[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?