[1235] Limbo Bimbo

I’m having a realization in this moment. It’s literally becoming physically hard to move myself in service to things I genuinely don’t want to do. I just wrote a whole piece about my sense of practicality and how it manifests with regard to my decisions. Any remotely functioning adult makes dozens of “I genuinely don’t want to do this” kinds of decisions every day. What’s the nature of this wall in particular that I’m coming up against?

For the past several days I’ve been trying to persuade myself to apply to jobs. But I don’t want a job. I have an in-person interview scheduled for the day before Christmas Eve for a job it seems I’m likely to get. It will require driving an hour to work each day. It won’t pay enough. I will likely see the holes and cracks and reasons I can’t work there after a few weeks, like I’ve done with 95% of the 25 jobs I’ve had over the last 20 years. When I first started working, you went in a building, filled out a paper, and someone almost immediately hired you after seeing you could dress yourself and speak like a person. Now, it feels like pissing in the wind submitting applications to almost-certainly-dead or fake websites optimized to extract buzzwords from an incoherent and inflated resume.

That, fundamentally, is a giant waste of time. I know most jobs, most of the time, people get because someone vouches for you. I know people who get insanely high-paying jobs they are in no way qualified for because of who they know. I don’t know those people to get me that kind of job. I know social workers. This job I’m likely to get, my supervisor from my last job we both left recommended me for. I was asked during my interview what it’s like to supervise me. I refrained from telling them to turn around and ask her.

But, more to the point, I’ve been attempting to trend into more and more free time. I think time is the most valuable thing. I think even when I feel like I’m “wasting” time, I feel better about the option to than playing pretend that I’m doing something better or more productive than I’d otherwise be. I don’t dignify work for its own sake. I’m in social work. I don’t have a savior complex that’s enriched by the very fact of my presence and guidance in your life. I want to do whatever it is I want to do in any given moment. And every moment that passes that threatens or explicitly attacks that, I’m finding a growing impediment in overcoming.

I’m a partner in a sober-living house. We have plans to grow. I don’t know that anyone has manifested what it would take to practically do so, nor do I trust my partners to volunteer more effort or of themselves than they currently do. If and when the house is full, all 8 beds taken, I would stand to make $1,100 a month. I live in a way that allows me to pay the bills on that amount. The house needs 3 more people. Every person is a volatile universe unto themselves. Right now we have 5 consistent, good-tempered, paying-in-advance people. I can’t live off that amount, but how much do I want to gamble?

Doesn’t my “job” immediately arise from this description? Find 3 more cool/appropriate people. If you’re a social worker, or have worked in addiction, or counseling, or just know anything about people, that’s a fucking massive and impossible task. It’s insane we’ve had 5 last in as stable a way for as long as they have. Every new person added to the mix is a mini miracle. We just had a rockstar who demonstrated everything we could want in a tenant for months relapse and blow a hole in things. There are no guarantees.

As well, I’m a counselor. I could and do work remotely. Where those jobs exist, neither I, nor Google, nor AI can discover them. The last company I worked for, in spite of conducting 15 groups for almost a year and a half completely remotely, insisted I come to the office an hour and a half away 2 days a week. They promised otherwise, and I won unemployment on the back of their lies. I have one client who yells at me to charge for counseling because she loves our conversations. She wore me down and I say her paying what she thinks is fair allows me to work for others who can’t afford it.

I want to protect and keep the trend going. I’ve slowly etched out more and more freedom for myself each year, so when I find myself in front of a soulless company application page for a job I absolutely don’t want, I just stop and stare. I’m stuck, but not the kind of stuck that’s my usual existential brand. I’m physically just checked the fuck out. Fuck them, fuck their bullshit inhuman expectations and low wages. Fuck learning some arbitrary way they do things. Fuck the whole game. The impending disrespect for my time and experience. The dance of hiring. This job I’m supposed to get is my 3rd fucking part of the interview. Screen, then talk to manager, then talk to would-be supervisor in person, then spin in a circle 3 times and recite the company directive and then you get on double secret probation for 6 months or some shit I don’t know.

