[1183] Watered Down

I think I’m gonna write because I wish I had someone to talk to. It’s 7:30 PM. I left my house at 5 AM, which I do now 5 days a week to drive an hour to work in a truck that costs me 7% of my paycheck in gas every 2.5 days. It’s cold as fuck, so when I am home, I’m quick to put my clothes in the dryer and get under a heated blanket. I haven’t played my instruments in a while. I feel like I’m gambling with my indoor/outdoor cat’s life in how often/when I allow him outside.

My current job has me deeply embedded with people in a way that I haven’t been before. Every day I see about the same set of kids, their parents or other family members, staff, and elementary school milieu. There’s the usual pleasantries and predictable smiles or avoidant posture of different people in the halls. My job is to instantiate a proper after-school program for the YMCA. Before I arrived, from no less than a dozen sources, I was informed of the hostile and chaotic history of my site.

I’m a professional assessor, skeptic, and reporter of events. All things being true, there’s also hope and positives and different responses you can elicit from spaces described that way. The harder the gossipy world wants to judge and caricature my staff, for example, the more I look for opportunities to compliment the things they do well and invite them into my designs for the program. I was not always this way. This was something another site director and I were discussing this morning. I didn’t use to be able to see and accept the raging dumpster fire and the rainbow at the same time.

I can’t help myself but to dream big and maintain a default “too much” posture about whatever it is I’m doing. There is no, “just sit here, and do the job, and in 30 years you’ll retire.” I don’t want to “live within my means” employing a cover phrase for humbling my ideals. I don’t simply believe some despondent opinion about “how things are” or “they don’t care.” I know enough about people to accept their baseline “getting by” dispositions and the books of apologetics to justify it. I also know, precisely, how to cut through the noise and get the shit done that I wish to do.

And so now I’m at an ongoing transitional space. It took me my regularly predicted timeline to adopt a new job, find out the broken parts, advocate, pitch, and have now begun stepping in the directions I’ve both been demanding and people are recognizing I should have. I have coworkers happy for me to shoulder the brunt of articulating and pushing back on the dumbest of dumb shit. I’m leaving myself room to otherwise capitalize on my time and create more points of leverage. I’m certainly pretty broke, but I’m making sure to eat gratifying food along the way.

I feel like I’m no-less treading water. I was fairly desperate in my adoption of the job in the first place. I’m not dispositionally, age-wise, or even hobbies or interests remotely close to anyone I work with. So even when I’m surrounded by people, rooting for them, working earnestly to create a space they enjoy and can thrive in, I don’t feel like I belong there. We can chalk this up to my usual condition, but also….I don’t belong there.

The space needed, like all spaces need, accountability. They need to stick to the clock and a schedule. They need a little planning. They needed someone to remind them that it’s disrespectful to be screaming at each other or ignoring reasonable asks and direction. Any reasonable adult can or should occupy my position. 6 failed to do so until I arrived. So either I have no idea what people could or should be capable of, or I’m continually exercising this unique capacity for doing things I struggle to conceive of as more than “idiot proof.”

I can’t trick myself. I can’t make myself believe that even when I do a “good job” or people tell me, “I was going to quit before you got here,” that it means the same thing to me as it might to them. I feel I have to be careful that I don’t end up just doing the “indulging for me” thing channeled through the prism of my role. Taking compliments or encouragement too seriously would be sucking on a certain kind of distasteful teat. While I won’t deny accomplishing something or doing well, if I can’t get at that “deeper” thing that speaks to my actual, I don’t know, purpose? It’s just going to be 1 of the 20-something jobs I’ve had that inform my “can you believe this shit?” stories.

I model self-confidence. I model open, honest, continuous conversation. I model an invitation to the messy team trying to figure it out together in spite of ourselves. I haven’t missed a day, navigating car issues, the weather, and illness. I haven’t hesitated to ask for more and take on responsibilities even while feeling like I got bait-n-switched regarding the nature of my role. If I’m going to have a prayer (ha!) of finding what I want or need, professionally or in general, it’s at the end of this road where I’m laying down each cobblestone.

I can’t afford asphalt.

[1182] Slow Burn

It’s been a little bit since I’ve dipped back into my onechannel. It’s the playlist I’ve created with every TV show I’ve downloaded that I haven’t specifically sought out to complete watching. Currently, there are 647 shows on it. These are shows I don’t consider worth slowing down from 2x to watch, at least yet. It’s all genres, languages, and eras. It provokes a unique sense in me when I’m immersed in it for hours at a time.

