They believe $125 was, in fact, refunded. It wasn’t, as confirmed by Google Play and my credit card company yesterday.

The last time I wrote about what I had done, ChatGPT told me that I was defiantly asserting my agency under a backdrop of circumstances that often feel overwhelming and out of control. I found it curious how quick it was to justify my behavior. I wasn’t looking for “real license” to make what I had done “feel better” or seem reasonable. But, like I’m sure the vast majority of what those algorithms have trained on, I found it.

Less superficially, I have a problem with the goals and purpose of my money.

I’m the kind of person who has spent years of his life proud to eat Ramen and hotdogs in service to saving. When I had a goal to buy land, I saved and sat on thousands until I could buy it, in cash, for $15,000. Before I began working with a debt consolodation company, I’d never missed a credit card payment. I never even owned credit cards until 8 years ago, meaning I lived by the idea that if I didn’t have the cash, it wasn’t “for me” or I couldn’t afford it.

I recall getting business advice from some older gentlemen who headed some business association in Bloomington. I’ve always been entrepreneurial. They said, “Get a loan.” It made sense to them, having started their businesses in the 70s or 80s, that you just get loans, pay them back over time, and it’s fairly simple and easy to get rich if you just keep at it. They had not updated their perception of the landscape. I graduated in the wake of the financial crash. Business loans for enthusiastic up-and-comers hadn’t been a thing for quite some time.

I also, once, got a loan to get a car. I found the entire process and prospect of paying it off so miserable, I’m almost positive I crashed the thing on purpose so insurance would pay it off. That, surprisingly, went exactly as subconsciously planned. I’ve been loaned $2,000 to pay off my shed-turned-house from an ex-girlfriend. I found the experience so torturous, I worked 20 hours a day for weeks to pay her back in 3. She didn’t need, want, or ask me to do so.

If you look at my entire life in terms of assests, I’m in the black. If you look at my day-to-day approach to money, you’d think I was a desperate poor person just trying to enjoy fleeting indulgences in a way that invites and deserves judgment from onlookers.

As I’ve gotten older, and acquired the things I wanted, my approach to money has gotten even looser. Thankfully, I’m generally in good health. I don’t have to keep my prescriptions flowing. I don’t have kids. I don’t have a mortgage. I don’t need premium gas for my car that cost less than my guitar. I have “first world poor” people problems in trying to find memorable experiences and tolerable people to engage in…whatever it is we do…kind of things.

I could pay another $125, get my access back to the game, reassure my alliance that it was just a hiccup, and kick myself for playing with fire. I could then spend another few months arguing with the world’s dumbest, slowest, and most intransigent “support,” I’ve encountered in years trying to get that money back. With each paycheck that comes in, it’s easier to swallow “stupid” and “wasteful” expenses, so 2 months from now when they’re still trapping me in some AI email loop, I’ll open my account, see 3 or 4 thousand dollars and think to myself there are bette ways to spend my time.

But I will still have a deeper, ongoing, and predictable problem. That money will face the same circumstances the $1,000 I have now does.

Let’s provide even more financial context. I bought a $475 dollar My Chemical Romance ticket. I’m in the pit for Linkin Park in 2 days, and the pit for System of a down on the 31st. I’ve spent $6,000 on people I’ve tried to hire in service to getting past business ventures launched. It amounted to an expensive lesson about how to manage and what to expect from people, particularly working with them remotely. Every meal my friend and I go out to lands somewhere between $45 and $100 dollars. I’ve paid my electric bill for 6 months in advance. I’ve spent, approximately, $4,000 on band t-shirts over the last 3 years. I almost never donate to charity and would piss in most collection plates.

I don’t “need” any “thing.” I’m full, clothed, and entertained even when it just looks like preoccupied. I have an budding opportunity to open my own extension of my current job, a step-down sober-living house, that could gross $4,800 a month within the next few weeks. I could go make enough money to cover every “stupid” thing I’ve bought Door Dashing at peak times for a few hours each day. I’m in no way unable or unwilling to account for my worst instincts or decisions regarding cash-flow.

Not superficially, I have a problem with meaningful investment. 

For years, arguably, I’ve been “fine.” Not driven. Not motivated. Not “passionate” (a word I continue to hate). I just am. I’m just capable, therefore maybe I do. I get jobs when the aimlessness of not having to be anywhere starts to grind me down. I spend money I both have and don’t to introduce drama, perhaps, maybe, but probably not, worthy of “me” and the creative ways I might go about fixing the problem.

As a counselor, investigator, and general advocate working with people on their linguistic barriers, self-esteem issues, and terrible framing of their circumstances and capacity, it’s incredibly hard for me to spin a story about my life or behavior that isn’t true. That doesn’t mean I don’t have blindspots. That doesn’t mean you have to agree with or believe anything I say. It does mean I know when there’s a temptation or desire to be deceptive or downplay the extent of when my behavior feels pathological or like “some addict shit.”

I didn’t really want to talk about the gorilla spending. It felt particularly acutely stupid. It also felt like it nagged and highlighted that incoherent hole at the center of my “fine” that’s never as fine as it “could” be. I feel like I owe, at least one person in particular, money who, also, hasn’t asked, doesn’t need it, and wouldn’t have offered it if she didn’t recognize what it was paying for at the time. Part of me still feels hung up on getting fucked for $12-20K in the effort to flip a house to only my ex-friend and his parents’ benefit, and the $25K I was supposed to get as a result of my grandparent’s house getting sold. I’ve been fucked out of more money than I’ve lost in service to my actual goals or folly combined, for 20 years, 4 to 5 times over.

My experience with money feels reflective of my increased richness in time. Traditionally, I’ve found ways to give myself “too much” time. I spent most of my 20s learning how to depress myself reading about the world all day, getting good at guitar, and learning how to watch TV. My friends stopped wanting to hang out, or even leave the house. Then they started moving away, and have never found the nostalgia or romance button that bothers with meeting up again when they came back. I’ve been able to spend good portions of time with the last 2 people that will have me, my dad and friend who will both be at Linkin Park with me. What are we all going to do there? Drink expensive beer, buy expensive t-shirts, scream with Chester’s ghost over ambient feelings that one hopes don’t echo reasons for a new self-righteous suicide.

Music means something to me. I’m genuinely excited and anxious and don’t wish for anything to go wrong so that I can experience the shows coming up. I’ve been to 362 shows in the last 3 years. Most often, you see solid and talented people who put on a good show. There’s a handful of bands that really seep into my bones, and they’re all mega-famous and playing in Chicago the same month.

Once, I didn’t fight to stay at a concert I only saw half of because my friend got sick. I tried to maintain perspective and respect. I’ve seen 2 of the 3 bands we missed, one at least twice, in the past. I watched full recordings of the shows a few days later. My friend means more to me than seeing the shows live, nagging “completionist” itch notwithstanding. The game, I’d been playing for 380 days straight before I was locked out, at least an hour each day, tapping the screen hundreds, if not a thousand times. I’d made “friends” at least as superficial as any in “real life.” I’m probably in the top 20% of players in terms of team power and time invested.

But I don’t really care about the game. I care about letting my alliance know what happened to me. I care about getting treated “fairly” in one more arena that is designed to exploit and extract. I care about not feeling at the “mercy” of glitches and not falling prey to sunk-cost reasoning. I could spend the $125, start the new arguments, get right back into the “flow” of tap tap tapping to collect resources and upping my stats. Why? Had I not been invited to an alliance, I would have deleted it shortly after downloading it and finding out the advertised scroll game was only a mini portion of the whole thing.

I want to have a life full and meaningfully busy enough where I don’t find myself embroiled in problems like these. I ask people often if they’re attempting to “fix” something that has nothing to do with them or their real goals. I’m rich in plenty of ways, but still don’t “feel” rich or responsible in pissing away money to account for mild inconveniences or so I can double down on a game that’s designed to function like a slot-machine addiction. I can’t even take solace in the idea that I’m just suffering compulsion. I’m not. I’m meandering into things because I haven’t felt enough of or the right kind of pain that might lend itself to growth or stability. I’m sweeping up the mess of debts, disorientation, and disaffection.

[1211] For The Longest Time

To my mind, I am a master of nothing. By itself, that sentiment reads incoherent and indulgent. It might be better understood as a feeling in the shadow of watching or listening to a master. I’ve just finished the And So It Goes documentary series about Billy Joel. This is a man so woven into culture that I found myself going “Oh yeah, that’s his song too,” for approximately 5 hours, somewhat floored by the idea that anyone could create that many hits. I googled how many songs he has, and it said 122. 33 have reached Top 40, 13 in the Top 10. That’s 27% and 10%, respectively.