There’s so much dipshittery on full display across so many areas of life that need serious thinkers, leaders, and people who are genuinely invested and understanding about the nature of the problems. I’m here trying to “get by” when I know what I’m worth, demonstrate it constantly, and am offered this endless slog. This insult. This waste. I think so much about the career people in positions of government who get summarily fired because the stupid is just rooted. Imagine becoming a doctor or general and getting written off by an alcoholic TV personality? What prayer do I have as some random Indiana asshole getting passed around an industry that was shit and ridiculed before it was cool to do it everywhere all the time?

I’ll do things with a “real job” consistent paycheck. Even a shit paycheck is better than none at all or the scraps of aggregate door dashing. I already have a tentative list of next year’s concerts and comedy shows to hit. There’s $1,000 waiting to be spent on the first 25 because Ticketmaster is another example of a horrific out-of-control monopoly. Just playing things conservatively, I could still pay off debt in 6 months if I chose to prioritize that. I know I prefer to be out in the world interacting with people than sitting at home all the time. The idea is to get a remote job that allows me to engage in those human interactions on my terms.

And I still have 5 acres that I can’t even generate conversations about how to turn it into something profitable. You hear statistics all the time about how lonely people are, how expensive things are, how people are giving up ever owning a home. None of those mother fuckers ask me how they can live super cheap out here. Haven’t for going on 10 years now. I know all the excuses. A parent’s basement is more comfortable than here. McDonald’s around the corner is more convenient. I’ve rented to people who’ve improperly stored vehicles and it taught me even allowing people into your space needs a level of intention and planning you can’t instinctively get right. Also, they won’t communicate well.

I feel so fucking stupid. I’m so fucking stupid searching and applying and creating spreadsheets and trying to efficiently type in my information in the worst designed web pages on the planet. Just read the fucking PDF resume! Just call me and see if I sound like a psycho. I’ve passed a dozen background checks and been routinely entrusted with children, and am in no way affiliated with the Boy Scouts or Catholic Church. I can do whatever it is you need me to do around here, but you probably won’t want to pay me what I’m worth and you probably will resent when I do it better than you.

I’ve already won the lottery and I feel like I don’t know how to spend the winnings. I don’t know how to make the money work for me. I don’t know what dot to connect to the next. I don’t know that I even believe that there are people who recognize and respect what I bring. The ones that do went immediately into creating this sober living house with me! So why the fuck isn’t there something I can double-down on there? I’ve made the outreach calls. Referrals coming in? Sorta. I’ve looked for property that we might expand into. Can we afford it? Not really. Not yet. Have we fixed everything there is to fix at the first house? It depends on if the goal is to just have a place people reside in or have it resemble what we wanted regarding therapy and programming. That’s where I don’t expect my partners will be as keen to work for mostly-free as I’ve been.

I’m just ranting at this point. I get so angry at myself even clicking through these stupid job boards. It’s a bigger waste of time than paying any attention to the Law & Order, NCIS, and CSI episodes I deliberately have in the background as something that’s not going to compel me away from trying to accomplish the miserable task. I don’t need much more to still be pretty fucking broke, but stable. 3 people. My client actually figuring out the pay portal and completing the transaction. Another passable house with 6 beds and less than $1,300 mortgage or rent. I’m only getting a job to “have something more to do.” Hopefully feel a little easier regarding my overall finances. I’ve anchored to what a part-time remote counseling job could really provide me, and so I’m disgusted with myself that I haven’t been able to dig one up.

Fuuuuuuuuuck. FUUUUUUCK. My life is too good to be in this stupid of a fucking place. FUCK ME SIDEWAYS. I’m fucking annoyed.

[1234] Littlest Piece

I consider myself a pretty practical person. I think this is different from being a "realist." I'm familiar with the seemingly infinite ways in which we must operate under illusions to function. This inclines me to either make peace with options I'm not crazy about, or rail indefinitely against something I'll never know enough about how it functions.

