[1224] It Takes A Village

I woke up this morning with the sentiment, “It takes a village” echoing in my head.

Yesterday, I arrived at a farm that belongs to my new employers. According to him, it’s only 2 years old. There’s all of the classic farm animals besides cows. When I got there, a 15-year-old was driving a tractor with a bush hog. This is another social work job, mentoring, tutoring, case-managing, but this one comes with the actual life-infrastructure and physical engagement that children need to properly learn things.

While me and one of the owner’s talked, I was left with the 10-year-old younger brother of the boy on the tractor. He’d only been at the farm for 2 days. He asked how I got so tall as he wants to be a center or power forward in the NBA. I told him it’s mostly genetics, but that he also needs to eat right and avoid sugar. He proceeded to list the heights of a dozen family members on either of his parents’ sides. When the owner got back, he set the boy to a task of breaking down a little pen that got twisted by a recent storm. He wasn’t great at it, and the “little” things that speak to success or failure really get highlighted.

This farm is located pretty close to the Indianapolis “normal neighborhood,” off a busy road, space. The kids that come here aren’t generally doing manual labor, and if they’re with a program like this have areas in which they or their family are struggling fairly significantly. The many things that you may take for granted in how to take down and move a small animal pen don’t exist in the mental framework of a child like this. He’s likely to pinch his fingers pushing in the little metal button that snaps into place. He’s not thinking about how to stack the polls in the cart so they don’t spill over the sides as he wheels it back to the barn.

I think most good parents are going to have thousands of examples like this in watching their kids grow up. It becomes too-obvious how much is missing and what else is needed in order for your child to thrive and survive. I don’t think it excuses, but I think it meaningfully accounts, for why so many immigrant families in particular put such an emphasis on working hard or getting extremely educated. Not that long ago, the alternative was pretty regular and visceral oppression and death. You need to be able to do things correctly. You need to be able to persist. A place like a farm will wise you up to that and humble your worst ideas very quickly.

Whatever you can say about the kids that find themselves under the care of a social worker, it’s ten-fold for their parents. The community is deficient. The family structure or set of assumptions is broken. There’s not just one messy or evil person going around sabotaging otherwise perfectly functioning spaces. As inclined as we are to bogey-man things, this framing always let’s us off the hook. This takes the direct impact of policy-makers and not-so-hidden agendas and keeps them abstract things to fight about.

There aren’t a lot of good-paying meaning-imbuing jobs that can account for the extent of needs. There aren’t enough institutions protecting and espousing a genuine education. There aren’t enough protections and long-term support systems that also don’t make people dependents. What we eat breaks our processing power and energy levels. What we watch reduces complexity into dopamine fixes. What we say keeps us trapped in circular self-sabotaging illogical blame games. We’re addicted, isolated, and constantly searching for heroes often ignoring the immediate fight we should be having every day.

Without a village, the loudest win. It’s a math equation at that point. The most violent, wins. The most diseased infects. The most money dictates. The village is the interplay and competition. If you refuse to play the game and stop competing, the worst wins. This is why we regulate markets. I think this is why we give mystical faithful beings codified evil to battle into infinity. We know we’re shaped by an immense amount of seemingly immeasurable forces, and individually it’s impossible to sort them out. In the interplay, we can mutually arrive at conclusions that enrich our knowledge and immune systems. It looks like teaching a kid how to stack things correctly. It looks like planting an idea seed that you shouldn’t eat too much sugar.

I’ve felt this problem for at least as long as my college cohort complained about how bleak the world looked at the time. There was a lot of discussion about what a little eco-village might look like. There was a lot of pain being felt about the lack of jobs. We stopped really hanging out, even before people flooded to Colorado and California. We neglected the best fix to the ever-atomized landscape provided by our phones, algorithms, and now A.I. We don’t challenge, learn, and meaningfully engage. We scroll through content. We default to irony. We allow ourselves to be crafted by forces that have nothing to do with why anyone would choose to stay alive.

Are you working because you love your job? Or are you paying the bills? Are you going to school and learning about how to craft and invest in the future? Or are you managing, poorly, debt and trying to look a certain way towards an employer who’s itching to outsource your job? Are you “dating,” or desperate to feel safe and find a narrative about being single, or childless, or “complicated” that doesn’t feel like a self-defeating parody? Would you drink the water in the nearest lake or river to you? Are you exhausted and checked-out trying to anticipate the fallout of “political” consequences?

Where’s your village? Who is in your tribe? Feckless democrats? A family more defined by the addictions and denial than anything passing for “love?” A friend group who sees each other once a year or less? A job that might cost you more in time, self-respect, and if you’re me, somehow MONEY, than you’re getting out of it? I’ve been in a dozen work environments where no one cared to unionize. I’ve watched friend groups deteriorate well after my exit. I’ve watched my family eat itself alive, next on the menu my alcoholic cousin gearing up to follow his older brother into death.

It’s our village’s complicity, a story told at every individual’s level, in how they respond, or don’t, to their suffering. Do they fight to protect the gifts and privileges and push what they’ve been given into even more, or wait for someone to “fix it?” No one is coming. No one was coming back in 2011 when all my friends pretended they were going to be a coherent accountable group. No is coming today or tomorrow. No one is going to teach you how to “adult” in a way that fights fascism one farm-lesson at a time.

For me, it’s always returning to what I have to do today, this hour, or when I write, this moment. I have to try to account, first. I have to try to articulate what I think is the problem altogether. I have to see my agency play out word by word. I have to control, at least one narrative, and look for evidence across time that I and what I’m responsible for exist independent of the amount of noise. It’s been work the whole time. It’s something that, were I not holding myself accountable to it, no one would do for me. I can take my existence on my land, my experiments entrepreneurally, and my patience and exploration for places to belong to for granted. I can also break them down and see them as a series of next-best-steps I could define about how to “deal with it all.”

When are we going to rebuild the village? When are we going to recognize the values haven’t changed? They’re no more complicated than the difference between specific practice and excuse-ridden theory. The excuses trap you in a job that doesn’t sustain you. They trap you in a family that exploits you. They trap you in a rental you’ll never own. They trap you under political leadership that sends you off cliffs financially, socially, and psychologically. What’s your, “This is how you stack the polls” thing you’re not doing for yourself right now? It has to be done thousands of times, together, right now, while the world continues to burn down around us. What’s the alternative?

[1223] Master Debaters

Part of me thinks each time I write I’m looking to round out a “grand theory of communication.” I don’t know what that means. I do know that I continue to notice patterns and experience frustrations in talking with people that steer me in a direction that there’s a better way to account for how we exchange information.

I have a really good friend who, I think it’s still “innocent,” will do this:

I’ll ask her, “If you had 10 people, 5 of them white, 5 of them black, would you be able to separate them into 2 groups based on color?”

