I’ve watched so many people behave in such persistently disgraceful and ridiculous ways for so many years. I feel acutely disoriented sometimes when I think about it. I wonder about myself. I figure there must be something to be done at an individual level. I look for creative fixes and load-bearing narratives that balance my perspective. I do, genuinely, try to be better than what my feelings play as torturous blasts of bad unskippable music.
I believe I have the right answers to most of my questions. I give myself credit for thinking things through and arriving at actionable plans as more habit than struggle. I literally put that process on display. It is a lonely process. It is an isolating process. It is a forever incomplete and functionally every single person who I invite into the process rebukes it in their own way.
The dismissal of my process isn’t about me. In fact, it’s not even “my” process. It’s “the” process. It’s the practice of accountability when there’s an offer of an excuse. We know what excuses look like because we know what children are. We know what accountability looks like because it hurts. Most of the work of being accountable can be done for free, alone, and with enough reflection. It’s impossible work to do if you can’t be, or don’t know how to be, honest.
We live in an extremely dishonest series of worlds. We’re dishonest linguistically. We’re dishonest in our video performances and pictures. We’re dishonest in our memes. We’re dishonest about the particulars of our struggles, hatred, and insecurities. If there is one loudest song I hear out of most people, it’s the dishonesty beat. It’s the thread that ties so much of my sense of dread and discomfort together. It’s why I can’t keep the jobs I’ve had. It’s why our politics is trending towards fascism. It’s why no story of personal accountability will ever scale.
I’ve been using the word “crisis” over the last week or so to describe my feelings and behavior. I’ve been filled with the kind of dread I haven’t really dealt with since high school. I didn’t make it into the drug study that would have paid me solidly. My heart rate and blood pressure spiked, as they did 10 years ago, and I was screened out. I wanted to loop a damning and hopeless narrative. I’m a smart guy who graduated, works high-stress jobs, builds things, is creative, etc. and I’m hearing begging to be shot in the stomach for $9,000? It’s absurd. In the moment of truth, where the numbers won’t lie, the depth of that absurdity and drama raging in my core manifests.
This underlying reality that informs everything I do is there - all the time.
It doesn’t get to be ignored if I care to meaningfully and comprehensively address whatever my issues may be. This is why support from friends and family always feels “wrong.” They aren’t fixing the real problem anymore than I am. We all need reliable land to stand on, not be clinging to buoys thanking the gods for the right to keep breathing.
I don’t want to feel like I’m gambling with every moment. I don’t want to impose guilt for not being “productive” or “performative” enough. I just want basic accountability and responsibility for what I have, need, or hope to accomplish. It’s not more complicated. It’s not a secret. It’s not all of the excess emotional labor that goes into converting that project into something a fascist or feeble mind can agree with and meet halfway.
None of this protecting pedophiles posture surprises me. I was (will always be) a DCS assessor. I saw the “leaders” in my office who made the job about them and their power more than any desire to protect children. I talked to the parents who routinely denied the physical and emotional abuses they carried out every day. People protect their egos, power, and story of themselves first. Pedophiles say things like “the kid came on to me,” wholly unironically.
The persistent underlying truth will inform everything. The numbers speak while your words and body poorly cope or try to lie.
How many pedophiles did you indict? 0.
How many murders did you investigate? 0.
How much richer did they get? 1.5 trillion.
How much debt did you drive up? 8.4 trillion.
I’m 37. My net worth is approximately $25,000, according to my bankruptcy filing. I have a degree. I’ve had over 20 jobs since I was 15 from delivery driving and hoarder-bathroom scrubbing to counseling hundreds of clients and literally “saving children.” I have NEVER been paid “enough.” I have no savings. I have no health insurance. I have the kinds of cars that flirt with costing more to fix than they’re worth. I live on a rural road in the middle of nowhere. If I sacrificed everything fun or “extra” I’ve done for myself over the last 4 years, I might have $5,000-$10,000 in the bank, as I did in the past when I did nothing, went nowhere, saved everything, and worked 15-18 hours a day or actually got into drug studies.
I’m as manager as it gets. I’m a quick a study as you’ll ever find. I have ZERO desire to lord power over people. I’m running for county clerk. I don’t want the position. I want a fucking system where I don’t have to worry that the clerk is complicit in fucking fascism. I was raised to believe that the world was mine for the taking. I got the grades. I make people laugh. I speak, explicitly, often, and loudly about what I value and why to the people who slam consequences down on me for doing so.
Occasionally, someone chimes in that they appreciate the example I’m setting. I want to scream. Bitch, we all need to be setting the same fucking example so I’m not your poster boy for the kind of resistance from that fucking Black Mirror episode. I don’t want a slightly bigger crazy-making cage. I don’t want your attention for it’s own sake. I don't’ want to perform like this shit makes sense or that I want to fit in like you are. Fuck your appreciation, I don’t trust it. It’s not real. You do not demonstrate what I need to see independent of your reaction to me. You’re a dog pretending you can’t bark until the others around it start.
So I feel paralyzed. What’s out there for me? A poorly-paying job I’ll likely have to drive an hour away for. Coworkers who are leveraged, afraid, and full of empty sentiments they repeat like catch phrases. “It is what it is.” Do I just continue to buy stuff? Watch stuff? Accumulate experiences? Yeah, probably, for their own sake. Just like any project I do on the land or around the house. Because there’s nothing left. There’s nothing bigger. There’s nothing together. Sure, we’ll like, share, and subscribe in solidarity on the social media BUT IT’S NOT REAL.
It’s real like how your brain can’t differentiate, but not real like what you would be doing under reasonable constraints and conditions. We’d be dumb to think we exist unbounded or like “freedom” is coherent on its face. I don’t trust what binds. I don’t think you recognize it for what it is or how it operates. Hint: saying “unalive” as if we’ve just discovered people kill themselves, and maybe for reasons we might too.
Musicians never stop writing music. The feelings can only ever be captured briefly before they evolve or disappear. A song might make you cry or give you chills, that moment, and then never again. The truth it was speaking to persists. The math behind it will total the same sum long after you and artist are gone. I need to live in that truth, and it makes me sick every moment I watch myself do anything less, even if I don’t puke.