 

What would it even mean if every 4th thing you created functionally had a global audience? Or every 10th thing you made, a massive plurality of people would want to see it, sing it, use it, or reproduce it? He took music lessons, but can’t really read music. He borrows and steals from his musical influences. He kept at it. He said, “Fuck You,” with a capital U, and he wrote how he honestly talked. He doesn’t even seem to really clock how impactful his music is or what it’s meant to stand up and represent it in the manner in which he has.

 

But a master is part of a tribe, a legacy. My mind went to Michael Jordan in thinking about who to compare mastery to where it’s so unequivocal. Who is Michael without The Bulls? Certainly everything human about him. Is Billy alive long enough to create what he has without his family?

When I reflect on my motivation as a child, perhaps the largest portion of it was being seen. It really seemed to matter that I was smart and did well in school. People talked about me, and praised me, and told me of all the jobs I’d probably have. I belonged, as the smart kid. I was something by moving fast and could be excused for being obnoxious or immature. I could “master” school, but “I” didn’t really have anything to do with it. It was safety, because I was afraid of consequences if I fucked up. It was compulsion, that still manifests as dreams in my 30s as panic I forgot to turn something in or won’t graduate.

 

Mastery is no substitute for what is missing. Billy Joel’s been married 4 times and struggled with addiction. Jordan’s a gambler. Whether someone’s running away from or straight through their trauma, you can’t argue with the results provided they survive and have an environment that allows for the churn.

I’ve trained myself to be considerably less compulsive. I don’t mourn it, but I miss it. I miss the energy of it. I miss the enthusiasm, even if it was bolstered by naivety. I miss feeling like things were achievable, and achievable in fantastic and magnificently large ways that no one else could see but me. I wink wink and nudge at that capacity sometimes, but I’m not embodying it. I’m often waiting for the motivation, the excuse, to tap into what would otherwise be a “master’s” bottomless well of compulsive creative energy.

 

I have a lot of confidence in myself. I don’t have a lot of confidence that I would keep it under control. I think I would latch onto things in an increasingly unhealthy way and restart what I assume to be the engine of alienation that’s gotten me where I am now. It’s never meant to be overstated, as I have friends, and one in particular I’ve been doing a ton with the last couple years. It’s more that, if you’re not willing to settle down, people stop really even talking to you. A master would be thankful for less distractions.

 

I feel foolish that I’ve waited until my 30s to be more “open” or “expansive” in my interests. Just as I want to see more of the world, try new foods, or meet people and engage in different cultures, we’re spiraling into a digital monoculture hellscape of isolated feeds and endless depression/anxiety cliches. When I didn’t have the headspace to truly see and take in the world I was a part of, I tuned in just in time to watch it flicker away. Are 1 in 4 of my observations and digressions something a quasi-global audience would dine on? Are 1 in 10 something they’d come back to again and again and weave into what remains of our culture? Could I achieve such a feat over attention at my own pace and on my own time?

 

I’ve been to some 360 concerts and comedy shows over the last 3 1/2 years. 360 times where an average of 3 or 4 acts are jockeying for the chance to be seen. Allegedly, they have something to say. It’s possible they don’t know how to be anything else besides performer. They might be driver by compulsion, complacency, or comfort. We criticize them too harshly at our peril. I’ve bought at least 100 shirts, plenty of stickers. I’ve shaken hands with what might be stars, or absolutely already are stars in their domains. Their obligation is the same as mine, to master their act. They’re smarter than me in trapping themselves into songs or a routine.

 

What do I do? I surround myself with instruments I play occasionally. I build a wood shop and show off when I cut grooves into a scrap board. I write, not for “publication,” A.I. often nags, but as a “raw” thing for niche plugged-into-whatever types who you’re certain unironically tout their awareness and cultural bona fides. When I sit for too long, I look for another show, or I rearrange the deck chairs. I notice, deeper*the cracks in anything I’m doing well or well enough and contort myself in service to inevitable* fallout.

 

I am a master of retention. I have and keep stuff. My feelings for more than 20 years are chronicled and one click away. My fruitless hopes zombie stomp across my potential to act every day. I keep the memory of the spite that sent me over every cliff I could find. I gaze upon the wishlist items, dumpster dives, and single-use clutter of my insatiable consumptive substitutes. I can hold my pee like I hate my bladder.

I’ve been throwing a lot away. I occupy a relatively small space, so clutter becomes apparent quickly. More than my desire to get rid of anything, I just wish there was room and that everything had its place. I wish the use I once had for something might renew, and the inherent value never forgotten. I think I have a hard time throwing out anything I’ve found useful. I have a hard time disassociating from things that have felt like “mine,” or represent something larger about me. It’s hard not to infer or conclude about the people in my life who I would have considered family and how little I must have registered to them.

 

I had hundreds of people in and out of my apartment and house in college. Some of them live 45 minutes away. I’ve had 25 different jobs and hundreds of coworkers. A handful linger on facebook. My graduating class had like 700 people in it, and today one of those classmates I’ve been to 21 shows with this year, with another 17 lined up. She had a brief hiatus for 8 or so years in Florida, but damn, the difference a single person makes

 

I wonder if the allure I feel, the false overwhelming security and confidence of “my crowd,” back then is the spell people are under by default. It’s their families that eat them alive. Their unchecked word choices and posture. Their neatly packed goals and accolades for following the expectations. It was something new and invigorating to feel like I belonged to something again in college. I thought of friends as an extension of myself. I wanted to do things for and with them in a way that felt like things mattered or spoke to our future together.

 

But I’ve always been on the outside. I’m watching and noticing patterns. If I had that feeling since birth? If it occupied a place where I was taking it for granted and it was just this unconscious place I “built” my life and relationships around, of course it becomes easy to ignore or discard what doesn’t conform. It wasn’t new to them, that feeling of belonging to something. They’re normal people. They belong by default.

 

How could I take it personally if we don’t even see each other as persons?

 

So you master your game. You write your song, and then “people” do whatever they want with it, interpret it, you, sideways, backwards, and in ways that obliterate you entirely. If you wrote it for you, it stabilized you, it made you laugh, it hit the frequency that one other person could hear, you’re golden. It’s all you “could have” done to begin with. It’s all you can do right now. I don’t blame people for not even knowing what they were lying about. I don’t blame myself for falling for it. If I’m going to discover a tribe where whatever I’m a master of might truly shine, it’s not going to be within the romance or nostalgia of a compelling and false premise. I still like the idea that I could turn living alone in a shed in the middle of nowhere into a spot that attracts the people I need.

[1210] It's The Way You Want Me

I’m out of sorts. I’m feeling a level of creeping panic and disorientation that hasn’t been around for a while. I’m finding myself in the midst of the “slow creep,” where I’m looking for some kind of “relief” or way to get “anchored,” and as a result of not finding it, am tempting fate with some profoundly questionable decision-making.

The first was to fuck-around in a stupid phone game, spend an obscene amount of money, and then try to get it back. I’m forever, always, at-once, broke, but always find/make the money I need to stay in the piddling first-world-poor place. If I don’t get the money back, nothing materially changes in my life, I just get to point to a new bar/low for stupidest thing I’ve ever spent money on, and I’m someone who has spent thousands attempting to hire people for jobs they couldn’t do and tools I’ve used sparingly to not-at-all yet for years.

That’s more to the point than it sounds. My spending is, hopefully, in service to my actual goals and things that bring me positive feedback. From band T-shirts to instruments, I’m never upset when I actually do use them. I don’t hate the food I eat. Even if it takes me getting to some level of infirm, I do plan to play and complete all of the games I bought. I’ve never wasted a dollar on a friend or in service to time together.

The odds of me getting my money back feel increasingly low, and even if I do, I’ll probably lose access to the game until I re-buy the requisite credits to match the in-game currency. I’ve played this game, every day, for between 5 minutes to several hours, 352 days in a row. I’m part of a team. There’s a rationalizing story I could provide myself that would go something like an infomercial, “For about a $1 a day you too can make friends, fight for your clan, and share memories of increasing conquest!”

It also just feels like an insult to how many useful and “hopeful” and meaningful things I’ve put money towards. It’s not precisely lighting it on fire, but that’s the kind of emotional space it’s occupying. Keep in mind, that’s the second-order effect and feeling. I’m only doing something like that because something else has shifted in me, and I’m not finding a great way to articulate it.