Her, “I don’t know if they’re actually black or white! I would just feel so uncomfortable and wrong!”

Sure, but, that’s not really the point. It obscures the simple for the sake of the moral posturing. She knows, I know, we’re all mutts. She knows, I know, I’m not fishing for some racist conclusion. She knows, I know, colors are their own mystery and exist all along the color spectrum. She invites an infinite list of needless-to-qualify sentiments that obscures or obstructs what, at least everyone in our high school, could figure out in self-segregating at lunch. We also both know that she, and I, and nearly anyone on the planet, could do it easily.

This is also a friend who, at least initially struggles to notice characteristics that might be shared by different ethnic groups in general. This could be a form of prosopagnosia. I find I struggle to distinguish cars, maybe similarly defining mechanisms are implicated. Again, she knows, I know, nothing is perfect as there is no archetype “Greek” or “Italian” or “Somalian.” But it would be weird to pretend like traits aren’t shared and passed down, and that some people look like the groups they, in fact, belong to. When I go to Serbian fest, I see my uncles everywhere. When I go to Italian fest, I see my aunts and grandma everywhere.

I don’t know if there’s a discussion that even brushes against racial or ethnic differences that isn’t immediately derailed, so you can reasonably criticize me leading with these examples. They do give you a most visceral window into the nature of the immediacy of the general conversational derailment.

The classic space where this occurs is in religion “debates.” Legions line up to argue facts, science, history, genetics, evolution, psychology, chemistry, philosophy…and they don’t understand they’re up against “faith.” Hours of exchange improperly coded as “discussion” and “debate” and “reason.” No, you’ve been banging your head against their faith. Any topic for any reason can be subsumed by your faith in it.

I think we’re wired to protect “just whatever it is I believe right now.” I don’t recall what the more scientific or accurate way of saying this is. It’s not enough to call it “bias” of our own opinion. It’s deeper than that. There’s a survival mode invoked in the emotional experience of being challenged, contradicted, or “threatened.” We dress up that reactivity in myriad ways, but at bottom it’s a defensive reaction, not an owned and methodically accounted for and relayed relationship. We feel insecure, lash out or shut down.

I listened to comedian Dave Smith word-salad ramble against Coleman Hughes recently. The unironic “I know you are but what am I” sentiments flew out of Dave. The “whataboutisms” the “Sure, but” as though the point didn’t just land or wasn’t true enough to negate and move on from the lazy and incomplete thing Dave just said. It was a masterclass in showcasing how someone who is cursed with an impressive selective memory has no capacity to organize the soup in his brain.

But, there’s an extremely small group of people who are going to listen to the 3.5 hours of that exchange, recognize what’s happening, or translate what’s happening in a way that anyone else might understand it too. What purpose did it serve? Other “intellectuals” got to dip into the pool of “debate” and take their mind off whatever’s plaguing them that day. It’s not “helping” the “public conversation.” It’s another errant play by the attention economy to capture yours.

I do think there’s utility in serious thinkers and academics getting into these kinds of exchanges with idiots, frauds, comedians, propoghandists, and apologists. I don’t think there’s a broader theory of mind and strategy that most are following when they do. A Christopher Hitchens debated differently than a Sam Harris or a Coleman Hughes or a Professor Dave. Notably, most aren’t, even when I think they should, going to just call the dangerous frauds, “fucking dangerous fraud” as explicitly as they could.

Regardless of the topic or debaters, I apply my heuristics. Who’s getting defensive? Who’s asking explicit and should-be-easy to answer questions? Who’s name-calling, not because it’s correct and appropriate, but so they can jump away from what’s attempting to be focused?

This tension between focus and abstract is key.

This debate I just watched between Professor Dave, Dr. Dan Wilson vs Steve Kirsch and Pierre Kory echoed even more viscerally that foundational discrepancy between an errant exchange for attention and good faith discussion.

I think it will need to be part of our cultural immune system, word choice deliberate, to be able to recognize these kinds of tactics and exchanges quicker. We need to move past the idea that someone who is anti-vaxx is “merely skeptical.” We need to stop pretending that an ideologue, of any stripe, is doing “good faith” in their thought exercises. It’s a complete inversion of the words. It’s good for them. It’s self-reinforcing for their foundational faithful position. All you can accomplish is peeling layers of respectability and coherence off of your argument in the minds of onlookers by engaging naively with their position. You need to be able to disentangle, highlight, and embarrass what they’re doing while also educating on whatever the topic might be.

It’s a feat, to be sure. To look and sound reasonable under what is a literally insatiable desire and comfort for destruction, grift, and ego/brand protection is nearly impossible without training incidental personality quirks that not many of us share. Even with those people in our lives that we’d wish the best for our capacity to disagree and misinterpret leads to catastrophic outcomes so regularly, many people just shut down and don’t make waves as an act of self-preservation. Who has the time, inclination, motivation, etc. to combat and deconstruct what might be understood as the death of coherent coexistence?

Yet, I think we all will need to find our own engine of “actual debater” in order to last long term. Right now, we’re letting people die of measles because we’re acting like segregating people by color is hard or unreasonable. That is, we’re letting our fears and unwillingness to designate information as more or less reliable based on evidence instead of assumptions kill our capacity to sustain ourselves, let alone get better. Yes, if you’re having a assumptive discussion about who gets to be a slave, somehow always leaving aside the era or country, you are correct. Horrors would then abound and you’d be right to be deeply incensed and suspicious of the person presenting the exercise.

The nature of lying is what’s being protected. The story of how a lie manifests and contorts stays hidden. The reasons you would resist getting past your own insistence to lie stays a secret. The nature of your always-right, always concerned with your feelings god gets to exercise its power indefinitely. You don’t change. You don’t learn. You don’t grow. You don’t genuinely see the evidence or define that which can cohere between us all. That sounds like the death of us all.

As a counselor, I watch my words get twisted instinctively all the time. I can say, “The door is brown,” and be interpreted as, “That door has never been brown, will never be brown, and if you try to paint it brown, you’re an asshole.” That’s what feelings do. That distortion doesn’t just ignore or destroy our ability to see a brown door, it can take something innocuous and convert it into a feeling of being personally attacked. It instantly builds entire worlds around the subject matter from which “natural conclusions” follow almost as quickly, about the person, the door, the color brown, or why we’d be so bold and disingenuous to invoke the door at all!

Return to your questions and make them excruciatingly specific. It’s excruciating for the person who doesn’t understand they’re lying. It’s important if you’re going to maintain respect and rapport for the people in your life who are otherwise inclined to behave like bad actors, but without the intentionality. Those who are in on the grift will get angry. Those who are genuinely trying to think things through will let your questions linger and hopefully discover how to speak to them either more removed from their initial feelings or after better incorporating what that feeling was attempting to tell them.