I think to create anything there’s an innate difficulty. I was listening to Mike Birbiglia and Ron Livingston talk about criticizing other people’s scripts and then realizing, “Oh, fuck, it’s hard to ‘just fix this,” whatever you may reflexively think about a line or scene, and then even harder to generate your own thing that isn’t rife with the same problems. Watching so many different types of things has softened me in how I might criticize as more objectively bad or poorly executed shows. It also has me thinking about the “why” so many of these shows exist or how they manage to occupy certain places culturally.

I’m sensing a distinction in comedies, for example. There’s a difference between zOMG RaNdOm, gonzo, irony, camp, or silly. That can be hard to make distinct, particularly from a creator’s point of view who has probably laughed at all of the above, messy mashing of them or otherwise, and considers them all part of their humor. Setting and maintaining a tone across a perhaps indefinite amount of episodes is basically impossible. At an individual level let alone at a professionally creative one.

Imagine having to maintain your “personality” every day, in every setting, and have it collaborated on with different departments so that it “made sense” or “accurately translated” through given constraints. You have a joke that is dead-on your humor and style, but standards and practices has opinions. You have a setting that speaks louder than any character will ever manage, but you can’t afford it. You have an emotionally compelling and pivotal moment in a character’s development, but it happened on the last episode, and season 2 is cancelled.

I often think many creator’s aren’t genuinely deciding on what lens they’re trying to tell a story. They just go with “comedy” and see what happens. That’s why you can get so many shows that might have different skin, but all sound the same or the “vibe” rests in a sort of middling place where you always feel like there’s more of a joke that’s supposed to be coming , but never arrives.

A show I love is Shameless. Part of what made me love it was that I could say, “Yep, that was shameless,” in scene after scene about every character. It knew its identity immediately, shouted it proudly, and doubled down at every opportunity. It didn’t feel like it was filling time in between incidentally shame-ish spaces. It wasn’t trying to persuade you of what reality was like for its characters. It was training the camera on exactly what it wanted and needed to say. If harder-to-believe things grew out of that, they at least had a reliable basin that felt honest to the environment that might breed such outstanding circumstances.

I feel cartoons went the way of arbitrary randomness. I get this sense after I watch a dozen Looney Tunes and then a modern Adult Swim show pops up. You’re tempted to pay attention to every moment of a 7-minute Looney Tunes skit. You’re invited to barely make-out at all what Assy Mcgee is even saying. Looney Tunes has visual jokes every few seconds like 30 Rock has verbal ones in almost every line. A show like Fairfax or Agent Elvis will build a unique enough visual world, but populate it with a kind of detached observational and circumstantial absurdity. What’s the voice? That you, in fact, recognize what people are wearing or are “supposed” to sound like?

I was scrolling though Trakt’s “discover” page and felt hollow. Another cop/murder investigation, or 10. Another doctor show, or 10. Another reboot. Another spin-off. Another “documentary” taking 8 episodes to tell you a 30-minute story. For the years of “identity based” rhetoric and public discourse, no one seems to have one, even and especially if a new show is based on having all of the boxes checked.

I’ve been exceptionally open to new bands and comedians the last 3 years. I’ve added or followed more than I’ve counted, but at least 100. One comedian I followed is coming to my local comedy club. I didn’t recognize him, and was only reminded when I scrolled through my follows. He, at least once, made me laugh, probably on the toilet. I scrolled through his page and decided he had enough of a unique voice and perspective to be worth checking out. I have 10 or more free passes to the club; it’s a no-brainer. Well, I didn’t have plans the weekend he was gonna be there. Now, it would involve an extra hour drive there, plus an even-later night drive, 3 hours instead of 2, to get where I’m otherwise going. Is his voice worth the extra gas money, time, and energy?

It’s mostly the wrong question, at least for me, as I tend to play things by ear based on my energy levels in the moment. I’m more curious about whether he would say it’s worth it. I want to know if he thinks his perspective and goals are things worth shopping around the country looking for laughs more than the thing he finds himself doing because he can.

I don’t think enough people, let alone creators, are asking themselves this. What are you trying to say, why, and what is it going to contribute to our overall experience of life? I don’t mean to suggest that everyone needs to have some deep and coherent purpose to everything they make. (I mean, have you seen how I write?) If you’re going to get on a stage, create or be cast in a TV show, learn the mechanics for bringing your animation, music, or comedy to the masses…I think you should bother more with why “you.”

