[1239] Take Me Out

I’m going to keep writing until I dig out the heart of what’s lodged in me.

I just got back inside after engaging in a kind of ritual. I have a dozen things related to the development, organizing, and cleaning up of my land at any given time. I have a block of well over a hundred tires. I have overgrown weeds and prickly bushes weaving their way through a scrap pile. I have hundreds of pallets, bricks, and panels. I have windows and old mowers. It truly is a snapshot into the white-trash half of my blood that I guess felt neglected growing up.

Today was cutting through a lot of the brush and beginning to load up my truck with steel for the scrap yard. I’m trying to not get short changed, so it’s spending time applying a magnet and cutting away plastic or aluminum from different pieces. It’s kinda dirty, occasionally painful, and something you have to go about in a very specific way or you’ll get nothing done. It’s snipping bit by bit the thorny vines. It’s noticing how pieces attach to each other and having the right tool available. It’s trekking back and forth from the truck to the pile and taking solace in the little bits of order you’ve wrangled from the chaos.

At some level, it’s simply preoccupying my brain which is otherwise plagued by enough thoughts to start me on my third digression in 3 days. At another, it’s cleaning up and accounting for one more piece of my pie-in-the-sky vision of how I was going to operate from my sustainable land in the middle of nowhere. Isn’t it romantic to think you can get by patiently breaking down and recycling what you’ve collected over months or years, and have it pay? That pile of tires I’m working into a, functionally, art project, that will also serve as a privacy fence.

There’s a few problems with the dream, not least of which that it’s winter in Indiana. Yes, you get these odd days where it’s like a cold spring, but it could snowstorm in the next 15 minutes, and then rain for 3 months, and now all my plans on what to do next for the pile become moot. Also, scrapping doesn’t pay much. The most I ever got was in dropping off a load of cast iron radiators, which lowered my raised truck bed almost to the ground, and got me a little over $100. It also takes a lot of time to disassemble little rubber bits from complicated metal pieces. The tools it takes to do the job need replacement pieces that break or get lost.

More to the point, a dream turns into a chore, and barely one that feels tolerable the more you get into the, often actual, weeds. The effort doesn’t feel precisely “wasted,” but you’re forced into a tempered place.

“Tempered” is different from “defeated.” I worry that over the last few weeks, and last several days in particular, I’ve been defeating myself. I find it hard to operate from an endlessly motivated and optimistic place when I’m staring down what feels like a miserable series of obligating tasks. That’s humbling, or humiliating, work tasks. That’s legitimately needing to borrow money. That’s the tortured negotiation as to whether I “deserve” or “can afford” to get fast food, and what that says about my “respect” for the hole it feels I’m in.

I’m the kind of person who has spent years of his life proud to exist on ramen noodles, hotdogs, the dollar menu, bologna, and $1 or less frozen dinners. Back when it meant I was doing right and saving. Was I raised on super-sized double quarter pounders? Yes. Will a double cheeseburger suffice? Absolutely. When you’re stressing over every dollar, the difference between a $4.28 meal and a $10 one can’t be ignored.

What for? I keep returning to this question with regard to my behavior. Why do I want to get out of debt, even if it meant owing friends or chopping up my land? I feel good about the idea of working for friends. I don’t feel good working for anyone else. Why was I trying to save money in the past? I was saving for what I needed to build my house, and start my businesses, and invest in “the dream.” I wasn’t depriving myself of the burger I’d prefer; I was advocating for the future. There was no conflict until the future never seemed to arrive.

I think developing a TV watching habit, and then investing in going to shows both grew out of a desire to live more in the present. At least make peace with the present. If “right now” I have things to look forward to, to plan around, to budget for, then no matter what else is bugging me or is failing to arrive, the show is probably still going to go on. There are systems with more money and competence than I can plug into that keep the monkeys dancing and singing on stage, so why not join them as often as I can? Why not do what feels like stealing memories from a world trying to dysregulate or kill me?

This has all been a diatribe at the individual level. I can’t wait to have AI analyze the piece and tell me how the introduction of “fascism” or broad political issue is where I might lose “the reader.” If you’re even barely online you’re catching a headline of the not-slow-enough descent into abject chaos and violence. Resist the temptation to mock yourself for your paltry individual concerns when you’ve a president routinely picking at the fabric of the world order. I don’t trust even my closest friends to be a meaningful bulwark against what I believe has a legitimate chance to get us all killed. “Conflicted” doesn’t begin to cover it.

If I get everything I want personally tomorrow, my environment is still on fire. My future isn’t up to me. Every meal feels spiritually like the last one. Every show a selfishly defiant protest begging-to-be-violated by the armed religious fanatics next door. Hunker down and wait it out? Use my voice? Join the latest protest and feign the emotional outrage I’m supposed to sustain for the raped children, then the murdered children, then the exploited workers, then the beleaguered minority, then the feckless complicit politicians, on and on as I get bombarded with hot takes from people I would otherwise respect until they tell me Erika Kirk was gracious in her forgiveness. Bitch is a lying reality-show bot parlaying the attention economy to capitalize on her propaganda partner-in-shill’s death. Obviously. Do I want attention-whore shills saying nice things? I'd prefer people who actually practiced them, and the work getting the credit, not the words mindlessly parroted as though they represent genuinely shared decency. You don't marry someone like Charlie Kirk because either of you are good people. 

You say otherwise because you don’t consciously believe in anything. You’re as arbitrary as I feel, but it’s dressed up in modern garb. You’re not suffering your loneliness, ego, and megalomania, you’re a reality TV star! You’re not a greedy liar stealing from the poor, you’re a tech genius capitalist! You’re not stupid, you just have valid different opinions. Round and round we circle the drain, pretending “meaning” even means anything anymore. What you are is preoccupied, overwhelmed, dead inside, nihilistic, solipsistic, cynical, lazy, judgmental, confused, hateful, smug, lonely, hypocritical, scared, and foundationally unapologetic about how many things you’ll help kill before you catch yourself admitting to any of it.

So I should work for a company that can determine how desperate I am to take $3 food orders 30 minutes across town and adjust how much it pays me in real time? I should pay back Chase who will get bailed out for gambling with other people’s money? I should stop eating what I want or going to shows because I don’t deserve a sustainable “right now” series of thoughts, I should always be at the mercy of what it would take to “fix” the next problem I didn’t create. I should spend almost all of my ever-fleeting time at the mercy and directives of the equally lost, but certainly quicker to adopt their helplessness than me?

When I feel stuck, I explore different frames. The problem is that every frame is begging the same kind of question and delivering the same kind of answer. I’m one fucking person. I don’t believe any singular story I can tell about myself. Of the last 3 things I’ve written which one is “most true?” It’s absurd. It’s all at once, today, ten years from now, and it echoes the same shit I’ve been writing about for 20 years. Where the fuck am I, or it, supposed to go?