I get 2% heated when my friend does the conversation obscuring, abstracting out thing. I have feelings just like anyone else that want to catastrophize and race through my pages of thoughts and experiences of things it rhymes with. I know that’s a thing. I don’t make it personal. I don’t treat her differently. I move on from nights where it’s going to get intractable and needlessly frustrating. She returns to the subject matter later, more specific, sometimes with questions, or with a demonstrated ability to digest more than what was happening at the time. It’s something I’m incredibly thankful for as usually I just have to pretend there’s not some growing well of irreconcilable resentment that tends to erase me from people’s lives.

We’re now in the future where that erasure is rewarded from AI to the attention algorithms. Whether you’re calling out errors in my thinking or vice versa, that whole exercise is gone if you’re not seeking it out. I’m prescribing a debate and communication process 10-steps long after we bother to agree on the nature of the problem or purpose and utility of engaging said process altogether. That’s an accidentally convoluted way of saying I don’t think we’re gonna pull that off. I also don’t know what our institutions would have to look like to mitigate the fallout of it never getting better. As it stands, they’ve proven to be ineffective against popular gish gallop.

Individually, you can recognize in yourself what I’m talking about. I know when I’m getting “elevated.” I know when I’m feeling “defensive.” I know when I need to learn more about a topic to discuss or debate it more effectively. I know when I’m inclined to make a personal attack instead of contend with what’s being said. I know there are real and persistent patterns across subjects that speak to the reliability of the person relaying the information. If your narrative is unconcerned, or incapable of defining, evidence, you lose by default. If you’re unable to build on relevant details, your trapped like a Sims character in a pool without a ladder. You have to figure out you’re playing the game and there’s only one way the part of you that’s struggling to find agency doesn’t drown.

[1222] Yuck It Up

I’m having so many thoughts on the Riyadh comedy festival it’s getting in the way of me moving on to other things. 

When I’m wavering between things, sometimes I use the percentages exercise. I’m like 90% in the camp of Zach Woods, Marc Maron, David Cross and the things they’ve discussed related to fascist regimes and state sponsored violence. I’m 10% with, not even the comedians or the patent justifications and excuses they’ve offered, but with the idealized version of reality where people are just people and we want commingling and seepage that doesn’t try to paint entire societies by the atrocities of their worst actors or leadership.

 

I don’t think falsely equivocating countries is a wise or honest way to say why you’ll participate. I don’t think downplaying attacks on freedom of speech, particularly now, particularly in a country that will kill you for what you say, as a comedian, is ever going to be something people should stop giving you shit about. To me, you’ve reduced yourself to “entertainer” or “podcaster” or “influencer” and rescind the title. You’ve lost the dignity that comes with wielding the weapon of your individual voice.

 

The 10% of me is trying to embody the idea that I’m offered a huge amount of money. What’s the first line of the first excuse I would offer? I don’t owe anybody anything. My career is my own. I do, genuinely, believe we are more alike than different, even if that’s incredibly hard to discern in someone raised in a theocracy or dictatorship. How fast can you expect “progress” to be? If I’m a Jewish lesbian like Jessica Kirson, who I love as a comedian, isn’t it a monumental moment to just be there and not immediately murdered at all? So they don’t want me to make fun of religion or the royal family? Do I make fun of my colleagues who are clean and don’t touch certain subjects?

 

It’s not abstract, though, that they kill people for what they say. It’s the greatest piece of evidence you have about how important your voice is and how useful of an idiot they believe they can make you. That’s what would stop me if I felt the devil calling. That’s what would make me look at $1,000,000 or more dollars and trigger an emptiness and a closing of creative and accountable possibility. Anyone who claims it’s just a payday who’s either already solidly rich or mingling and friends with those who give them rich access, is simply not seriously engaging with their moral center. A moral center that hopefully continues to nag them.

 

I do believe the comedians who went over are also captured and insulated. They’re all, mostly, each other’s friends and apologists already. Bill has turned Jessica into a name. All the podcast bros just are on rotation on each other’s shows, touring or otherwise. Some of the comedians are hardly “comedian” anymore than they are “global brand.” When you reach those levels of success, everything takes on a more abstracted character. It’s why I tend to find arena-level comedians and shows boring even if they were, technically, the same people who made me fall in love in the first place.

 

To me, it’s pretty much a bad taste at every level of context you could apply. As individuals, I’ve yet to hear a compelling reason-not-excuse to go that doesn’t pie-in-the-sky the conversation. As a comedian, I wouldn’t invite that much scrutiny from professional shit-talkers into my life if you paid me 1.6 million dollars. As an American who is on the verge, if not already lost, freedoms, and in the wake of Jimmy Kimmel, it just feels like stupidest kind of betrayal too-indicative of the times. Thankfully, I worship nobody, so while I can be disappointed and I’m going to be significantly less inclined to pay attention to or sing the praises of anyone on that list, it’s not like my identity has been shattered. You know how many comedians who’ve brought me to tears laughing who aren’t on that list?

 

I think, reasonably enough, comedy has achieved it’s modern pedestal because people are desperate for more “truth to power” spaces. Whether or not it’s the kind of exercise that nets anything but laughs, the laughs become sacred because it feels like all you can do. I think that’s why people would imprint on anyone with the ability to articulate how they feel. But it comes at the cost of agency. Your hero let you down? You make the next joke. You learn how to meaningfully impact the thing that’s keeping you down. Save your breath trying to indefinitely shame them as they spend their money and ask yourself why you’re so keen to make it about them instead of you. You also have a microphone.

[1221] Another Time

I was super tired earlier and felt like I had to write something about my recent experience, but I don’t know that I actually caught what I needed to say.

My mind keeps returning to the idea of how “unfortunate” things are when it comes to my experiences with different work environments. The idea of a career, years spent in service to something, is so foreign to me. The idea that reliable and demonstrable problems can get routinely ignored, lied about, or compounded is as confusing to me as any chronic human condition that doesn’t concern itself with getting better.

Sometimes it can be incredibly easy to criticize from the outside looking in. I’ve been an agent of the State. I know the incredibly biting judgments and assessments of DCS’s behavior and occasionally bizarre takes on our motivation or incentives. It wasn’t until I was working on the inside that I was both able to develop a nuanced appreciation for those who break themselves in service to helping others and maintaining any semblance of order. I could understand the details of what breaks down and why. It always comes back to individuals abusing or negligently exercising their power.

I didn’t have the power to structure the business I just quit. I didn’t have the power to redirect funds to ensure the air conditioning was fixed in the only van they used to transport dozens of people from the houses to their IOP groups. I could say, “Let’s invest in another van, and a second driver” to ensure the timely and safe transportation. I couldn’t designate training days for case managers and counselors to know how to approach their roles in ways that didn’t become overwhelming. I couldn’t set the expectation that sitting in silence and not on phones would be mandatory even if you didn’t care to do yoga.