I get into trouble, a lot, over language. What's practical to me is pure fantasy to most others. Whether I can demonstrate that practicality in thousands of examples across my entire life or not doesn't matter. All that matters is that I'm pitted against someone who most often describes their life in ways resembling the following;

"I feel like I can't." "I don't see how that's possible." "It's real to me and you should respect my opinion." "It seems like you (x), therefore I can/should/won't (y)." "Everything, everyone, and it's always."

You can create an entire life, and entire world, on the back of these phrases. I'm sensitive to them as a general listener turned counselor. I pick up on them as driving the "plot" of hundreds of cliche television episodes. I see people employ them with such fluidity they might never grasp the water they are swimming in. I think every single fascist movement from the beginning of time resides within those excuse-making confines. They're rooted in our survival machinery. They're singular sentence representations of decades of books and studies that describe how we orient and anchor to the world.

How much patience should we have for these? If we want to treat them as practical constraints that happen…innocently, then how long and under what conditions do you tolerate them? How do you measure a growing or successful relationship to how and when they are employed?

You might stop saying them entirely, but their emotional core still dictates your behavior. You might recognize when you've employed one, but it might not prompt any kind of accountable action or change. I suspect, if you've made it this far, you're not even on the same page as me in considering them the heights of how we destroy ourselves and everything we claim to enjoy. Your capacity to notice won't get implicated when you couldn't be bothered in the first place.

This is why I don't task people with things they don't ask for and can only report on what I observe. I've had jobs with 185 clients. I'd go absolutely insane if I couldn't practically engage in some form of counseling or feedback and didn't try to personally emotionally account for whether or not any individual did something I advised. What you can provide as "therapy" is questionable at that level. You can cultivate a therapeutic environment. A therapeutic environment can presume you're trying to improve your relationship to yourself and others.

It should go without saying, but the internet, most social dynamics, your job, your hobby, and basically anything you do that is "distracting" or "taking the edge off," is not a therapeutic environment. Checking out and mindlessly scrolling isn't therapy. Numbing and suppressing certainly isn't. Getting embroiled in family drama or gossip, doubling down on hours worked, or making hundreds of superficial "friends" is not providing you therapy. We talk about these things as though this is what's happening. We mark partners with their capacity to mitigate our anxiety or depression. We celebrate and mask the depth of our codependency.

A therapeutic environment requires honesty. You have to be able to be called out and accept that what you said was, at best, incomplete, and often allowing yourself an excuse to stay where you are instead of improve. This is why writing became one of my tools for self-regulating. When I want to say something in a "too much" way, I can clock what that feels like. I can recognize, bodily, when I'm tempted to lie or hide something. I can feel when something is missing the mark or needs more words. Writing can be therapeutic for me provided I keep following the rules and maintain a genuine desire to improve my mood, behavior, or relationship to something.

It's just words otherwise. So it goes with how you engage with anything vying for your attention. I can laugh at the guy pretending to fart on people on the elevator, particularly after uniquely stressful days. If I rushed to my phone to follow his antics for hours a day every day in a way that felt beyond my ability to control, I have a problem. I talk a lot about my seemingly endless capacity to stream TV and ever-growing number of shows I'm adding to my channel. It's not compulsive. The second there is anything more compelling that catches my attention, that's what I move on to. I don't need to be immersed in a fantasy. I, practically, have little else I ever "need" to do on any given day, so it fills space.

There's a lot that I want to do, though. And the harder I lean into wants, the more practical negotiations I have to make. The more hours I have to spend at a job I know is never going to be a career. The more time and money I have to put into maintaining vehicles. The more I need to invest in tools and capitalize on moods and weather. I want to apply my practical approach to things much bigger than any hobby or work environment. I want to see them at scale. IU's football coach said there's no secret to their success on 60 Minutes, it's just fundamentals, and he wins. I believe him.

When I break things down, I tend to get what I want. I can transform my mood moment to moment as I look directly into the face of why I am or am not doing something. Often, I don't fundamentally believe in what the consequences of a course of action will be. I don't believe because I've tried, a lot, in the past. I don't believe because even if I do what I can or should, I'm most often met with what you believe that negates or sidesteps what I can otherwise show. This gets exhausting. This is where I can start "feeling" like things are "pointless." They are, if I choose to continue approaching them, with you, in the exact same way I know doesn't work. If I don't own slipping away from what practically needs to happen to get there.

