It's 3:12 AM and I've finally come down from my gently-manic thinking and energy. I'm, let's call it halfway, through rearranging/cleaning my woodshop. I’m covered in a decent amount of spiderwebs, and dust has definitely made its way to some crevasse in my throat. I’ve noticed over the last few days I’m returning to clenching my jaw. I’m anticipating something of a radical shift in how I approach my time and priorities.
On New Year’s Eve, it will be the 110th fun thing I’ve done for myself, with a friend, or my dad. The final show, The Phantom of the Opera, in Chicago, then I’m sure we’ll find somewhere to hang until it’s time to countdown. It will be the 423rd thing I’ve gone to over the last 4 years. When I made this into a series of bar graphs, predictably “the internet” was disinterested and asked me if I had a trust fund. No, I just live within 4 hours of a few major cities and don’t have kids.
Hyper-productive manic-ish periods happen less often as I get older. I used to have a belief system that would fuel them quasi-indefinitely. I thought there was something real, lasting, and meaningful to achieve. I thought it would make me rich. I thought I’d get the right kind of attention and power. I thought I’d get to live on a kind of auto-pilot as “things” sorted themselves out under my limited direction or decision to adopt a new goal. I had zero inclination that I would be well-enough on my way to 40 and be living in a kind of bizzaro forever-not-quite space.
It’s a few days after Christmas. I hate going home. My dad and step-mom are cool, the rest of the people who occupy their home I find exhausting, insufferable, boring, and often anger-inducing if I ruminate on how they’ve fucked me financially. They run the same playbook at every dinner table. There’s the family gossip. There’s the latest movies and sports. There’s who is sick, work drama, and particularly pointed digressions on the biggest family embarrassment of the last 6 to 12 months. My uncle this year trotted out the cliche trope, “Kids just don’t want to work.”
This uncle gives me $100 every Christmas, perfectly ambivalent about inflation. This is an uncle who I grew up watching verbally abuse and berate my grandma. This is an uncle who lived with that grandma until she had a stroke and functionally died. He’s spent 99% of his 60+ years on the planet co-habitating with either his parents or my other uncle, never in a long-term relationship, and making friends who accomplish things like suicide by cop and ballooning to over 400 pounds. If he knew anything about incels, he could have led them to Hell sooner than any modern macho man-baby influencer today.
This is an uncle who has stolen my grandma’s house when she died. This is an uncle who has talked his entire life about “the job in such and such” that he’ll definitely take and move to, but somehow finds himself shackled to NW Indiana. He moved to Gurnee for, I think it was a couple months, before scurrying back to grandma’s when I was like 13. He’s got strong opinions about where people my age and younger are coming from regarding their work ethic and culture that abandoned them. When I, humbly, explain that my half a dozen social work roles and thousands of conversations with people through counseling suggest giant gaps in experience and practice, “That’s bullshit” his pithy reply before waddling to the couch to talk guns with, 10 years younger than me, step-brother…who has also never left home.
I don’t make excuses for people, but I don’t deny seeing when something fundamental is missing. The heart of whatever has made this country genuinely great has gone missing. It disappeared when we stopped showing people how to change tires. It evaporated with the idea that we should capitalize on instead of invest in each other. It blinked right out of existence the moment we leaned into the ignorance and hatred and judgmental attitudes that have always been there, but otherwise transcended as we marched forward.
I’ve been watching a lot of Ken Burns documentaries. He plants you into whatever world he’s discussing. He’s got the details, the stories, the quotes from the people making the decisions. If someone itches in how he’s explaining, you’re scratching. You get this incredibly rich and alive sense about how decisions were being made. You get baked into the cake. You grasp the pressures people were under and glimpse the reasons they were hesitant to “do the right thing” or might find themselves getting harshly criticized by modern eyes.
And then you also see how little things change. You see the exact same fears and prejudices play out, it’s just pick a different population. It’s recycled slogans. It’s the same excuse-ridden tribalism and intellectual laziness that’s on an endless loop in your cultivated feed. My feed I think is clocking my frustration with seeing nothing but pushed content, so now will be fascist curious? It’s bizarre, and I’m thankful to be generally engaging with the online world at all less and less. The powerful do cliche powerful things. The poors react. The educated pray to be judged by the sensibilities and “obviousness” of their oratory and thinking at the time.
There’s always the people who are already in the future though. There’s those that don’t need to “evolve” on issues because political winds tell them too. For some, slavery was never debatable. For some, equality meant just that, so in their advocacy of course* it meant women and anyone from any culture who stood for the American ideal. If you don’t know what that is, or you co-opt it like an infectious disease and zombify, then “things” become “debatable” and “mere opinions.” When that happens to vaccines, foreign policy as it pertains to war criminal autocrats, and the consequences of greed, you have good reason to suspect the whole thing could go away if you’re not careful.
For most of my life I’ve felt like time was running out. The race against the clock was added fuel to push past the pain behind my eyes or desire to take a break and eat or shower. No matter how much I push through my experience, I continue to find time to feel “stuck” or “waiting.” I continue to use days and weeks to persuade myself to dip into the sea of mania so I can reaffirm who I’ve known myself to be. For me, an insatiable drive to create or work is now a mockery; the story of an abandoned ideal. I’ve suffered the consequences of my genuine beliefs, in family, in friends, in “the system,” in my intelligence, or my ethics. Most often, I’m abandoned or ignored, and my uncle’s, “That’s bullshit” echoes when we arrive at the question of who is to blame.
If I have enough time, money, and freedom to hit a show every day of the year it will not fix the rot at the heart of my family, work environments, or “friendly” superficial or antagonistic relationships. It won’t make my psychopathic ex-best friend own his betrayal and start shelling out what he owes me. It won’t make my uncle reflect on every hateful word he said to my grandma, nor shell out the money he owes me. It won’t make my aunt understand what she neglected that led to the death of, what may soon be, both of her sons before the age of 45. It won’t change the heart of my newest boss or bureaucratic nightmare to push for a living wage. It won’t make the water drinkable, or my fascist governor and attorney general less greedy trolls. I won’t make my closest friends anymore energetic or enthusiastic or available. I won’t get my water fixed, land occupied, nor in shape.
I’ll just have something to do and think about that isn’t explicitly inviting me to think about what I don’t have that I really need.
It’s not your god or some transcendent notion of reason. It’s not license. I don’t even care if you understand me. I just need to share. I need to give away what it feels I’ve won through a ceaseless battle against getting swept up by what I’m aware of. If I can share it, then it’s not just mine, and things don’t have to register as too personal. If many hands make light work, if we all bothered to pick up after ourselves, it might not even register as work at all.
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