I was able to identify and state what would feel like “obvious” fixes. This happens everywhere I work. At the YMCA you have elevated behaviors no one on staff is equipped to deal with? Write up and remove those kids. Don’t fire the person who says he’s uncomfortable at the invitation to physically intervene against the special needs kid who is swinging. You have staff targeting families for removal at DCS? Sit them down and call them out for being fucked up and not even trying to investigate and remain impartial. When the cab companies I worked for wanted the lion’s share of my money for each shift and provided zero access to the peak delivery times, I took my money and ran.

I find myself personally often trying to address a different kind of problem related to creating. I now have a step-down house that needs tenants. So, “obviously” I should reach out to other programs and let them know what we’re about. My problem is akin to the ones I had in trying to run a counseling nonprofit. Everyone’s got their own little bubble and method of doing things. Working you in or around it, seemingly by definition, threatens their fiefdom. Thus, the real problem is a schmoozing and politely engaging in a persistent enough way that someone bothers to work  you in.

My job is keeping my partners happy, my tenants happy, staying within my budget, and ensuring I get all of the paperwork correct. There’s a dozen things I’d like to do and ways I’d love to operate eventually, but in the here and now, I need a full house with a reliable enough stream of income that allows me to pay the bills and scale in a reliable way. I’m not rushing out to rent another house or three, like my former employer did, before I brought sense and stability to what’s on hand.

I have little reason to believe that if I can keep working with a reliable set of boundaries and reasonable expectations I won’t get what I want. It doesn’t matter how many times I encounter this breakdown in communication, common sense, or respect for what I bring to a space, at the end of the day it’s me and what I’m bringing. It’s what I’m taking and applying elsewhere. I don’t care if you look at a stupid video game or I again cite the very house I built, with the tools, time, and money, it will be mine. It takes incredibly longer than I ever think it should, but it gets there.

Tomorrow I’m going to research and make a ton of calls to sober living environments and start building a networking spreadsheet. I’m going to look up cameras to buy and install in the house. I’m going to get the contracts in order between the various LLCs and nonprofit. I’m probably going to all or most of this well before 3 PM, and then I’m going to sit around playing games, or music, or watching TV as I wait for the next job I’ve lined up to call me back. Or, I’ll get bored and go door dash somewhere. Or, I’ll sleep. No matter what, what it takes to succeed will remain with me and I have every intention of following the obvious choices to the places I wish to reside.

What kills me is how genuinely hard I tried to not leave in a messy way. I did not intend to quit. I did not intend to stir up drama on my exit. I didn’t intend to create bad blood or look like I was being deceptive and underhanded in how I was operating. But that’s the table I was invited to. That’s the nature of people who lead through means other than competence and accountability. It’s passive aggressive, an interrogation, demands of loyalty, and ambivalence towards you if you don’t just go along with whatever they throw at you. Once again, it’s not about me or us and what we could have created together, it’s about them. I’m forever obligated to account for myself and what I tried and failed to accomplish.

I’m still not back in Jordan Peterson’s corner, but his impact on me still resounds, and probably in ways he never intended. The depth of his exasperated sentiment that anything works or exists at all I felt in my core. His face and tone regularly cross my brain when I reflect on how my work environments operate. How there’s an invitation to be like them, which only looks appetizing on the surface. I don’t want to hide and play pretend. I don't want to censor myself and practice the exact opposite of my moral values. I don’t want to fit in. I don’t just want a paycheck.

If our culture is severely broken, and I believe it is, now is so obviously the time to manage your accidental martyrdom and continue to fight for and set the examples we need. That’s being honest. That’s being accountable. That’s accepting as quickly and as often as it takes how many are not with you nor seem to have a prayer of finding out how to be. It’s unfortunate, the continued choices people make to stay right where they are.

[1220] Another Day

Fair warning, this is some inside-baseball level of digression about my recent job addiction counseling and case-managing.

About 5 months ago, I began working for a company in Indianapolis that a friend and former coworker had been working for for a year. She told me regularly about the turnover, disorganization, lack of training, etc. I knew, well in advance, what type of space I’d be jumping into if I decided to work there. She was only part-time and it was supplementing her other job. She made it work, so I figured I could make it work. I did, part-time, in between my shifts working for the YMCA.

I’m not an average employee. I do all the “extra” stuff to make a space accountable and tolerable. I’ve digressed on this before. Today feels necessary to record because it’s the straw that broke the back day. It’s the pivot point after a culmination of what I’ve been witnessing or writing and discussing for months.

Literally, every single measure I attempted to create or adopt to stabilize my work environment has been rebuked.

There was chaos in the mornings about which houses were going to which rooms to be lead by which counselors, every day. It took weeks to get a white board with consistent accurate information so that I could expect to go to the same place and see the same people each day.

They try to implement supplemental education on financial literary and yoga, all with their own disorganized and inconsistent people and schedules. The expectations changed week to week. When I finally set one, it was overruled almost as if it was an allergic reaction.

For the past 2 weeks, the white board was no longer being updated, and after 2 hours of an entire house sitting around waiting for someone to arrive in a different room, they were added to my group for the last 45 minutes. No notice to them or me. No one even knew or cared to ask why they were sitting around for 2 hours. This was the last thing I had left.

They had no case management system, so I built one. Then they lost their funding, case managers, and cut or erased everyone’s pay overnight with no plan or direction.

They didn’t coordinate with any service providers. I, and other case managers, attempted to bring people in who provide free phones, get felons hired, or find low-income housing. Each attempt complained about and ended after an office manager refused to create a new transportation logistical plan.

I was hired to do 3 hours of group a day. Over the last few months, after previous DMHA complaints, they said a therapist has to run at least one hour of my group, then it became two hours, then today I open the group note to see the therapist already filled it out for the 3 hours under her name. So, I drove an hour to work to babysit for 45 minutes and not get paid?

In 5 months I go fro making about $1,100 every 2 weeks, which isn’t great to begin with, that’s more than halved, without notice, when casework is killed. Apparently then I’d be expected to shuffle rooms, stay later, and speed through random material to functional strangers in order to record an hour at the end of 3 groups to make, a couple hundred bucks?

They admitted people with a whole host of mental health conditions we were not equipped to deal with. One, 2 days ago, shot and killed someone. The entire time he was in our program, staff referred to him as “crazy,” and “not suited for this level of care.”

They currently have people they are housing, giving controlled substance medication to, and transporting, who aren’t enrolled in the system.