Today, for example, I left work “early,” we’re on a “points” system so I basically just forfeited the effort it would have taken to see anymore clients to get more points. I get home and just sleep. I’ve been groggy all day because I was up early to drive from NW Indiana to work in Indy. Now it’s 10:30 PM, I still have work tomorrow, but my energy is back, and I’m ruminating on this feeling. Part of the reason I left work is because I don’t “need” more points than I’m getting, and I’ve been taking big bites of my time back that are normally spent in work environments.

At the same time, I’m still in debt. As a recent discussion with one of my friends reiterated, it’s never been close to the kind of debt people went in for school, and are still paying back, and whether it gets paid tomorrow or over the course of my debt-consolidation plan, my day-to-day still stays the same.  Shouldn’t one of my “values” be getting debt-free again? Shouldn’t I be “focused” and “mature” and ensure I’m meeting my obligations?

There’s the perpetual rub. It’s all a giant joke. The game is rigged. The opportunities, while theoretically legion, are overstated and require obscene levels of luck and privilege that go just as understated as everything else is preached at nausea-inducing volumes. I say in counseling that an excuse is anything that puts distance between you and some decision, and a reason is something that contributes to taking more responsibility and building more context around decisions. I made the decision to fuck around in the game. I’m in a context that feels hostile, arbitrary, and pointless in explicit and acute ways. i don’t think it’s a coincidence I decided to act that way on July 4th as the monstrous bill is signed into law poised to functionally kill the people I work with every day.

When you map that reality and millions of things that speak to why it’s going to play out as reliably as any atrocious set of behaviors over my lifetime, why not strong gorilla in gambling game instead? Nothing registers as really mattering. Instead of choice paralysis, why not choice spontaneity?  As long as I’m still fed and “they” are still focused on the immigrants and not me - you know, because it’s not like there’s a “and first they came for” poem about that sort of thing, who cares what I’m doing?

This is no way to live, and to listen to conservatives tell it, this is why there’s a resurgence and enthusiasm or “coolness” to becoming religious. Lost? Come right in! All the excuses you need! I don’t know why we think we should be proud of this. We’ve so broken the social contract and reasonable moral exchanges that we’ve gone native and prefer the irrational comforts handed down through authority and magic as though reason hasn’t provided the spoils of Western civilization. If you’re clocking that people are turning religious, that should be your canary that we’re fucking up in a bigger way than is even already being advertised.

How am I going to find my brain and focus though? How am I going to find a way around doing dumb shit for its own sake because I can’t otherwise cope with the infinite hollow sucking me into the abyss somewhere just below my heart and brushing against my gut? Writing is by no means a comprehensive fix. I don’t wish to spend the next months/years of my life thinking about all of the other “stuff” I would have, could have, should have bought with that money. It wouldn’t be fair to the honesty of my feeling or perspective. Even my “best” and “most reasonable” projects are similarly undermined and arbitrary, if only because they just have to do with me and my preferences. I can understand that and not beg for a savior to fill in the blanks.

I have at least a somewhat-powerful-videogame-gorilla’s worth of stuff just occupying space an arm’s length away I might touch or use once a month, often less. That gorilla is killing video game zombies as I write this. Was I making some desperate round-about grasp for continued agency? That’s what AI argued in analyzing the last thing I wrote about the situation. Is AI known for it’s propensity to dress-up excuses to make you feel inflated and engaged? What tool built by lonely greedy ideologues could do anything less, better, or most often?

What’s sticking with me is how, I don’t feel “good,” about the mess I’ve created, but I don’t feel bad…enough? Rarely do I operate with the requisite fucks for most things, but I don’t know that the “pain” I’m causing myself is going to have anything to do with how or whether I’m inclined to do something similar again in the future. That bugs the fuck out of me. I don’t want to be known as someone like that. Talk about a complicated phrasing. I don’t want to preemptively justify doing shit like that by “just accepting” that from time to time I’m going to whip out my wallet and chuck it in the lake. Why? In protest? In reactionary panic? Because I’ve ceded to confusion and depravity of my overwhelmingly arbitrary day-to-day existence?

I clearly have considerably more questions than answers. If I get my money back and account suspended, I’ll just be back over at Candy Crush, which I’ve been playing for at least 12 years now, never spending a $1.

[1209] Ladies And Gentlemen

 It’s 12:42 AM, July 5th, and there’s still a handful of explosions in the background. Again, I have not traveled to location where fireworks are on display. Again, I have a deep and abiding feeling that “things” are wrong. I’m otherwise spiraling within my decadent observations and indulgences, wholly unprepared but for my observant practical nihilism and performative recursivity so astutely pointed out by various chat bots.

You hear how convoluted that last line was? See, it’s how the thought came to me, but it’s certainly not clear nor fit for publication. I, like us all, am my own brand and voice, no? If I want to get attention and be marketable, I need to sharpen up. If I want to echo David Foster Wallace or other angsty introspective documentarians of decline, I need to be persistent in my pitches to niche publishers so I can get a rabid 1,000-person-strong fan base.

One of the largest themes that beat up my brain is the story of performance versus truth. Most of my life, I’m treated with an extreme hostility when the other person feels how disinterested and unwilling I am to perform. I’m normal enough. I’ll say “bless you” and hold doors or compliment your clear attempt to be noticed. I won’t cosign your ambivalence to “real” or “heavy” ideas. I won’t pat you on the back for going halfway in your reasoning and action when the requisite moral or sensical behavior exists in the next nanosecond.

I take a certain comfort in the structure of performance. Pretty much every work environment serves to keep me from succumbing to the “freedom” of an unstructured day for indefinite periods of time after paying the bills well in advance. But I have to do extra work. I have to “be normal,” when every ounce of my being wants to rush to the end. I don’t need more ruminating and unpacking of the themes. I don’t need more analysis on the nature of the problem. I have the fix. I often employ the fix in my own life. My life isn’t just mine, so the fix is never comprehensive enough.

Again, that sounds abstract. An AI bot would tell me to anchor that to a specific example of a fix I implement in work or in how I approach my land projects. You know, for publication in a cleaned-up version of this, I’d want the reader to know the existential angst is driven by concrete examples and can translate into action. But also, fuck you if you’re so brain-dead you can’t take any single line and consider if you’ve felt the same or it resonates along an analogous example. Who the fuck am I writing for if not someone with the own running dialogue they’re desperate to see intersected with people like me?

I did something really stupid recently. But, it was only stupid if I don’t get away with it. I spent entirely too much money unlocking a gorilla in the game Last War. I, like all money, have and don’t have it to spend. I have no perfect system for saying war gorilla is “better” or “worse” than the alcohol, food, and concert tickets I otherwise spend my money on. It was stupid because I say so, and because I have deep resentment towards pay-to-play gaming. Also, I can probably get the money back because I immediately reported it as unauthorized spending I blamed on my non-existent nephew.

That I would even have this as a scene to play out in life testifies to the fundamental arbitrariness and decadence of my existence. I go from broke to 1st-world poor or hood-rich in months. I don’t tithe to feed the hungry, I buy band T-shirts of decent players. I’m drinking an over-priced beer I’m not really enjoying. I have 2 phones, one to more easily facilitate my TV and music habits entirely.

Here there’s a temptation to talk about what I do for a living to like leverage against how I assume I might otherwise be perceived as a piece of shit. It’s interesting to me because it would be part of the performance. Don’t you know? I work to help people maintain sobriety! I can get a little loosey-goosey in my spending because I’m a do-gooder! Go me! I work a job like that because I’m incidentally equipped, not because it’s a calling or measure of moral superiority. I’m driven by a desire to be understood and see things I take for granted manifest in new and meaningful ways for people. It’s as much a selfish pursuit as anything else. And, it pays.

“Things,” for me, are so good. Like, so good. I eat what I want. I have incredible friends. My dad and step-mom are unwaveringly supportive. I have back-up plans if shit gets dark. I own several vehicles, land, expensive toys, and cats. I’m healthy and can do the yoga poses on IOP yoga days. My job is weirdly occupying a space where I make just enough money for the amount of time I’m putting in which is allowing me to progress on land projects and not feel burnt out.

And yet, it’s not about me. What I want, at bottom, really has nothing to do with me. I’ve known about me and what I’m capable of for as long as I can remember. I get so bored with myself, I invite stupidly-expensive gorilla stories into my narrative. I want to believe in more than me. I want to genuinely think our collective space can achieve what I do for myself. I want to trust and invest and discover the focus that makes idle occupation of funds or time mute. I want you to have what I have so that we can play a different game of creative exchange instead of whatever you want to make of this fascist hateful hellscape.

