[1250] The Writer's Room

 I’m going to take a deliberate pause. When I tell you that I’ve been in something akin to a “blacked out” state for about a month, I want you to hear that as the complicated road leading to it, the time spent in it, and the means of coping/escaping it I’m hoping to find here.

I’ve been “adrift” for the last few years, at least. My jobs have all been exercises of walking fine lines between complicit negligence and practical necessity. My friends have generally either fallen off the radar or are so reliably busy or overwhelmed you start to feel guilty and disingenuous reaching out and inviting at all. I’ve got hobbies that are mostly solo or cost money I don’t really have. The shining light that has beamed through my otherwise years of living like this is a friend from high school who moved back to the area we grew up. We’ve been to dozens of shows together and spend plenty of time getting food or drinking and hanging out.

I’m perfectly happy to indulge. I like squeezing as much joy out of the things I like as I can. I don’t need to drink myself stupid every night, but that does not mean I do not want several refrigerators stocked with every good beer or wine I’ve ever tasted. At whatever point in time in my life that I pivoted towards prioritizing having my time more than money, I’m “happy” to spend that time “doing nothing” because it’s my nothing. I’m not assigning myself arbitrary tasks nor letting my attention get hijacked by selfish chaos actors known as “other people.”

My whole life I’ve struggled with wanting to be seen and get a certain amount of attention and recognition. I don’t know how much of this is my born-in disposition. I don’t know how much of it developed as a coping mechanism as a means of keeping myself safe in my mom’s abusive household. I do know that somewhere deep, when I’m doing something “good” or “big” or “smart,” that it provides a level of satisfaction and sense of security and being that doesn’t compare to anything else. I say this even in the face of the love and attention and care of those in my life who were not my crazy mom. People looking out for you is a different kind of thing than you figuring out what you need to do for yourself.

At the same time, some of the most romanticized periods of my life were from college. It’s when I thought I had a team or friend group that I could rely on. It’s who I thought I’d be trying to visit and party with in the future. It was a moment in the sun of a level of community and connection that I have not been able to find nor reproduce for 15 years. No one’s stopping over to eat dinner together, if they’re even responding to texts today. No one’s liking and sharing on dying, antagonizing socials.

When you spend as much time on your own as I do, you might be a gigantic consumer of media. I’ve watched 45 movies, mostly terrible comedies offered for free on YouTube, while I do this coding project precisely because they don’t need your attention. For as generic and awkward as they might be, they are a kind of persistent reminder of the collaborative effort it takes to manifest that kind of creativity. They’re playing. They’re contributing their pieces. I often have no sense as to what I’m contributing, or come to understand what I thought I was is something worth shaming or judging me for.

At work, I’m an authority figure. I’m discussing complicated topics like addiction or abusive dynamics in accessible and open or friendly ways. I’m often speaking to what I practice that allows me to stay on the straight and narrow and not let the moment-to-moment excuses give me license to treat myself and the people around me poorly. It never ends until you die. There are infinitely ignorant and evil forces that will kill you without blinking; they’ll be proud about it, and they’ll shape the world you inhabit until you think you deserve it. You’ll be betrayed. You’ll waste and miss opportunities. You’ll fail more times than you can remember. And if you can’t find a way to enjoy it, that joy will not arrive on its own. If you keep your head down and try to power through it, by the time you look up, the tour date will have passed, the friends will have died off, and the “If I could move like I used to” statements will flood in.

When you’re hyper-focused, time slows way down, but in a way that doesn’t feel antagonizing. It’s living potential space that you begin occupying. You can paint the future and implications. You can see yourself occupying and explaining your role. You could be perfectly delusional, but in the moment that’s not seriously considered. Things make too much sense. You can naturally see what you can or should do next. I describe it as a kind of mania, but mania I’ve ridden in the past to create many things I enjoyed or am uniquely proud of. It’s knocking on the door of compulsive. It’s begging for what I imagine the license someone like Steve Jobs took to treat people like shit. It’s an attempt to immortalize something about you that runs deep in a way that can’t be argued with.