Bill Burr is a comedian “the culture” is trying to mythologize. Why Bill? For many, he’s not a typically aggrieved east coast guy. He’s a “legendary ranter.” He’s not merely a funny comedian and creative who has been doing it long enough to have developed adequately. He’s treated more like a scapegoat instead of a goal. He’s what you don’t think you can be, so the more praise and lore you build around him, the less you need to concern yourself with your own comedic voice. Dave Chappelle was that for people previously. Dave recognized when people shifted from even knowing what the joke was about to laughing at the wrong things.

One of the first things that struck me about older, say 50+ years ago TV shows was how bluntly they dealt with issues I think a lot of younger people pretend were invented yesterday. We have these siloed screaming matches about race or gender, and there’s entire series based on those things many have never heard of. The crime or court procedural was dealing with heinous murders and unimaginable violence in black and white. Anything related to sex or its taboos shows up everywhere. You’re never reinventing the wheel, but you should be striving to drive the story in a machine maybe only you can build.

I theorize that people aren’t having genuine engagement with the things life throws at them, so they can’t discover their individual voice forged from the fires or compressive stress. They aren’t literate, so they can’t recognize nor say, “That’s close to what I mean, but here’s my flourish.” They aren’t curious because they’re exhausted by “the grind.” They aren’t genuinely creative, but more performing the performance of creativity in their Tik-Tok clipping and endless stream of podcast conversations.

Network restraints or dead-horse beating that you might recognize on any show, I do think real voices still manage to stick out. I do think shows that tap into the hunger we will always have while we’re alive to meaningfully engage experience altogether will most often win the day. At the same time, the barrier to entry is so low, you might have to sift through 650 shows to find the 5 or 10 worth being slowed down.

I’m decently creative when the inspiration hits. I’m not making a career out of it. I’ve never strived to turn it into something of monetary gain. I crack jokes. I do wood projects. I’ve started writing and creating music. It’s made me all the more sensitive to what is, or isn’t, in someone else’s creation. I get to ask myself if I could say that line, alone, and keep a straight face or feel sincere. I get to embody what I’m feeling, or don’t, as I reflect on what’s on offer. I don’t have emotional reactions to most things through most days. I can bring myself to tears writing and creating music. I can laugh till I cry. Measuring the contrast between connecting to that emotional space and why helps inform whether I even basically believe what you’re trying to tell me through your creative work.

I think it’s important to take as much space and time as you need to eventually “get it right.” The logic and engine of endless content or capitalism suggests that you need to turn into a machine your followers can gorge on indefinitely. I think the spirit of meaningful creation and engagement means you should do what you’re meant to do. Do it when you can, for your own reasons, and if you can both discover and celebrate that place, you’ll connect to that universal that let’s anyone else doing the same thing for themselves recognize and find you.

You might get cancelled, fired, ignored, endlessly misinterpreted and reimagined, but you’ll probably have something we should all slow down and pay attention to.

[1181] Somewhere I Belong

I want to talk about belonging.

As I try to understand what that means, I had times in my life that stuck out. It’s only a handful of periods in which I genuinely felt like I belonged. I want to see if they have anything in common besides however many stories I’ve written about how they went wrong.

My grandma’s house was a spot I belonged. The whole family would meet at my grandparents’ house for Sunday dinner and a movie. My grandma, in particular, would keep an endless supply of food coming, and was genuinely interested in spending time talking or playing cards. I remember once when I was maybe 13 or 14 I was having trouble sleeping, for months, at my house. I was sitting upright on the couch at my grandma’s, and remember nodding off, feeling, but not able to articulate then, an ease and sense of comfort that I was not finding in my chronically stressful and threatening home life.

I’ve felt like I belonged in two work environments, Showplace 12 as a teenager, and at DCS. At Showplace, I got to work early to hang out with friends, worked with friends, and then stayed out late after work with those friends. I knew and was good at my job. The management for most of the time felt like older siblings or surrogate parents who matched our maturity levels. I got looked out for when gossipy bitches tried to get me fired. The people who lasted could both do a good job and keep the fun and jokes alive all day.

At DCS any belonging stemming from knowing the intimate details of a very complicated job and getting a lot of positive feedback from professionals across realms. When the police defer to you, it’s hard not to think you’ve figured something out. When openly hostile school social workers eventually confide in you that they were thankful you were the one who got a particular child’s case, like, that’s your role, and you’re home. I got the chance to do a kind of ride-a-long with someone trying to understand an assessor’s day who I know they would have never gotten as much from anyone else. I got to train people who lit up after being mostly ignored or poorly informed by shittier coworkers for weeks. I could talk to judges at the “wrong” time and not get in trouble.