It’s when I acutely feel like I don’t know where to go that I turn catastrophically inward and invite arbitrary chaos. I don’t look for people to blame. I don’t scapegoat my sky-daddy. I don’t guilt-trip myself nor respect reflexively shame. I reassert the desire and try once again to articulate the nature of the loneliness. Certainly, let’s watch the movie, grab dinner, drink the beer, see the show, and liberally disperse our opinions. Will it last? Does it deserve to? And although the punishments feel constant and motivated in their ascent, are they translating?

[1208] It's Just That Easy

There’s something so fundamentally human that I think I will go my entire life unable to grasp “completely” or “seriously” or “empathetically.”

I don’t understand how people stay convinced.

I consider myself a deeply critical person. I’m exercising my judgment about everything, constantly, and it’s why I have simplified heuristics to remain sane. My cars are often old, dented, or cost less than my guitar. I just need it to get me where I’m going and it’s the greatest car it ever has to be. I have no genuine opinion that stems from the type of car that I have.

By contrast, I routinely experience people who functionally identify with their car and consider it an extension of their personality, taste, wisdom, etc. What this does is removes any obligation to say or think about anything “objective” regarding the car. Who cares how it was made, if it’s safe, or if it’s famous for being preferred by some notable despot of history, it’s my car, man, and nothing you can say about it matters.

I’m stuck just seeing “a car,” and it’s a “nice” car or “good” car if it cars correctly. If I need it for a more specific purpose, again, all that’s implicated is my sense of meeting the need. I don’t want to make a long trip in the backseat of a sports car. I don’t want to load wood onto the hood of my Buick. I love my truck because it helps me get work done, not because, “Geeerrr, man, truck!” Or because I want to be seen some kind of way. Incidentally, almost always if someone’s a cunt riding my ass, they’re in a truck.

To me, when you’re convinced, you’re stupid. You’re consciously and deliberately motivated to stay a specific kind of stupid to maintain some relationship to the identity you’ve…let’s call it worked-ish out. You train to prefer dodging skepticism, questions, or critical thoughts about whatever you’re convinced of. This is the maintenance of toxic family or relationship dynamics. This is religion. This is the heights of vitriol in music preferences. This is the irrational basis for war and control.

I’m extremely unconvinced. I’m interested in immediately changing something I’m doing particularly egregiously wrong. I know you can only have so much evidence and there’s always confounds, but I’m starving for ways to do “it” or “things” or “life” in ways that don’t make the whole project feel pointless and stupid. I feel incredibly alone in that posture. I’ve met maybe a handful of people interested in operating the same way, and often it’s extremely domain specific.

Well before the cesspool of the internet, I’ve been the kind of person who has fielded an immense amount of feedback about who I, allegedly, am. Boy howdy, do people sound convinced. I learned very quickly how that seemed to be most often what someone was willing to share, often a less than flattering opinion about how I talk, think, or behave. For most people, I suspect when they encountered the same thing it was pretty disorienting. The people I meet in counseling have an endless treasure trove of the traumas of youth and generational passings-on. I wasn’t one to be convinced. I immediately had thoughts, notes, and questions.

My mom used to call my brother and I “Serbian princes.” She considered us, as single-digit aged children mind you, on some pedestal because my grandmother would cook for us, and otherwise treat us nicely, I guess? My mother grew up in a verbally and mentally abusive home. She saw fit to pass on the tradition. She, clearly, was convinced about herself whatever she was told. So convinced, she found the wisdom to beat, belittle, and terrorize children. Also, you’ll be excited to hear, my brother doesn’t consider it abuse! He’s convinced! Pay no attention to me who has literally removed children, as a DCS assessor, from their homes for 1/10th of what happened to us. Same state, different decades, makes all the difference apparently.

I don’t want to be the kind of person who’s stuck doing something categorically stupid indefinitely. I think violently and routinely beating children is pretty stupid. I think using power in aggressive and domineering ways on people in sensitive situations is stupid. I think conversations where neither side complete sentences and begin to get loud are stupid. I think bending over and asking to take someone’s rapey dick move a little deeper is stupid. I think pretending like you’re too busy, too moral, too smart are all categorically fucking stupid.

I got a classic “criticism” in IOP class the other day. “What could you possibly teach us about addiction if you ain’t going through the same thing?” Many people in recovery, because they’re people, not because they’re in recovery, make a show out of how convinced they are correct. He’s right, no? Addiction is something so categorically different, defined, and dominated by those struggling with it. Obviously. Every scientist studying it. Every debate. Every counselor worth a damn is, or was, chronically abusing a substance in spite of the self-destruction.

Or, this is such an unimaginably stupid question, that it sits squarely at the center of my opening confusion. I don’t know how to sound that stupid on my worst day. I have no analogous topic or sense of defensiveness about something in my life that is like, “Oh, yeah, I sound like that when we talk about…” For most people, it’s their faith that occupies that space. They believe what they believe, circularly, forever, because. I don’t have that. I’m certainly not convinced of any given sky-daddy, nor am I convinced I have any fucking clue what it means to be alive, dead, or inextricably intertwined with everything.

I think it’s stupid to adopt catch phrases. Free Palestine? From what? The terrorists they elected to routinely terrorize? From the influence of Iran? Or are you, most likely, pretending to be an expert on global affairs, religious extremism, or Israeli foreign policy, and accidentally doing an antisemitism? I don’t have to be an expert to listen to 10 hours over 5 days on my drives to and from work the opinions of people who’ve lived, studied, or hobnobbed with the players involved for longer than I’ve been alive. Do you know what my opinion is after all that? You should listen to them too, and share who you’ve been listening to. Then, if we both want to pretend we, as individuals, have a dog in that fight, maybe we talk a few days later.

But people are convinced! The narrative is popular, therefore true! All my favorite bands and friends are saying it, and what’s ever gone wrong with punk or youthful energy? If there was a habit I wish we would adopt globally, it would be starting most sentences with, “I could be wrong, but here’s what I think.” Not picking a side. Not judgmentally labeling someone. Not decrying some grand victimized frame and indictment of power as though you have none.

When you’re convinced, you’re forgoing responsibility or choice. The conclusion gets to do the work for you. More importantly, it gets to take the blame when things invariably go awry. When you demonstrate to me how convinced you are, I return to one of my simple heuristics. “Oh, this is stupid, time to move on.” You’re not actually convinced, you’re woefully incomplete. You don’t like how that feels, so you anchor on literally anything, but especially on things that are culturally normative. Your car. Your girl. Your politics. But always your indignant posture that you met someone who sees through it and how it works instinctively, begrudgingly.

What are we to make then if you’re over there stewing and waiting to decry, “Ha! Fool! You’re convinced beating children is wrong!” Am I so unserious a thinker that I made some gross oversight? Or, in your eager temptuous posture did you not just highlight the nature of what I’m talking about? Are you genuinely trying to debate a child’s experience of abuse, or obfuscating because that’s all you know?

More to the point, I’m not convinced beating children is wrong. That’s not my framing, nor my language. I would describe, in detail, the research, the litany of people’s experiences, and my own, and use a mountain of evidence to say something like, “I’m 99% sure abusing a child is unlikely to get the desired outcome of doing so.” The more specific the scenario, details about the players involved, the better. Unless your goal is to fuck with that child, you’re probably doing it wrong. Don’t you want to know that?

[1207] Extra Ordinary

The last 2 days it’s been incredibly hard to focus. I’m entirely sure if anything happened. I feel like I’ve lost a beat, or like something that was previously animating dropped away. The days prior I was having fun, or trying, in spite of some aggressive feelings I was having towards no one in particular. When the weekend ended and I started back to work, I found it, and frankly still find it, hard to lock in and give a shit.

Yesterday evening I emailed my boss indicating a desire to maybe pull back on some of my work responsibilities and focus. My job, while not proving to be the often immoral and ridiculous environments most show themselves to be very quickly, is pretty messy in some foundational ways. I work for a sober-living/IOP operation. I conduct groups and carry out casework tasks. I’m currently obligated to carry out new person orientation and have been creating material for life-skills and case management that didn’t seem exist…at a company that’s been around for at least 5 years.