I've thought for a long time about what it would take to change how my state of Indiana operates. I've never found someone who has created the tools I would need. I want to create them. It would take more money and time than I have, but I think it can be created and I think it would function as I needed. It would start as just accounting. Who is voted into what and where? What reasons/excuses have they offered for why they operated or voted the way they did? I think there's no comprehensive and lightning-quick way that I can get that perspective about any given official from any given office. All I hear from are the loudest proudest fascists, and get to be surprised once every decade when a Republican doesn't do something I'm ashamed or embarrassed about.

My practical sense manifests in how I live. I live in a shed. My cars cost less than my guitar. I work when I "have to," not because I'm desperately trying to cling to health insurance or pay off debt before I'm willing to see the next show and buy the T-shirt. I functionally conceive of adulthood as your capacity to navigate the increasing weight of practical limitations. I got criticized once for having "garbage monitors" as though they don't allow me to display what I want them to display. What makes them garbage? Because they were free or $20? Because they aren't curved? That, probably child, just feels like they're garbage and like it's a worthwhile thing to say. It would be impractical to engage someone like that, if I care about how I relate to what I choose to share online.

It's funny and just hitting me now that my approach applies to the things I've bought as "extra" or "indulgences." I didn't get "fancy" tools or an "expensive" guitar until I reached a place of building and playing that needed them. I didn't buy an "Owner's Club" 4-day concert wristband until the year I had my bills paid a year in advance already. It wasn't until I applied and failed, for months/years on some measures, that I decided to invest in people who could allegedly help me apply for and secure grants or get impaneled with insurances. It's like, practically never, about my inability to do or try what's next.

I have not figured out how to navigate my environments more effectively. I legitimately don't know what the next step is to get where I want to go, most of the time. Again, the things I try work narrowly and specifically in the moment to get me each tortured step. The response dictates whether it's the latest step over a cliff. This speaks to why I'm skeptical of utilizing too much or the wrong kind of financial support for something. Who cares how much I appreciate it or actually utilize it? I'm convinced "the world" will waste both our resources as quickly as it's keen to mine alone.

I think most days I dream about feeling like I'm meaningfully trying. I come up against the things I create feeling like Titanic deck chair realigning. I feel like a curiosity most people just kind of stare at or laugh off, not because that's what I "deserve" or "invite," but because I'm so rooted and practical it's a provocation. It defies how you operate by default. It calls out. It begs the question. It's expecting of you exactly what I'm expecting of myself. I don't like it either, but the alternative is worse.

[1233] Seek And

This might be messy, but it’s no less on my mind. There’s two incongruent ideas that have been echoing in my mind. One is the concept of being “terminally online.” The other is a sense of peace I feel watching interrogation and sentencing videos.

Do “influencers” really exist in the same way from when they were culturally born? I find myself watching videos from “anyone” that happen to have caught the eye of the algorithm, and when I go to see their follower count or amount of posted videos, it might be a few thousand, or over a million, but they’re often produced similarly. They have the same patter, cameras, lighting, intros, thumbnails, “Hey guys,” etc. Billy Strings and Jesse Welles already too mainstream for you? I got 6 downhome folksy types standing in a field waiting.

We all get to cultivate our “niche” pockets of interests or influence, which turn out to be a simple measure of how often or not we’re fed the ability to view someone. I watched an interesting “the hit this month” video for every month of the 1980s. Even if I rarely or never listen to the bands, I knew 98% of the songs. The industry used to be the algorithm, and whether that music or those songs were ever “good” or just “popular” is inextricably linked to how often they were injected.

I think we’re under an illusion or misconception about what it is AI is doing to our understanding of media and art. It’s only exposing. If great artists steal, mock-worthy embarrassing AI “artists” merely steal at inhuman speed. “AI slop” is the billions of child drawings unworthy of the fridge. Now they’re given the chance to be remixed and recapitulated, occupying your brainspace independent of your choices or desire to see them. If what you bear witness to most of the time is the soulless, lazy, arbitrary rehashing of someone else’s often incomplete idea, I think you become a particular kind of stuffed sausage.