I also felt like I belonged with the college friend group and at the party house. There wasn’t knocking to enter each other’s houses. Mind you, that “group” is more of an imaginary distinction that spanned, to my mind, as many as 20 or more regulars, but nonetheless I felt the culture and vibe was something people were hungry for and hoped to belong to. I think a space of genuine connection and freedom was cultivated, in spite of how it was transformed and resented eventually.

Finally, I’ve felt at home, at least in humor and what I thought were shared expectations with my former best friend.

Throughout my life I’ve been a part of different sports teams and clubs. I’ve got a family. I’ve had longer-term girlfriends whose families I’ve met and spent time with. I’ve attempted to put together different hang-outs and make new friends. Always, I’m prepared for it to evaporate.

I’ve read a lot of books. I know there’s a cliche trauma-kid in there somewhere that can’t trust anything and had to grow up too fast. But I think the rift between me and other people goes deeper. Within the last couple years that might be described as still not diagnosed autism. Even still, I think, or at least I feel, like there’s an even bigger piece that’s still missing in this story.

Today, I have 3 main friends. 1 lives 3 hours away, who I’ve managed to spend more time with than the other 2 by miles. 1 lives 20 minutes away, is from Saudia Arabia, but has lived in the US for probably 20 years now. 1 lives 45 minutes away and I almost never see, but we text almost every day for brief spurts. All 3 of my friends appear to me to have something I don’t. They’re plugged into something “normal” or “familial” that I don’t feel.

That is to say, it’s the same kind of thing I witness in my ex-girlfriends and their relationships to their families. It’s the same thing I see come up from clients when they’re trying to articulate why they can’t adopt some behavioral change. It’s this kind of allegiance that people who all seem to suffer from something deep and peculiar all agree upon. And I have no fucking idea.

Let’s linger on the word “allegiance.” There’s this both from fairy tales and colloquial conversation that you pretty much ride-or-die with your lot. It doesn’t matter how bad they treat you, what they stand for, or what they’re likely going to do to you in the future that’s your family. If they’re the reason you need anti-depressants, are in debt, or routinely shuffle and disrupt your self-care, no matter. You’re so overtly obligated that literally every violation forever is reduced to a write-off.

That’s only one side of it though. They also seem to be getting something wholly immersive and worthwhile. I might liken it to some kind of religious conviction that gets invigorated by each lash. With each donated strip of skin and drop of blood you’re one step closer to salvation. “You couldn’t possibly understand because you weren’t born into it,“ a furrow-browed and disgusted-with-me explainer might remark. It’s not for me and therefore shouldn’t be commented on or bastardized by my looseness or inability.

Movies about elves and orcs or super powers don’t make more money than anything ever has because the world is full of ”cool“ people. I don’t want to lose what I’m trying to articulate in some lazy idea of categories like ”nerd“ or ”outsider“ that plays the broken record of modernity citing their social anxiety or ”quirky“ introversion.

There’s something deep that people have that I do not.

My Saudi friend will get together with his other Arab friends and they’ll pray on his porch. My recovering alcoholic friend will spend as much time as she can get around her deeply alcoholic mom and sister. My 3-hours away friend will describe needing to stay closeted yet mostly enjoying her time with family who espouse many a fascist opinion and nearly re-traumatized her when she had to briefly move back in with them.

I think about the things people have cut me off over. It’s incredibly hard to square whatever this substance is that binds people together that might be 100 parts ”toxic“ for every dose of love or care. I will have people never talk to me again over rumors. They’ll cut me off when I’m ”too honest.“ I will get dragged into screaming matches so someone can build an excuse to run away, even as I’m literally offering food, money, time, and a white board writing things out to try and stay peaceful and connected.

Remember, I also have listened to hundreds of people’s descriptions of their histories and family lives. I’ve heard stories of years of physical and mental abuse turned routine. I’ve heard of theft, confinement, and substance abuse never being enough to tear some bond apart. I’ve had people report to me week after week for months or years the horrible things they’ve been called or accused of. They’ll tell me how they sacrificed savings or goals to ”help“ someone they care about. They’ll get genuinely aggressive and annoyed with me if I can’t phrase precisely my question about whether it’s wise to do so.

I know most people have an infinite capacity for self-destruction, including myself. So, no, I don’t think that’s what’s missing between us.