At first, this job was supplementing the paltry salary I was getting working for the Y. I got there in the morning after my first Y shift, left before the beginning of my 2nd Y shift. It’s messiness barely touched me. I decided to get myself fired from the Y, then I could neatly become “full time.” The messiness grew. I took steps to try to make it less messy like asking for the materials I’d be teaching in advance so I could make copies. I insisted we get a white board that showed the daily schedule so everyone could be right or wrong in the same way. There’s many, very simple, fixes like that which the place still needs, that I think can be accomplished in relatively short order.

At the same time, it hit me how often I seem to experience the same pattern in my relationship to work. I show up, experienced, energetic, consistent, and with a good and genuine nature at the prospect of demonstrating the work or a fix. A slow-creep of things that undermine the effort come in, and if I notice and speak to it, I also have to ensure I don’t do so in a hyperbolic or sounding-too-aggrieved type of way. There’s all this excess labor that forms “shouldn’t have to be this way” kind of sentiments in my head and gut.

If I don’t want to be rushed to make copies right before class, and to their credit, they give me the lesson plans in advance for 2 weeks, but forget the 3rd, I’m pulled right back into the anxiety and frustration over something “dumb” and “simple” that I’ve tried to fix several times in asking for the whole curriculum so I can spend one afternoon getting prepared for months in advance. Surely, it’s just a series of .pdfs somewhere. The rush in the morning bleeds into my attitude or sense of preparedness for group. The notes and tasks due after group maybe take a hit. Now I’m angling to “reset” the next day, trust violated, and my grasp of the spirit to make things work better loosened ever so.

On balance, I don’t know if I get 3 out of 5 days a week that I’ve worked there (it’s only been 2 months) that I’ve been able to anticipate, technically, scheduled and easily anticipated things. It’s incredibly disorienting and feels compounded when we’re trying to model behavior we hope our clients will adopt in service to maintaining sobriety. Do as I say, not as I do?

In 2 months, I’ve been witness to improvements. I’ve contributed heavily to them. I’m feeling protective or maybe defensive of my perspective that, for reasons I’ll never understand, needed to be the one to show up and make the changes. I’m worried the changes won’t stick. Or that the people who I’m trying to shape up and do better are stuck in a place that’s going to continually undermine the attempts to create better beats and downstream effects. I, never, just “trust” that my effort will be recognized or rewarded, nor do I think as a rule most people are concerned with quickly and materially altering the consequences of their blind spots.

It seems out of nowhere, but it’s also relevant that I just got some outside work done around my property. It was a reminder that I like shaping up my property and working to build/organize things. It’s something that takes a lot of time and I usually only ever have the time when I don’t have the money or the weather. It’s been incredibly hot lately, I have a little more time, and I’d rather be doing mostly anything here than somewhere else.

It feels key to point out I’m not impatient. I know change takes time. I know I’m not prepared to ride that empty broad sentiment indefinitely. I know I still retain the power to say I don’t want to nor can work as much as I previously thought if the instability feeling persists. I’m not shooting for some vague notion of stability either. I’ve worked for enough companies at all layers of social work and interpersonal drama to know what works or doesn’t independent of the players involved. Paperwork can be a savior. A shared calendar can cut through a lot of noise.

I want to believe really bad, in something beyond my friends, indulgences, and self. I don’t have a magic sky daddy or in-crowd I practice apologetics for. I don't have bad solipsistic philosophy or the personality disorder to uncritically tout my brand and content. I want to show the principles I’ve applied to my life in order to achieve what I have so far in a context explicitly suited to doing so. It feels like such an opportunity for a Shakespearean play-level tragedy to embody the fucking up when you’re proof positive, individually, the fuck ups need not be.

I don’t know if my focus fucking off is me trying to protect myself from what might be yet another catastrophic failure. I don’t know if I’m looking for license to distance myself in a more deliberate and polite way so that I might maintain a reference that won’t throw me under the bus. I don’t know if the heat is just making the ambient space we’re all operating within wonky in a way that can’t be accurately accounted for. I do know that I’ve been pretty locked in and inspired and motivated, and then it aggressively drifted away. It’s not gone. It’s not hopeless. It’s not even got a decently long list of issues that can’t be fixed. No one has shut down attempts to try or deny they are problems altogether like they did at the Y.

My coworkers are overwhelmingly fun and funny people as well. It’s as close to DCS coworkers as I’ve found, and even more raw in places. We’re dealing with about 80 people, on rotation, in early recovery and regularly getting shit on for things both in and out of our control. We got jokes. The elements that were impeding structure and growth were removed from the work landscape, the ones recently hired (basically 85% of the staff is less than 4 months) read as capable and reliable.

I want my focus back. There might be more begging for my attention, but this is my best first guess.

[1206] Bet

I’m not going to pretend like I don’t have days where I simply feel aggressive or like I want to fight. They are few and far between, but they happen. I don’t know if it’s a guy thing, or a me thing. What’s important for our purpose of writing today is that it’s not some innate and persistent hunger. I’m not trying to fight. I’m not desperately waiting for permission to be an asshole. I’m loathe to accept the invitation.

If you’ve been to a concert in the last few years, you’ve no doubt read the words that go something like “no refunds under any circumstances.” Weather rains out the show? It also washes the organizers’ hands of responsibility. You get sick? Ha! Go fuck yourself on that one in particular. They move the date and time? At this point, you’re not even talking about having made a real purchase with any genuine intention nor can you take any real responsibility unless you think literally all money spending is akin to gambling.

When I reach out because a date has moved, relatively last minute, months later, and to a date I know I can’t make, you are obligated to refund that money. You are obligated to refund that money because it’s not a fucking complicated thought experiment or rumination on morality. You’re obligated to return that money because you offered a service, production, show, whatever descriptor you wish to apply, and then do not intend to deliver on it. You’re not performing in my backyard on my timeline. You’re obligating me to plan on meeting the conditions of your venue. When you don’t meet your own conditions, you’ve violated the contract.

When you respond to my outreach with “No refunds, I’m sorry. Policy. Yada yada bullshit.” You’re inviting a kind of retribution and drama that is unbelievably unnecessary but for how it speaks to how and whether we’re able to exist with each other altogether. I’m decently disagreeable and have a vengeful spirit. I didn’t earn them, I think I was born that way. When you want to pretend like I’m crazy or entitled in wanting my earned money back for a thing you can no longer provide, I want to destroy you. I want to sabotage your toilet. Steal your shit. Throw a baseball through the window…you get the picture.

What I fail to understand is your lack of imagination. Are we living in a world so devoid of consequences? I think the answer is yes, but I maintain, I don’t care how ridiculous and backwards we get, I will remain of consequence. I will maintain a standard of reason and fairness. If you can’t get on the same page of polite exchange, I’m going to give you precisely what you don’t want and take considerably more from you than what constitutes a loss from me. You must understand, I’m defending civil society at this point. I didn’t hunt you like some crazed ideologue. I was invited by you to enjoy a show, and then you shit in my face.

Hyperbolic language is fun sometimes. But the point I think is sane and salient. I spend my time often encouraging people to not prioritize vengeance or repeat the stories of the injustices they’ve experienced on a loop. They don’t often grasp the nature of what they’re suffering in staying stuck on certain narratives. I know precisely the nature of my struggle and why “small” things need big defenses or reactions. I don't let the slow-creep of what’s essentially social suicide go ignored.

In the meantime, I’ve disputed the charge with my credit card company, filed a Better Business Bureau complaint, negatively rated their facebook and Google pages, emailed, messaged on facebook and Instagram, and am fully prepared to aggressively knock on a window and demand a manager every day like my name is Karen. We cannot keep putting up with this bullshit people. You cannot keep feeling the license to conduct yourself in a way that justifies this behavior. The irony of how often I’ll need to scream that at myself when my retributive self turns cartoonish is not lost on me. No less, I refuse to be a martyr for ambivalent selfish exploitation. I bet I value fucking up your way of operating more than you do my money.

[1205] When I'm Gone

I have a unique ability to trust in who I am. I presume it’s unique. As a counselor, and often when I reflect on conversations with friends or coworkers, I don’t get the impression others are as convinced of themselves. That is, they’re often “fascinated” or “frustrated” about their own behavior or in hearing about how I conduct myself. The most dramatic contrast is with clients. A deep ambivalence and skepticism is the default when I insist on performing habits of taking responsibility or looking for solutions. It’s a though I’m operating with answers and am pursuing the matter-of-fact or step-by-step means of trying to achieve the given thing, but am encountering people who either haven’t asked or can’t be bothered to believe there’s a question altogether.