People being interrogated don’t seem to understand that the pigs can smell the sausage. Even the “weird” ones find ways to betray themselves and the underlying truth starts to unravel. I think someone willing to do something horrible, and then lie about it, moreover try to pass that lie off to professional truth-seekers, is suffering the same kind of condition as someone you might describe as terminally online. There’s the self-affirming, dopamine tripping narrative. Then there’s reality. Then there’s a chance for consequences so severely imposed, you, as an individual, are never again given the opportunity to avoid accounting for your ideas.

I worry about how smooth lies are. How thin they can be like a film laid across our otherwise “innocent” interactions or intentions.

There’s something serious to be said about a lack of awareness and how that differs from lying. While I don’t think lying is solely defined by intent, I think the list of unknown unknowns is practically infinite. I think your feelings about people and life evolve, and it’s easy to get caught repeating something you were taught or earnestly believed in one setting or era that no longer applies. You’re almost never going to know how something has changed until it does, and sometimes slaps you in the face by how much.

I know it’s often a cliche of getting older, but slowing down, or perhaps better said, not being so “in a rush” became a sensibility that sunk in with me. If the internet, and death by it, is this constant flow of “the next thing” and the anticipatory anxiety that feeds the cycle, I’m thankful it seems to follow that the more you wish to slow down, the less appealing those environments register. The click-baiting redundancy is exhausting enough. The idea that I would train my attention to re-read 100 times the same ads and often rage-inducing articles, now with incomplete or incorrect information, yet still populating days later, feels absurd.

I also feel like my life currently operates as one of the loudest refutations as to what “the world” or “the internet” and it’s oligarchs are trying to make me. I do still make inflammatory comments that certainly contribute to eyeball capture. I’d make them in person, but I don’t have the kind of representatives that talk to their constituents outside of controlled settings. I also have the brand of genuine obnoxious anger and commentary that life, broadly, should only dose itself with in moderation.

I get out into the world as often as possible, working to create a real memory or lived relationship to the artists I enjoy. The Letter Kills front man put his arm around my neck and sweated on me as I pretended to know more words to the song we sang together than I do. I bought the T-shirt and taped their setlist to my fort's door wall. I enthusiastically told him about how the Boys Like Girls frontman gave their band and Vendetta Red a shout out on Shane Told of Silverstein’s podcast not too long ago - and how I felt an exacting sense of solidarity with his perspective about both bands - so it’s like magic that one is back up and in rotation - and he did not quite know how to respond to my flurry of enthusiasm.

Part of me feels like I’m on a mission to demonstrate, as often as I can, how much you can really get done if you’re paying attention. If I can make it to 65-142 performances a year, for the last 4 years (my goal is to average 100 a year), and work full-time, and watch the 7th episode of 700 shows (albeit sped-up), and complete however many videogames, and be a solid guitar player, build a few things, and still be bored or needing to spend more time bowling or cooking, why can’t “we” have nice things? Why can’t you find the time to hang out? Why are we stuck on repeat in the fight against fascism? There’s so many hours in the day. There’s so much money going to nothing worthwhile or indulgence. There’s so many ways our ignorance and ambivalence get exploited.

I can both engage in it and call it out and it’s never taken up as a proper rallying cry or point. My entire adult life has been talking past and echoing old wishes yelled into an infinitely deep well. I don’t know what to do about that. I think I’ve instinctively decided there isn’t anything that can be done. My creative ideas as to what might be done break against what I think they’d need in time and money I’m not prepared to spend yet.

This started as an attempt to synthesize my perspective regarding what it means for something to exist online and feelings while watching interrogations and sentencing. It provoked an explanation of what I crave and seek out in the real world. I’m left feeling as if much of the real world is so polluted by the internet that it’s hard to parse how much of it is left or how it manifests in spite of what we’re subjected to. I’m not, foundationally, plugged into systems and people I trust, and it’s a condition that seems to worsen with each headline. No amount of music, comedy, house projects, or scrolling has meaningfully accounted for what’s missing.