I never planned to quit this way. I feel like I’m watching the movie of who this is happening to, but thankfully have been in this field and alive long enough to have been managing the decline and chaos along the way. I was the one talking my colleagues down who have been threatening to quit for weeks. I’m the one trying to find what’s salvageable while everyone’s crying about what’s burning.

The being confronted by the owner told me what I had been intuiting in the most direct way. He wasn’t interested in accountability or learning, he was hunting. He’s been unable to demonstrate leadership the entire time I’ve been there. Today, when I warned my clients that if the accountability calls get made as they were expressed to me today, they should have a plan for where they’ll live. They took that to mean “this place is closing down” which I explicitly said that was not what I was saying.

Should it be shut down? Probably. Will it? I have no idea. If I care about my clients and being accountable, I’m not going to provide a hopeless catastrophic vision of what’s happening, but I’m also not going to pretend like the way in which that place is operating is sustainable. All of the therapists are leaving. The desk staff. The turnover on “peer support” has been incredible. Meanwhile, they think they can start and operate an even higher level of care PHP program, as they chase anyone with the competence and ability to run it away.

This kind of thing is too typical. It’s so played. I almost feel like I’m wasting my breath talking about another environment where people’s greed, ambivalence, and ego bring consequences to dozens, but wish to be held harmless. In fact, wish to hunt for more witches undermining their ends.

Anyway, I’ve got jobs lined up. I’m still populating the step-down house. I practice what I preach in counseling, and yet again, am prepared to shoulder the consequences of maintaining standards of care and concern for people. I can write about it. I can create around it. I can’t control your individual shit you’re willing to hurl in my direction.

[1219] Too Sweet

I feel stuck in a lane where I have to say several pages of boring, redundant, and too-obvious things in order to unlock what’s bubbling deeper.

I don’t understand the people who pretend like life isn’t horrible. Every moment that you’re alive and not actively suffering something is a miracle. The amount of ways in which you can die “normally” don’t make the television show 1000 Ways to Die. You’re incidentally complicit from everything to ongoing war crimes to environmental destruction. You tacitly accept the death and destruction of nearly everything that doesn’t touch you, without irony, every day. It makes the whole farce around Charlie Kirk all the more confusing and cringe.

I’ve now had the experience where someone told me they literally didn’t know who he was as they went in to defend him. The fascists and apologists think if they start sentiments with, “He was a father,” or, “Nobody should be killed for their opinion,” that it has anything to do with what’s at issue. No reasonable person thinks you should be killed for your opinion. You’re trying to shift the point, and not in a smart or honest way.

More importantly, our inability to accept how honestly weird it is that the dumbest of the dumb and the smartest of the smart commit the same error with such fluidity you’d think critical thinking makes you ill. He wasn’t “debating.” He wasn’t “honest.” He wasn’t harmless, even if his words weren’t literal violence. That goes doubly for his backers.

I don’t understand why people don’t grasp that most of the world, most of the time, but especially the rich who get that way by extracting and exploiting, don’t care about you. The religious who hide their power and money-hungry agenda behind rhetoric instead of practicing anything Jesus actually said don’t care about you. Your employer doesn’t care about you. Your reddit mods don’t care about you. They care about themselves. They care about how they look. They care about exercising superficial power and how it makes them feel.

So do all idiots, ideologues, demagogues, charlatans, cheats, liars, insecure cunts, incels, proud spiteful entitled children, Karens, pretentious music nerds, homoerotic dress-up-and-play-with-guns club members, or any average person who, on a given day, is struck by how confusing, absurd, arbitrary, and pointless their life is. Because they struggle to accept this, they turn their sights on you. Naturally, if you’re the problem, they can never be.

I know why I’m a problem. In my heart of hearts, I’m hateful and violent. I’m a literal counselor and professional de-escalator and feelings examiner. I can snap quick. I’m indulgent and wasteful. I do feel a certain pride in my accomplishments and stature, earned and unearned. I know how to work people and navigate the consequences of what my mother used to refer to as, “that mouth.” I know when I’m jumping to judgmental conclusions and not thinking deep or long enough about something. I know when I’m going to come off as inflammatory or cold. I know what I’d be tempted to do with the wrong kind of power in the right kind of circumstances.

It isn’t hard for me to say any of that, because I make choices. I can be many things at once and pick who I want to be. I can take responsibility, through regular practice of working to be more like one part and less like another. Meanwhile, it can still all be true. I used to think this made me a psychopath. I now think it says something unquantifiably damning about the nature of the culture in which I was raised that I couldn’t arrive at calling it “adult” for so long.

I don’t meet a lot of adults. I meet a lot of people at the mercy of their worst instincts. They use vague approximations of how they “feel” a word is supposed to operate. They use vague phrases to avoid accountable behavior. That’s the human animal first. The adult moral individual goes, “Oh, fuck, that’s a bad thing about me, let me try this. Also, let me try this long enough for it to have an effect and materially change my mental and physical circumstances.”

I meet people who check boxes. They rage at what they’re told to rage at. They vote like the only way to learn something is through word of mouth from your mouthiest friend. They do, barely, what a job kind-of asks of them. They lead with empty descriptors of “who they are” a thousand times before they’ll tell you anything they’re proud of doing or of what they’ve done. They’ll have kids and pretend they want to keep them. They’ll get educated and pretend they’re “passionate” about the field. They’ll get tired and busy prepping for who they swear they’ll be eventually.

When you actually care about something, you learn about it. You invest in it. You sacrifice the impulse to get lost in superficial feelings that are begging you to give up caring. This applies to yourself as much as anything else. No one, not a single solitary person who has performed their grief gives a shit about Charlie Kirk. They want to be absolved for their abhorrent beliefs, laziness, and terrible word choices as confidently and assuredly as he proselytized.

What “father” makes excuses and does apologetics for the guns and the “rights” after a school shooting? One who thinks he’s a god who felt license to flood the world. One whose sinful pride and greed would ride the adoration of being inflammatory. When you’re nothing but an attention mouthpiece, you can adopt whatever posture you need to keep the clicks and eyeballs coming. You don’t “believe” in anything besides yourself and how you feel in any given moment. A civil society hopes and prays you’ll feel bad enough through enough “debate.” But they don't understand that you’ve chosen to never feel bad again already.

You can’t recognize how egregiously and obviously people are lying to you when you don’t understand the nature of the lies you tell yourself. My sense that I’m going to “live forever” is as alive and well as my sense that I’m about to die at any moment. Whatever that means in biochemical or psychologically balanced terms, I have no idea. But I know for sure one is a lie no matter what you tell me about your heaven. I can differentiate what I wish to be true, versus what I encounter every day. I can pause before I speak, clarify, and own when I get something wrong. I choose to articulate how the lies manifest so I can practice working them out of my behavior. I don’t use what I know about lying and how rich it could make me to confuse you further about what constitutes an honest opinion or innocent exchange.