At bottom, my mind wants to obsess over something. Call it autism-y. Call it compulsive. Call it ADHD. I want my attention sunk deep down into TV or a videogame, a woodworking project, a rabbit hole debugging something, yard work, practicing an instrument. Any one of those things could be a relatively indefinite obsession. I reach natural stopping points. My fingers give out. I run out of money. I get tired. But I crave a degree of engagement and stimulation at my core.

I’m not addicted to it. I’m not at the mercy of it. It’s just how I’m built. Knowing this, I also know I can, in fact, achieve pretty much anything I genuinely wish to do. That’s, at least, the most common way to phrase the idea that provided I’m realistic, even at the outer bounds of what one might consider realistic, I know I have the intelligence, drive, creativity, persuasive capacity, and time. I know what I’m prepared to sacrifice. I know at least half of the ways I’ll likely fail and what would be needed to carry on anyway.

You might well consider this all an errant faith claim. Fair enough. Faith without works is dead. Hence we arrive at the floor of my “belief” in myself system. I work. I put the time in. I make the drives. I have the conversations. I write the blogs. I try, really hard, to make peace from moment to moment, and I try to keep track of what is or isn’t working. I state my values constantly and then work to put them into the world. I pick hard things to do, and then show myself I can do them. You do this often enough, you’re allowed to claim you know something about how to conduct life.

What I’ve gathered as I’ve gotten older is that in spite of my work, I’m embedded in a significantly impactful series of contexts that don’t really care how quickly I can fingerpick or competently assemble a shoe rack. I don’t live in a county, state, or country that appears to agree on pretty basic principles for someone like me. Whatever heights I, or anyone bothering to do work, might reach, they will inevitably be cut short because the air is poison. This has humbled me. This has stifled me. I’m reticent to obsess and immerse because “it” always tastes poisonous. I can’t maintain innocent “passion,” I’m disingenuously distracting myself from “things” that need more attention. That’s no way to live, and that feels like precisely the point of ensuring we must. Why nail a Sum 41 song when insurrectionists are getting pardoned?

Life’s not fair! The dismissive and condescending will decry. And they are correct, in the weakest way. The counselor in me would question the framing of my last question. What does enjoying music or drilling a solo have to do with federal corruption? They only happen to both exist as facets of my perception that appear to influence how or whether I direct my attention. Fair or unfair, I feel I owe “the mess” more brainspace than I do the story of what I can do with perfecting an already written song. My relationship to both things is its own story. Maybe I get called on stage one day at a reunion show and get the chance to show off! Maybe fascism continues to win in greater and greater ways. One feels considerably more likely, and not just because I’m not appreciating art enough.

I used to think I had “good reasons” for a lot of my behavior, and come to find out even more of it was out of spite than I was already claiming. “I” used to be an unyielding reactionary force. Reacting to people’s judgements. Reacting to the helplessness and fear instilled in me growing up. Reacting to off-comments about how I talked or looked. What did I want? Who could even say back then, but I can speculate. I wanted to hang out at my grandma’s. I wanted to play videogames. I wanted to fit in.

I think a lot of the chaos I see in the world, in clients, in colleagues, is the same kind of misstep I used to make riding my reactionary energy. Bari Weiss recently told Coleman Hughes that The Free Press started as a reactionary response to her experience at The New York Times. Now she’s tasked with evolving it to be a center of people’s news or media diet. She never considered herself an entrepreneur or business owner, she’s just corralling the fallout of attracting attention over what she was reacting to. The “good reasons” might have been one or a few, but the ongoing story of the collective reactionary effort will be painted as though there was a method and guiding principle all along.

I’m still spiting circumstances more than living for things. I’m living to go to shows and hang out with my friends and dad. I’m living for the last few hours I spent inventing a multi-situational phone holder, playing with my tools and drowning in sawdust. I’m living in service to the, still pretty vague, story of what happens when I’m back out of debt, too comfortable with my job and regained my free time. I’m situated in a future hopeful the broadest institutional and spiritual failures don’t crash my plane on the way to Vegas for When We Were Young. Perhaps my industry goes bankrupt because “charity” and “grants” are needed to construct the Thunderdome approach to healthcare.

I just heard it, but forgot who said it, when they said the best thing they ever heard about how to know if you were rich. You’re rich if, had you even more money, you’d still be doing exactly what you’re doing. I’d still be building, just bigger and more efficiently. I’d still be going to shows, but in more exotic locations and with better seats. I’d be trying to hang out with more people, but likely from the crop who have the money to have the time. I’d probably spend more time catching up on the history of games I haven’t played knowing I don’t have to be anywhere else. I might get a personal trainer and cook or nutritionist.

This presumes a world you can basically trust. Overwhelmingly, I’d be doing what I’m doing, just taking errands out of the equation and building a team I can’t achieve organically. If I could create the adult version of my college party house atmosphere, I think that’d be swell. But, that wasn’t about what “I” could do as it was all of the players involved. If we’ve come full circle, it appears every potential player I meet is stuck asking questions they don’t feel obligated to answer.

I think I don’t want to wait until things get dramatically broken that we simply must react. I don’t want to wait until the next divorce or depressive episode to be relevant to a “friend’s” lived experience. I don’t want to be more bald and grey before it dawns on us that time’s almost up and the answers are already there, but they aren’t being acted on. I don’t want to think I’ll “luck out” and get brief stints of my “ideals” provided I treat most time as something to suffer the wait through and incidental to some vague fairytale about tomorrow.

I got really good at guitar and I love to play, but not in a way that started a band. I enjoy creating things and having the tools, but rarely invest the money and time to make things particularly pretty or consistently. I can get lost in plenty of stories, but I’ve already given myself to dozens of narratives in the past, and whatever I was missing that compulsively drove the play, I think I found. I’m not waiting for permission. I’m not confused. I’m not helpless or ashamed. I’m not even as alone as I’ve normally been. But I am still pretty singular in my perspective about how all of “it” works. I’ll continue to dream about the damage we could inflict as a group of like-minded individuals.

[1204] Just Chillin

Getting back into my role as an addiction counselor and case manager has me thinking more frequently about the themes I belabor in class.

One of them is “work.” I firmly believe that if you don’t feel like you’re working, you’re probably not doing your recovery correctly. That doesn’t mean you need to be manically occupying every moment so you don’t give yourself a chance to feel. (be it a craving or simple pleasures). It does mean when we’re exploring new boundaries, who is or isn’t supportive and why, or what it feels like to practice something new be it writing, conscious breathing, or exercise, if it was “easy” and you’re “killing time” or professing a cliche like “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do,” you’re lying to yourself.

Trust me, this position is often considered contentious or unreasonable. Surely, all that needs to happen is you being physically present, mostly, within the constructs of a recovery environment and in the presence of counselors, therapists, and peer supports, and when enough time goes by, poof! sober. Sober in such a robust and persistent way it’ll grant a new license to be pretentious and judgmental about those who haven’t done it like you.

When I moved to cousin-fuckistan, I routinely underestimated the amount of work it would take to reach a minimum level of comfort. Some people like the outdoors and can handle all sorts of weather. I need that AC. When you go to build something, the right tool makes a world of difference. An extra hand makes several worlds of difference. It started to sink in the resolve, planning, money, time, and disposition I would need to have in order to get the next thing. I started eating before I started, packing water, bringing “extra” tools, listening to my body when I started to get tired so I didn’t crush or cut myself out of fatigue and frustration.

I think it was a lot easier for humanity to find solidarity around things when we were all forced to work to survive. The argument from a conservative is that the negative consequences of welfare trickle down into how we conceive of ourselves as responsible conscious agents. They’re not totally wrong. They severely underestimate the degree to which the game is rigged and exploitation reigns. The liberal argument also rings true to me. But I’ve been around for, let’s say 20 “adult” years, and I’ve found 5 or 6 people willing to bet and work in bids to transcend the game, and the vast majority accepting or more or less making peace with their level of first-world poverty. Financial, "spiritual," interpersonal poverty or otherwise.

We’re working, somewhat, in service to basics. It has us believing that the effort we’ve put in thus far should suffice to get what we deserve. It has us shifting our concept of what we deserve to precisely what we’re getting. Our adaptability is a double-edged and dangerous tool like that.

What kind of work would it take to get to some form of globalized consensus? I mean the kind of world that bakes into the cake of “global understanding” that there will always be a forever-percentage of the most trolly/insane/just-asking-questions types that we can remain persistently confident might never again seize power regardless of their “platform?” How uncomfortable would we have to get trying, trusting, and investing in ways of being? And is it even possible to be intentional about it? I’m not so sure.