It has to be somewhere in the realm of positive emotion and that sense of belonging, no? I just watched His Girl Friday recently, and the whole joke of the movie is that the girl, no matter what else has transpired or been said, is his. They’ve got the magical bond that transcends literally everything. It’d be convenient to just write this off as an invention and mythology of the movies, iterated and evolved a million times, were I not witness to it from fucking everyone except myself.

I return to the battered-wife caricature so often because that’s what it feels closest to. I’ve also listened to a few podcasts recently just enamored by Christianity and the hold it has managed to have on society. It was novel to elevate the slave and espouse the idea that everyone has value. There’s not a more powerful tool in the universe than an indignant victim seeking self-righteous retribution. Oh! To be morally unencumbered! Is there anything more natural than a naked and afraid beast reacting after being provoked?

Most people are like my brother, and even my dad to a certain extent, when it comes to my batshit mom. I cut the bitch off at the first opportunity and haven't spoken to her in maybe 15 years? My brother invites her to his wedding instead of me. But, here’s the thing, of course he did and should have. He knows, like I know, that I’m not stuck to him or her or ”family“ like a normal person. I don’t belong. Weddings aren’t for ”people“ like me.

My 3-hour away friend’s dad remarked to her recently about our dynamic, ”whatever that is…“ He’s a little autism-y too, but also has clearly done the family-man, normal job, suburb life thing. His comment I feel articulates what my exes have felt instinctively. What are they even doing? It’s extremely unlikely I’ll want to get married. My sense of being an adult in the world swings from doing drug studies, to food delivery, to ”real job“ with the State seemingly at random. I do this, and it’s been insisted, ”Nobody wants to be a blog,“ meaning the subject of mine. How did I trick them so thoroughly?

I’m like someone who has all of the pieces, but can’t make them fit. I’m not a weird-looking ”anxious“ I can’t, I can’t, I can’t type. I’m not unable or unwilling to modify my behavior to be ”more normal.“ Fuck, typing that line just made me feel a wave of incredible sadness lol. Especially as I’ve gotten older and heard so many people’s stories, I’m so much less inclined to hold any serious negative opinion or judgment towards someone. I’m a doubt and counter-factual machine at this point. Even my crazy cunt of a mother I can depersonalize and describe her objective tragic woes.

I feel like I’ve been longing for the sense of belonging that I had at my grandma’s. I feel like I know how I feel when I’m open and trying and enthusiastic about helping or sacrificing in service to someone I care about. I have been soundly rebuked by several exes for not only buying things spoken to as necessary to facilitate a goal but even just in offering money to help or fix something.

I feel like I’m literally trying and living the standard I wish for, but the options almost everyone chooses are some version of fatalistic calculation. I think most of my dad’s side of the family, for example, are jockeying for inheritance, my uncles already having stolen mine from my grandparent’s estate. Now them and my aunt want my great-aunt’s money. We play along at Thanksgiving or Christmas, but they don’t feel like family to me. Too much time in their presence, and I feel physically stressed. Do I want the money they stole? Sure, kinda, but not for what it’s probably gonna cost me.

”It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.“

It’s never been my belief, in and of itself, in those times of belonging that has hurt me. It’s not that important to me if they were ”real“ or not because they felt real, and they feel different then the rest of my life. Incidentally, I’m not only accused, but it happens to be true, of not feeling particularly much beyond anger or spurts of happiness in general. I’m also loathe to give too much deference to feelings as a generalized rule. Who cares what I feel? That’s easy, fucking no one. I think I just care more about how those feelings inform or dignify the values I wish to live by. I want them free of the sticky muck that seems to inherently undermine their manifestation in shared reality.

That is, you can call your black eyes ”love“ all you want, I’m gonna think there’s something wrong with you. I’ll then be ushered into my shame corner for stating things so bluntly and condescended to because fear is the heart of love, idiot. It’s familiar and traditional and therefore worthy of identifying with.

My ex best friend couldn’t fight the temptation to prey on my sense of longing and hope to belong to something meaningful and robust. He got a whole house flipped off the back of it, and me complicit in a threat to my life. I believed the best about our dynamic right up until the moment I couldn’t. I voiced my displeasure along the way. I provided opportunities to make things right. But I no longer existed. That appears to be the end goal for nearly everyone I encounter in life. To act like what I saw, said, or felt wasn’t real. Whatever needs to get said or done to make explicit my wrongness or otherness is fair game. I couldn’t possibly be just like everyone else and choosing to sound and act the way I do. Best to suffer my syndrome alone.