If I did, I’d be a cunt. If you spent years of your life explaining what I was doing as something noble and righteous, you’d be a dumb cunt. You’d be catastrophically wrong. You’d be contributing to the impulse that kills us all and rides the nihilism I chose for you to suckle on. Are there “true believers” out there? Sure, probably. Are any of them slapping their faces on T-shirts, creating clickbait, or occupying bizarre spaces that smell overwhelmingly like racist and sexist tropes conveniently contradicted occasionally? I have sincere doubts. The faithful don’t sell you things. The faithful don’t sell you. The faithful don’t sell. You don’t have to give yourself over to their games unless it’s secretly your game too.

[1218] Back To Reality

It’s been a full weekend. My friend and I went to all 3 days of Riot Fest, open to close, with one after show at The Cobra Lounge for Senses Fail. My feet hurt. I swore after our last festival that we should stop doing festivals, especially since both of us enjoy smaller venues and the energy you can’t find exhausted at the end of a field watching a video. I took off today because I work in Indianapolis and live even farther away. Thankfully, it rained, because I was intending to pick up furniture in service to my budding rental property endeavor.

The festival has a running “joke” about how much it sucks, yet every band that plays regularly expresses how much they love it or how it is their favorite. It’s all over the place genre wise. They put similar artists against each other. The layout, even as it seems to make a certain kind of sense, betrays another (like, maybe 2 water stands and the ability to walk around both sides of the stages). Overall the spirits were high, people tolerable, and beyond the miserable task of escaping back to parking, another one for the memories and lists.

For me, it marks the 66th-69th concerts, comedy shows, or theater performances I’ve been to this year. 371st since 2022. I got a lot of new concert T-shirts. I paid way too much for food. I won Snoop and Dre’s drink sunglasses. My nose was lightly tanned.

The idea of returning to work didn’t fill me with the usual dread. It’s sunk in in a deeper way that doing this, going to concerts, making the drives, budgeting for the indulges, is what I’ve made my “real world.” I do it more than I do anything related to my job. I already have built so much to ensure my overall comfort or preferences, I’m just stacking experiences and seeing where they take me. It feels like a different kind of power. I’m not rich, but I’m clearly privileged. I work hard, when I must, but I’m not an ironworker like my dad. I’m not in the courts or on the front lines of fighting fascism.

I’ve been so relatively focused on shaping my existence for so long. I don’t know that I take it for granted, especially because I write. I think I’ve seen every decision it’s taken to get where I am, and I have a healthy appreciation for what it’s going to take to get me where else I want to go. I still want a real community that focuses on group goals. I still want to go to sleep and wake up when I please. I still want the space to engage all of my creative ideas and hobbies at once. I want to create part of the machine that keeps the fascist impulse in us all at bay.

It’s been weird trying to figure out the nature of the tired over the last few days. The only thing that really hurt was my feet. Thankfully, I’ve been doing yoga at least once a week for the last few months. There’s a degree of physical tiredness, but it’s not like I couldn’t walk, stand, drive, or manage to move furniture if I had to today. I was deeply appreciative I got to come home and sleep. It’s now 1:35 and I’m to be up in about 6 hours to go to work. At once I still think I’d enjoy more recuperation, but I also feel like again I’ve proven to myself I’m not that old and could stand to be more involved, moving, dancing, or otherwise.

[1217] Ding Dongs

It’s hard to overstate what writing can do to help you think clearer. As I reflect on what I perceive to be a series of muddied and disingenuous responses to Charlie Kirk’s death, I’m noticing patterns that hark back to the era of The New Atheists. The “nature of debate” is on full display, and routinely, no one defining terms nor willing to be nailed to the cross of their alleged convictions.

If you want to be “reasonable,” you can start by trying to say one truthful thing after another. You don’t have to know anything else about where you’re coming from. You can start with what’s most obviously true, for you, or of your perception. For me, it’s something easy like, “I don’t give a fuck about Charlie Kirk.” That, by itself, is very true. A reactionary response is going to invoke his children, far-flung theories of political violence, and almost certainly personal attacks questioning my right to say what I say or feel what I feel.

But I don’t give you the rest of the rope to hang myself, you invent it. I care, generally, that we have an environment where people aren’t dying for speaking. Speaking, in and of itself, is no reason to kill someone. It’s not hard to understand that “speaking” and “invoking violence” or “apologetics” are different things. When you meet someone who treats those distinctions as illegitimate or confusing, if you’re me, you dismiss them out of hand. You’re not prepared to have an adult conversation and I’m not interested in engaging with your feelings.

The most compelling thing I hear is about how the fascists will use death as a pretext to escalate. I know things can always get worse, but I don’t see how we’re not already living in the midst of their endless lies and pretexts to continue trying to control and kill. It’s like I’m hearing we shouldn’t attack the Nazis who’ve taken a small town because they’ll just ramp up their efforts on a different front. Bro, we’re already at war.

In taking things line by line, I can clock “elevated rhetoric,” because no, we’re not literally at war. Nor do I wring my hands hoping we devolve into some kind of civil one. At the same time, literally, the people in power are sending National Guard troops to cities and rounding people up, deporting them without trial, and claiming national emergencies. The “highest court” in the land cosigns and invents whole-cloth justifications to destroy the entire system of accountability. An entire party spends more time defending rich pedophiles than writing policy that remotely represents their constituents. They didn’t need Charlie Kirk to die to get there.

What are you supposed to make of your individual response or responsibility to the state of affairs? I work directly, every day, with the population who is going to lose their health insurance and SNAP. You think it’s my job to preach civility when I’m trying to get people to believe in their fundamental worth and humanity while they’re under attack?

People are getting fired for posting quotes from Charlie. His words are supposed to be at once banal and about “freedom” of expression, but when you use them, you need to be punished? This transcends gaslighting. When his killer was discovered to be the whitest of the whites — gun-toting, perpetually online, with Republican parents and Mormon upbringing, who went on Charlie’s show to decry the violence of "the left" -- the vice-president. Why am I supposed to be afraid of what they’ll do “if?” They’ve been doing it in big and small ways for decades.

I also can’t help but think that we’re falling into the trap of putting things off on “leaders.” If 10 more people are killed on either side, does that mean I don’t have to think critically anymore? Does that mean I shouldn’t vote in an informed way? Does that mean I’m just at the mercy of the notion that “violence begets violence.” Does it? Does it not sometimes cause the aggressor to stop long enough that we get a chance to live peacefully again? Dozens of clichés and statements that are ringing as increasingly hollow sentiments are offered as it clicks how terrible people are at denoting the real enemy and nature of the problem.