When I think about my “politics,” it feels weird to characterize it as some kind of “independent” position. It’s almost never I explain myself to someone, nor listen to where they are coming from, and there isn’t some kind of objective story to be told. I don’t meet people intimately familiar nor interested in learning the stats and science behind abortion before they offer their “strong” opinion about the sanctity of human life. I don’t meet people particularly concerned with “logic” or “existential assumptions” as they tout the dictates of their sky daddies and mysticisms. I think you get to maintain a certain wonder and deference to the myriad means of describing “power” that shapes or controls you without taking the extra step over the cliff and drawing conclusions about fate, ironic metaphysical constructs, or context-independent morality.

I think, for example, if you’re a death cult like Hamas, I want an extremely strong border with you and want to do just about everything within my power to eradicate someone who is willing to carry out the violence insisted upon. That can mean bombs, indoctrination, or painfully slow attempts at integration with the Western world. It probably means all 3 and more. It feels objectively true that debating tactics and timelines all need to be predicated on a fairly straight-forward idea about groups who kill concert goers. You’re also allowed to mourn the innocent civilians they embed with and regularly brag about utilizing in their sympathy campaigns. You can also ask yourself if they’re shielding themselves with someone who’s “soft” sympathies with their position is what got them voted into power in the first place.

But that paragraph alone takes a level of responsibility it’s hard or impossible to do if your identity rests in not grappling with it. I suspect there’s such a stigma around addicts because they’re simply a visceral example of our own posture as it relates to token issues. Who isn’t extremely dogmatic and intractable about any number of unhealthy relationships? Bill Maher recently said we need to move the narrative about personal responsibility and continue to take allegations seriously and hold men accountable through the efforts of metoo, but the women need to leave. The women need to be expected to, in one of his examples, take their private jets back to their loving rich families and stop talking about how toxic Shia LeBeouf is like they’re chained to the radiator.

Whatever it is we think we’re getting from tying our hands to various narratives isn’t as true as we think it is. That’s the work of articulating and reiterating where the lines are, why they exist, and what deciding what hills are worth dying on. I’m as confident as one can be that the next thing I profess to want will take time, effort, doing it wrong a bunch, and meaningfully engaging with the reasons why. The self-righteous are never wrong. The convinced are never patient. The noble and proud warrior can’t pronounce humility. These are defensive positions created by an ego that doesn’t wish to be threatened. It’s saying something objectively concerning about you if you consider new or more information a threat or something to fear.

The human animal is none of the things I talk about. It’s not what our biggest dreamers, creatives, thought-leaders, or scientists discover. The human animal is just waiting for the context, the excuse, to react in familiar and gratifying ways. The human animal wants to fit never asking where. The human animal wants to wink and nudge its way through a seemingly endless game of exploitation and distraction. The human animal won’t do the work. So where does that leave the humans? To my mind, at the mercy of the savagery and inevitable death that drives unbound nature. The appeal of the familiar religious fantasies will clench and suffocate as they do. The sins will pile up, and we’ll call the next, boring, compelled reaction a “revolution” and continue to pretend we’re ever going to take the requisite responsibility.

A client of mine wrote down that she was feeling lost and hopeless. She then said something about her ex and his behavior and, “if it gets to the point…” I stopped her. What? If it gets to the point, what? You’ll then have your excuse? You’re already at the point where you’re feeling what you wrote. There is no “point.” We’ve had several conversations on the best way to address her concerns which she’s provided thanks and expressed relief for in the past. Her job is to ask what her responsibility is to the feelings right now. Not after she constructs a false if-then scenario about him. Her responsibility is to bring the broader context into the catastrophized thought. Her responsibility is to respond to the feeling with things she can do to incorporate it, and barring that, steer away from the worst consequences of it.

I have interactions like that a dozen times a day. Someone might talk brilliantly, intimately, of the right and intellectual way to go about something, but it’s rarely acted upon or not felt. It’s not felt in their bones. It doesn’t serve as a quiet confidence built on example after example. So often it’s the ones contributing the most who feel like they’re not saying anything or “it’s probably of topic” or “I’m talking too much” as though there’s some neat and perfect answer I’m fishing for regarding their feelings and sense of being in the world. I remind them, it’s not just “addicts” that struggle to articulate and own what we’re talking about. It’s everyone. It’s the animals we all are that we’re up against.

The values need practiced and defended at all times. It’s work. There is no amount of shit you will eat that will absolve you of the choice to do so nor transform the flavor.

[1203] Same Page

It’s 3 AM and I’m home from day 2 of the Limestone Comedy Festival in Bloomington, Indiana. Earlier today, I was at St. George Serbian Orthodox Church in Schererville where I was a pallbearer for my 45 year old cousin’s funeral. It was close to 3 AM that I arrived to the area driving up the night before, and after a viewing, church service, burial, and lunch, I made the drive back, finding myself exhausted and briefly/uncontrollably drifting lanes just before the Lafayette exit I was looking to pull over on to take a nap.

 

For what my decision to buy a VVIIPP badge for the 3-day event might’ve suggested would be a flatly “fun” weekend packed with “comedy,” my cousin’s death being the most obvious wrench in my expectations is not even what’s mostly on my mind. I learned more about him from his obituary and eulogy than I had ever heard/remembered family talking about. As a basic human, it’s sad when people die and I’m not coldly dismissive of what my aunt is going through or anyone else in my family. Especially because I’ve gotten older, I just don’t play along anymore than I have to.

 

I suppose, again, we arrive at the notion of “playing along.” To be sure, I will never “forgive” nor “forget” the horrible things my family have done to both my dad and step-mom, grandmother, or myself. These are thieves. These are liars. These are greedy, insecure, and angry children who, as recently testified to in my cousin’s death, are willing to let those in their orbit suffer for their lack of accountability. My dad is 1 of 4. They all got the same parents, and he managed to be the only one who didn’t find a way to mock the examples my grandparents were trying to set.

 

At the same time, as I can already sense this is sounding incredibly judgmental or callous, I don’t pretend that anyone is anything less than an animal first. I had this moment as they were lowering the lid to my cousin’s coffin where I just looked around the room and felt this lightness about the terrible and inhumane or exploitative shit the people in my family have done. There was a useful narrowing of focus and forced perspective as the sickly mouse-like face of my cousin descended into his coffin and I looked at the congregates hold back tears or stare just past where he laid.

 

There’s a certain poetry to the idea that I go straight from comedy festival to burial and then right back to festival. There’s a certain highlight that I, in spite of my best effort, would find myself flirting with death on the highway. You really do want to believe something about the bigger picture. I couldn’t escape the thought that the reason we have this whole lengthy procession is to distract us from the responsibility that is begged in thinking death is the end. What if my aunt simply failed her son? What if she’s continuing to fail her remaining one who is struggling deeply with alcoholism? Now now, fuck all that noise, we’re gonna hang out soon in heaven!

 

The comedy festival is feeling feeble. There’s plenty of funny people, but I’ve never felt more like an afterthought in buying the highest-tier badge for something. Maybe the System of a Down “VIP” tickets once, but this is right there for considerably less money. You don’t feel the energy. You don’t get the sense the ones who have been doing it for…12 years…have figured out the rhythm. Did you know I get reserved seats right up front for shows that haven’t sold 1/5th of the room? If 30 or 40 people got invited to it, why am I seeing the same hosts and features multiple times? It’s very first or second year energy. They told me my badge would look the "coolest." It’s the exact same badge as the VIP.

 

I’m exhausted by what feels like perpetual unreality. My family isn’t real. The competence and “love” of comedy by whomever organized Limestone isn’t either. It’s so many people playing along with some idea of what they think the thing “should” be. At lunch, my surviving alcoholic cousin and I get along in a weird way. His energy and my fluid acceptance of it did not match the pleasantries vibe at the table. He shakes. You thought he was going to drop each bowl of food as it was passed around. I recognized how important it was to him that he wasn’t babied as he still managed to serve himself without spilling or breaking anything. He’s dealing with real shit, including recently diagnosed cirrhosis of the liver. I gather he clocks me as someone willing to meet him where he’s at.