[1232] From The Other Side

Lately, I have been a lump. It’s been snowing. The main highway I would take to get anywhere close to civilization had the worst multi-car accident in its history. I’ve managed to get from my house to The Region and back with enough Thanksgiving leftovers that I’ve not had to leave again. This means it’s been a waterfall of TV. This means staying under a heated blanket in my poorly-insulated fort.

I feel like one of the last times I wrote I hit a certain turning point in my capacity to feel anxious about not doing “enough.” Most often, sitting around doing “nothing” but scrolling, phone-gaming, and TV watching would fill me with a sense of worry or dread that I wasn’t out making money or filling out a frustrating and absurd job application. I’ve really started to bodily lean into a place that’s unconvinced there’s a genuinely more “meaningful” or “productive” thing that’s going to land me a persistent sense of accomplishment or belonging.

My desire to accomplish is no less diminished. My plans for shows haven’t changed. I think I’ve just punctured the illusion about what exists on the other side of what I might do. The horrors and potential of the present are keeping me curious about what is or isn’t driving movement or thought patterns.

The image of a woman dying from an exploded ordinance sent by Russia is staying with me. I think it was an episode of either Frontline or 60 Minutes. A pianist, her clothes and hair flutter furiously before she takes a few steps, collapses backwards, and bleeds to death. Any musician will know the time, patience, and dedication it takes to be described by your instrument. A war criminal’s ambivalence and his country’s either ignorance or complicity will snuff it out, arbitrarily, in an instant.

Watching her die is sticking with me like when I watched beheading videos and these couple of alleged Mexican cartel members get chopped up by a chainsaw. If you’ve seen the extended video of the Ukrainian girl stabbed on the train, there’s a similar sense and tone. This moment of infinite, “This is it.” If you did the math on their lives, would you mourn correctly? It sounds like a weird or inappropriate question. But would tears flow for the loss of potential, or for the worlds of selfish negligence that sealed fate well in advance? The gangsters didn’t flinch or cry. No one rushed over to even check on, let alone try to help, the Ukrainian refugee.

“Yeah so I’m already dead, on the inside, but I can still pretend.”

The gangsters know the patterns of gang life. It’s not a surprise to them when it’s their time. One could speculate part of the reason they got involved in the life altogether was to speed things along. One doesn’t routinely risk their life when they consider it something vitally important to hold on to. Travis Pastrana dialed back is adventures dramatically once he started having kids. Do you practice your instrument so it’s singing the song you’d want played on the day you die? When you travel to dangerous parts of the world, is there an irrational thrill for every second you’re not next to be abducted or taken advantage of?

As a narrative-based creature, it’s seems, literally, the most important thing you need in order to survive is the genuine belief that life matters. Count this as another reason to be deeply suspicious, if not angry, about professed religious faith. You get to bypass perhaps the paramount obligation in service to the next life. Your animal instincts may auto-pilot you through a series of impulsive pregnancies and acts coded as survival, but you might not really believe, deep down, that you should be here. If enough people pass a certain threshold with that not-so-deep “secret,” I think you start to explain why so much of the world looks the way it does.

Specifically, when lying becomes the air you breathe, to the point where entire organizations rise up in service to propaganda. Why care about any given endangered species, habitat, or “forever chemicals?” Why define words like “rights” or “zygote” when you’re stuck violently campaigning for an insatiably ironic and impossible level of control over forces that have already sealed your fate? “Life” knows you don’t get to escape and you’re probably not getting a pearly gate. The bullshit artist that constitutes your sense of an individual self is chronically incapable of incorporating that fundamental truth.

If there was some kind of “divine goal” of consciousness, I think it would look something like eradicating the otherwise ambivalence that dominates the landscape. It’s not to pretend it isn’t there. It’s not to act like it can be actually erased. It would be a dance. It would be a celebration of the knowledge of consequences. It would be the building of a communal accountable ecosystem that correctly clocks who is out to kill us and stops them before we’re converted into units of their system.