Somewhere along the line of “social media” or “public discourse” we dropped the expectation that things needed to have evidence, make sense, or be an extension of reason and shared reality. All that began to matter was the performance. That’s leftist land acknowledgments just as much as it is fascist professions of faith. What you actually care about is how you feel and look to the tribe. It’s a tired observation, but it continues to manifest in ways that aren’t being articulated. It feels like we’re trying to address it by continuing to point at it, ridicule it, or reduce the discourse to both-sides gibberish.

How can you be more accountable? You can accept that people lie. You can accept that you are human, and you lie. You might even be lying when you don’t “feel” like you are. The lie is that you’re informed enough. The lie is that your confidence is real. The lie is that your tribe will protect you or that you belong to one above your class. The lie is that you’ve put in the work to think more deliberately and reasonably about ever-evolving topics and your place in the world. You’re stuck reacting. You’re stuck regurgitating language you have no emotional connection to nor could ever arrive at on your own.

My hatred for people like Charlie Kirk is mine. I know the kind of stain and impact they have like everyone they’ve targeted does. I don’t need to cross my fingers and trust that the fascists will do one of a hundred things I really care about. I know what a fascist is, how they operate, and what they will destroy in service to their ends. If you were honest, and not lazy, and practiced in your accountability, you would too. You wouldn’t waste your time “debating” someone’s dog-whistles and not-so-tacit endorsement of wanton death.

The unreasonable people will spend your whole life never figuring it out. Why continue sacrificing for them? Is that why you wake up every day? To be told who your god is, what to think, and what your life is worth? Your brain can’t distinguish for itself what you never create or protect it from.

[1216] Prove Me Wrong

I’m what you might consider a “shit, or get off the pot” kind of person. I don’t like waiting around for the “inevitable,” positively or negatively charged. I’d rather watch every good and bad installment of my favorite franchises today than wait years in between. I’d rather the “modern civil war” take place and we move on to reconstruction, saving the “debates” entirely.

A certain kind of person is going to hear this idea very superficially. They’re going to think I don’t believe in conversation. They’re going to think I’m an entitled and impatient child who wants to be appeased and indulgent. They’re not going to catch the wisdom in goal-orientation and properly-aligned priorities. The state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, especially if you’re Charlie Kirk.

It’s natural, the “conservative.” I wish this would sink in to our modern discourse. It’s natural to be hateful, violent, and disingenuously concocting “arguments” to complete your internal narrative and sense of self-assuredness. It’s the most natural thing in the world to be perfectly proudly stupid and righteous, making whatever noises you can to enrich yourself, get attention, or fuck.

But “natural,” has nothing to do with “moral” or “right” or “reasonable.” Those are all the wretched “human” things that, theoretically, distinguish us from mere animals.

I arrived at a question earlier today. Is it worse to think that someone does, in fact, deeply care about the same things you do and won’t or can’t do something about them? Or is it worse that they don’t care at all? The classic is school shootings. You know who doesn’t care about school shootings? My cats. They care, every day, about the same handful of things, none of which are about who is dying or under what circumstances.

Wouldn’t it be crazy if they had the power to meow in a particular way that prevented school shootings? That’d be nuts, right? We’d maybe struggle with the idea that cats don’t give a fuck if we knew they had that kind of power.

Yet, across the whole of “political” discourse, we carry on like there’s “two sides” to everything. We act as though we must “tolerate” those who are perfectly capable and hell bent on killing us. Every single moment of every single day that you treat one of your fascist friends or neighbors like an innocent little kitty spells our collective demise.

So, yes, when a Kirk dies, an angel named “karma” or “common sense” gets its wings. I can’t say I believe in either nor am religious, but we literally had to kill thousands of Nazis and Japanese before we could start to have a prayer at what passes for peace. That wasn’t that long ago. The same animalistic haterade is what we’re born with today as we were back then. We need a long-term active solution for that sucker born every minute ready to tear at the fabric of everything we care about. A process supercharged by myopic solopsy-inducing algorithm.

You’d be foolish to think it’s about “you” and to don the kind of invincibility cloak the fascists have been parading under for way too long. You’d be even more foolish to look at those loud and proud in their behavior and not think your own version of it is preventing you from taking the kind of responsibility you must to account for them. You actually do have to speak up, be consistent, hold yourself and others accountable, and own fuck ups in a real way. You actually do have to pay attention. You have to step outside of what you think you already know and confront the nature of the problem you’ve yet to articulate or visualize properly.

I don’t rejoice in “death.” I rejoice in the visceral experience of necessary consequences. It lets us move the story along. The bowels are compacted. I want to shit. I get confused about people who think we must debate how, why, and whether we must, in fact, shit. I get more confused and viscerally upset by those who think we must quibble about the smell, size, shape, and nature of shit. It’s been so shitty for so long, you’d think we were a society based around finding ways to interject shit into every possible area it does not belong.

I would love more than anything to just take a shit, flush it away, and not have to genuinely worry that over half of the people I pass that day are itching to find the turd and shove it down my throat while remaining deeply skeptical about anyone who tells them it’s not “just like eating a carrot. ” Maybe if I did my research about all the nutrients left behind I could wake up and join the other patriots.

This has been the level of discourse since, at least, Sarah Palin. Probably fueled initially by Newt Gingrich, but there’s historical analogues everywhere, see Heather Cox Richardson for a proper education there. Somewhere, we didn’t just lose the plot, we burned the whole goddamn book and started divining the rules as though by magic. We’ve poisoned ourselves, destroyed the ecosystem, kept people poor, sick, and stupid, and what does that fuel? Religious, compulsive coping narratives. The narcissism and immaturity of self-righteous pride. Animalistic sin. The arbitrary wilderness dictating the rules, the language, and the increasingly inevitable consequences.

As a conscious agent, again, I don’t want to wait. I don’t need another 37 years on the planet to be persuaded of the depth and danger of ideological capture. I don’t need a series of brilliant TED talks about the consequences of short-sighted “sinful” behavior. I don’t need persuaded and cajoled over pedantically argued words which were never respected as meaning anything by your combatant in the first place.

Prove me wrong?

I have no concept of proof! Proof is what I think, always. Proof fits my definition and God’s! Proof makes me feel good, so if you don’t make me feel good you haven’t even entered the realm of proving anything! Me? I am anything! I am everything! I am humble and graceful and righteous and correct! You might dare to try to prove me wrong, but that goes to show how small-minded and simple you are that you can’t even recognize what I am! Wrong? WRONG? You think I’m going to even bother opening my mouth about something unless I was already convinced and knew how right it was?

I think the shooter knew he needed a new hole to try and say something worthwhile from. I think if we’re “shocked” and “horrified” by such things, we need to act like it every day by saying and doing the right things so often it renders the impact of the Kirks, Trumps, Shapiros, McConnells, Thomases, ists, isms, ologues, etc. moot. It’s your fault. It was your fault then, and it’s your fault now, and if/when things stay compacted and explode later, that’ll be your fault too. It’ll be your fault that you have this much to say, and have every day, and waiting to accidentally find me to say it.