 

The comedy festival is interesting if only because it’s a majority female comics, and younger people than me. It’s like this weird little microchasm into the broader fucked up world of lonely fascist men steering us to Handmaid’s Tale-opia. Tonight was karaoke, and by 1:30AM, when the songs were done, it was 30 girls in mom jeans and 90s dad sneakers talking too-enthusiastically to each other as people like me I assume felt reasonable in not even thinking about hitting on any of them. Tomorrow, we can get brunch with the comics. From what I’ve gathered, they’re mostly comfortable talking/working within their fellow comic cohort and marketing themselves or playing friendly with the locals wasn’t quite explicated in their contracts. I don’t blame them.

 

When I first started writing this I felt this desire to get on the same page. I was going to just list the things I “individually” felt and thought “everyone” could kind of support or understand. Instead, I’ll take one thing, like sneezing and saying bless you, to illustrate my frustration. I think we need to be saying “bless you.” I don’t think it has anything to do with religion. I don’t think you’re remotely sane if you find it offensive. At least half the times I sneeze, I don’t get a bless you. Every time I hear a sneeze, I say bless you. We need things like that to save us from the individualized algorithms. We need social norms back. 30 funny creative women should not be meandering about a bar in a college town during a festival because they can’t trust any man because “toxic” is all they’ve known and men are no longer being properly socialized.

 

The ideals live and die with each of us. My grandparents set examples. They died with 3 out of 4 of their children. To me, that says you need to work 4 times as hard as you might assume initially to maintain whatever it is someone was showing you is worth maintaining. You think you worship Carlin, Pryor, Williams, and Chappelle? Create something, in 12 fucking years, someone like them would want to play at. Stop “doing comedy business” and seek and celebrate those with the message. If you want family, don’t perform and pretend like mine, hold the line of standards and respect for yourself and what you contribute to the pot of wellbeing.

 

I think there’s like 5 separate blogs in here, but I had to say something. I have to say something because, whether it’s 40 comedians or 3 days or acquaintances who only see each other at deaths, no one else is saying what needs to be said or what I need to hear to suggest we’ll ever find each other again.

[1202] Ring My Bell

I’m dancing around writing because I’ve gotten home particularly late and wish to be done with the day. No less, my brain is buzzing, and pretending I’m focusing on TV and my delicious New Belgium Trippel isn’t going to serve me as well as just getting in the weeds.

I’ve gone full steam ahead with my new job after functionally begging The Y to fire me. I’m now back to my regular casework and IOP counseling space. There’s approximately 70 people living in 8 or 9 houses owned by the company I work for. I do 4 groups a week, and have made it my mission to assess the needs of all 70 over the last few weeks in an effort to standardize how we carry out casework or “life skills.”

This program is only 4 months. What I noticed immediately is how many people were discharging without any idea where they were going next. This is IOP. Some have transferred from other similar programs, some straight out of prison, some from homelessness, or inpatient detox. All very early recovery circumstances. It appeared like the owners had a blind spot in the expectations they had of the people in their care, and it was leading to this being a messy pass-through spot more than a place to really practice the necessary skills.

As I’m inclined to do, I started asking about what the whole picture/process was, and started brainstorming how to do it better. People don’t know where they’re going? Do we have any information we provide them to get a place lined up? No? Okay, let me do that. I spent 10 hours building a resource packet so, day 1, if you’re so inclined, you can call about what the availability might be at 6 different locations. I’m going to presume innocent enough oversight as to why this wasn’t standard issue already, but in modeling what I’m counseling, I asked what I could contribute more than bitch about, and then did the thing.

This gets into what get so exhausting about these environments. You can be the living active embodiment of the values you’re talking about, how you arrived at those values, and have a direct causal impact on the people you need to affect, and the overwhelming majority will still look at you like you’re high and full of shit. They’ll cling that much harder to what they know* and if you don’t relay “your” message in a way they care to hear it, be prepared for their emotional fallout.

I’m experienced and distanced enough to not take things personally. I don’t let verbal disagreements or awkward moments linger for some prolonged period of time. But when they happen, like they did today, it highlights the frustrating parts of work like this. I need to meet with 70 people a week, at least once, so I can get us all on the same page and hopefully empower some practical direct next steps. You’d think the relatively captive audience who are lucky enough to be in this program would be mostly receptive to what I have to give. Or, you’d be wiser to what it means to be an animal who is exhausted and learned to cope with addictive substances.

At least half of any house I visited is often asleep. Doesn’t matter if I’m there at 1, 3, or 6, or if I saw them awake earlier in the day for IOP. Almost none have a job, but say they want/need one. Almost none have resumes, but claim they can create one. Almost none know where they’re going to go, how to get their personal documentation, or find the nearest open food pantry. But, they’re asleep! Like there’s nothing to do, learn, or figure out. And to be sure, I’m not begrudging anyone their developmental capacity or if they struggle to read or write. I’m talking people who are perfectly capable who, somehow, find so much time to sleep, and fill their waking hours with criticisms about how the program isn’t working for them.

When I show up with a resource packet, I have people waking up just long enough to say “Okay, I’ll come in the kitchen” and go back to sleep. I have people taking “important phone calls” and “gonna smoke real quick” ducking sitting down for even 10 minutes. I have people who manifest migrains so they don’t have to leave their room, but they were healthy enough to engage in trafficking teenagers the night before. Or, you get people who, it’s as if they can’t really listen, so if you deliberately and explicitly say you’re in a rush, they’ll turn yes or no questions into 5-minute meanders. And, dare you choose to assert your boundary and respect for time and blow up your rapport, you can redirect them back to the task with a now checked-out child whose feelings you hurt.

In an environment where you’d think you’d want every possible means of not staying stuck in self-destructive cycles, you will get the most unironically judgmental attitudes you have to dodge instinctively or they’ll wear you down. In a place where people will loudly proclaim their goals and values and you’ll spend hours breaking down how to demonstrate and celebrate them step by step, literally in the next breath you’ll think you’ve entered a parallel universe because the automatic and familiar reaction dictates the scene. You don’t talk yourself into new behaviors. You literally have to practice the new thing you want, or you’ll only get what you’ve always done. This is one more time that I practiced patience, self-forgiveness (for hurting that client’s feelings), redirecting the anger/exhaustion of my perception of the entitlement and laziness.

I don’t judge people as some kind of specific good or bad thing. I’m not even feeling anything in particular about “them” as “individuals.” I’m exhausted by the human animal and it’s typical, predictable, boring as fuck cliche nature. I first reached that place with regard to myself and my own behavior, and now it allows me the distance and license to recognize and diagnose yours. It’s taken my 21 years and 1,2001 blogs and counting to just barely pull my own head out of my ass. I don’t take you seriously when you defy the idea that you should fill out a worksheet or make a phone call. I don’t respect you as a serious and moral thinker when you tell me “I’m good at pretty much everything I do” and “I don’t have triggers” when we’re having this conversation in your structured rule-bound grant-funded sober-living environment.

You’re lying. I know it’s coming from feeling vulnerable. But what makes it worse is where I locate the truest and deepest lie. You think you’re more vulnerable than anyone else. You think your pain is unique. You think your anger, dread, fear, and sense of hopelessness is special. That feels downright insulting. That feels like a dare. This, of course, my personal silliness that needs to be accounted for and dealt with directly. Eventually, though, when you’re just lied to so profoundly and with such conviction thousands and thousands of times, it changes you. And it’s not always clear if that change is a certain kind of wisdom, or deadening.

Some people do get it. They contribute, and work, and write a ton down, and ask questions, and share what they’ve been reading about or watching. They help each other. They thank you for investing in them and taking the time and creating things like a resource packet that anticipated some of their worst fears. Each person is a universe unto themselves, and with that in mind, the adage I used to ridicule about “If I can only help one person, then it’ll be worth it!” rings differently. Those handful can often account for the worst behaving actors that day. They help me bother to keep playing this kind of game and maintain my perspective about the nature of “help.” I show up for singular people in my life all the time.

I do genuinely believe that the more of us who find the same kind of exhaustion and perspective about tired and cliche human shit, “things” get “better.” I don’t think it’s a “belief” that we’re all connected, and the less poisonous any given node is in that network, the better. I will almost certainly never know the extent to which it’s better, but it certainly isn’t worse, which is the second best way to confirm why you should bother with a course of action. (If I’m barely understanding a Mindscape podcast episode that was way over my head.)

Tomorrow I need to input some 40 notes and chase down 10-15 people. Over the weekend I need to create several weeks worth of curriculum packets. I’m still trying to nail down how my effort will land me somewhere close to the 100K/year mark. In context, I can deal with as many sleepy, defiant, and defensive clients as I must if the money’s right.