It’s on all of us, all the time, every day. Not to play along and posture, but to tell the truth. Truths like, I’m happy he’s dead. I’m happy at least one is down. I don’t want to be happy, because I’m human. But I am happy, because that animal, and animals like him, would rather us die as randomly and arbitrarily as he did than live peacefully together.

I don’t, actually, want anyone to die. That’s not why I wake up every day. I don’t think to myself how nice and what a relief it would be. I think that if they don’t die, they’re coming for me first. I don’t wake up and look for a gun, a place to rob, or a policy to pass that strips people of food, healthcare, or an ability to pay for a modern existence. They do. I don’t argue about how we should up our danger quotient by flooding the zone with lies and weapons. They do. I don’t sit with a smug self-satisfied mocking tone looking for provocative things to say for attention and money at the expense of those who can’t figure out what I’m doing. They do.

They aren’t on the “other side,” they’re on the pre-human plane we all have to cross if we’re going to have a prayer of sustaining a collective existence. We’re not going to fix anything if we allow ourselves to remain stuck, in the exact same manner in which they are stuck, about the nature of the problem.

[1215] Awesome God

I tend to watch movies on Sundays. I don’t know if that’s by accident, or because as a child we used to go over to my grandparents for lunch/dinner on Sundays and watch a movie afterwards. I’ve been more or less baked into my home for the last 4 days, leaving last night under the impression I was to spend time with a friend I haven’t seen in a while. Instead, I did some grocery shopping and returned to my nest.

I’ve been anchoring to an idea lately. I watched a random short or TikTok where a man described how much conservatives care about your life and body. They care who you marry. They care who you fuck. They care where your immortal soul is going and how to get it there. If you just want to be left alone, you can’t do so in a world where a conservative will make it their mission to introduce you to Jesus or otherwise condemn you to their hell.

I listen to pushing 100 podcasts. The Pod Save America guys dutifully list the atrocious consequences of the continued spiral into the fascist abyss. Why are we cancelling research to save kids with brain cancer? Because. Because, fuck you, that’s why. Because it doesn’t serve the financial interest of those in power, and because hundreds of millions of people can’t be bothered to register their neglectful impact on others.

I’m tempted to say I’m like the man in the TikTok video. I don’t care about what you do “personally.” I don’t think it takes a high I.Q. to understand that if you walk around as a disease vector, that can affect me. If you’re keen to kill people I’m not sure are the enemy, that will blow back on me too. If you’re incapable of defining and carrying out laws and justice, I can’t expect to maintain a certain coherence to my own thoughts, household, and family. You’re not leaving me alone in the same way I’d grant to you.

I asked in my IOP group the other day what made people so confident in their judgment. No surprise, no one had a good answer, but they wield it reflexively all day. They don’t want to be judged by the worst things they’ve done as addicts, but give them a second of unstructured/unfocused time and most sentences start with something like, “That motherfucker,” or “He knows what he did,” or “I’m just being real.” We’ll label, other, mind-read, and circularly “logic” ourselves into compulsive coping cycles.

The religious person is analogous to an addict. All answers resolve to an infinite unearned confidence in how you compulsively cope with the world. What makes it an addiction is your proclivity to do it in spite of the self-destruction. When your god sees fit to burn the latest witch, your hair also being on fire is a feature, not a bug. It’s just god’s warmth lighting your way.

We talk about “extremes” on the Right and Left and how they end up mirroring each other. Despite a whole period of The New Atheists, I don’t think culturally we walked away with a deep enough understanding of ideological capture. I listened to Dan Carlin and Sam Harris talk about how ruminating on modern times and the absolute craziness people are willing to go along with makes the past easier to understand. That we’ve supercharged it with technology is all the more confounding. “We” are captured. I don’t feel like “we,” because I still use my voice, and look for every opportunity to fight the march over the cliff.

I don’t think people wrestle with how much they do, in fact, want to die. They grow up in ridiculously ignorant and abusive households. They consume media that makes it nearly impossible to think clearly or coherently. They’re fat. They’re weird looking. The nice things they try to do for themselves, say a concert, come with huge price tags, people masturbating in the crowd, and some asshole with a sign blocking your view. Paid $20 for popcorn lately, or a single shot?

It’s not like they’re born wanting to die. It’s that they get messages fed to them their entire life that dying’s where it’s at. You’ll get to Heaven. You’ll get to enjoy your enemies in Hell. All that you can’t understand or cope with will be revealed and made perfect. It’s a linguistic drug you feed yourself in every moment you stare a little too long over the cliff’s edge, too curious.

Doubling-down is the name of the game most people are playing. Whatever they say, say it again. So often the words contain less useful information than a baby crying or bird cawing. Never stop. If you stop, you’ll interrupt the road to the true goal of dying. If you stop, you’d have to start working to account for your infinite ignorance. Why do that when you can celebrate and be empowered by it with your claim to your god and its powers? Why can’t you just be left alone to condemn and destroy as you see fit?

Addicts share an immaturity and entitlement. Their development has often been arrested. Who are you, counselor, to tell me anything about how to live my life if you haven’t walked in my shoes? Unless you’ve walked the fine line between “normal” and “meth-induced psychosis,” you certainly can’t be trusted. It’s not their fault, necessarily, but you have to approach subjects as though you’re talking to a child. We pretend like we’re not all fundamentally children in the same way. In addiction, it’s just exacerbated. Why would a third to half of the population in any given moment or era want a “strong man” or “angry daddy?”

I think about this any time someone “intellectual” claims to be a specific religion or believe in a god. I think it’s why we’re doomed regardless. The exercise of self-justification, the double-down, can be dressed up in thousand dollar words, books, and surgically precise sutures to moral postures. The concepts of “good” or “fair” or “justice” or “individuality” or “rights” or anything we’ve trudged up from The Enlightenment will never feel as salient as “my god.” We can’t share in my god. You have to navigate my god. My god is awesome. My god fills in the gaps. My god is all-powerful. My god can do literally anything ever I need him to, except give me genuine peace about how you are living your life.

This is the utility, the joy, the comfort, in self-destruction. Every piece of me that dies is one less I need to suffer. If I break my brain, I can’t think about how you make me feel. If I break my legs, I can’t be expected to stand on my ability to argue. If I break my back, it won’t be expected to be in the fields. If I break my tongue then it’s your fault! for not recognizing the drooling ramblings of the confused and infirm. If I break my eyes and ears I’ll never know how many die, needlessly. If I break my heart, I won’t feel how violently I’m beating my chest.

[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 better 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.