That doesn’t mean that by itself it’s good or bad. It’s just the nature of the force at work. If you recognize a force in you, then it’s your job to try to account for it, not glorify, weaponize, or deny it. I want to be consumed by meaningful work. I don’t want to be eaten alive until there’s nothing else about me worth talking about.

A.I. is giving me the opportunity to feed this space indefinitely. It costs more money than I can pay for indefinitely right now, but also that means I see weeks-straight of time that I can capitalize on. A.I. also does a terrible job of maintaining context and not catching drift. I get a concurrent goal/task to learn how to keep the playing field and rules from falling apart as I try to build the big complicated thing altogether.

Meanwhile life is still happening around me. I have bills to pay, so naturally I took a computer stand/arm and found a way to position it in my car so I can run my laptop from my phone’s Wi-Fi and plug into a jumper battery and code between DoorDash orders. That’s normal, right? That’s safe? That’s reasonable? That’s not a story of a desperate need to matter? That’s not being punished by anxiety-driven “my life’s clock is running down” sensibilities regarding efficiency?

I’ve thought, good and hard, about leaving this chair for days. I made cursory preparations like heading into town for food and errands and that experimentation as to whether I could feasibly code from my car. I can. The desire to sort of melt into my environment and this work is very real and very powerful. It’s close to what I felt as a child in what might’ve been described as a budding addiction to video games. I don’t have the same kind of desperate and furious rush, but the world I’m occupying right now is very sticky. It feels “wrong” to do anything else besides maximize my output. It feels like I’d be missing an opportunity window that I’ve been raging at in the rear-view my entire life.

[1249] Can't Catch Me

Sometimes I forget that not everyone has to read, and if I'm preempting what I want to say for fear of it sounding "whiny" or indulgent, I'm defeating the purpose.

I just got out of my bankruptcy hearing. It's been psychologically taxing for month and a half as I got everything together for it, within hours of things being requested. I've sent polite emails regarding my questions and concerns, all mostly gently and persistently dismissed. I've been reassured that my filing was straight-forward and I should know by the end of the hearing whether the petition was successful. I'm not writing because I got good news, but because again I am in limbo and stewing about what feels like negligence and disregard.

The trustee asked for Door Dash's address. I want you to know that so you can get an impression of how boxed-in her world must be if she's not aware of how food delivery works.

I got drilled on the value of my, closed, business during January. These are numbers I submitted to my lawyer, who did not say a single word while I was being grilled. When I opened the bank account and read what the amount was for the time in January when I informed my lawyers about the business closing, it seemed to just hit her as "not good enough" and she pivoted to my lawyer and said, "I think you know what I need," to which the lawyer agreed.

I was in the room for the last person's session. She "grilled" him about the process for self-publishing a book on Amazon in a way that made me think she was interested in writing one herself. I don't know if she liked him because he's married and has a kid with autism, but she found his case in his favor before the sign-off, so someone's in a decent mood right now.

Barring getting sick, sitting in psychologically tortuous limbo states is as furious, panicked, and dramatic as I get. I don't sit and spin in silence. I try, earnestly, patiently, persistently, to get people to engage and address my needs in a way that is respectful to them and myself. I am forever, routinely, denied. I am subjected to the whims and arbitrary judgement of people who can go through motions, but not be expected to show any real discernment or accountability. And I have to wait, at their behest indefinitely, pinging between crises, either financial or interpersonal.

I haven't written in a long time. I've been immersed in vibe-coding tools for making local politics more accessible and transparent. I've been spending 15-20 hours a day refining rules and codes and learning how to get things hosted and parsed. I've been, always glimpsing, at what I've been desiring to my whole adult life. I've aspired to throw myself into problem-solving in creative and engaging ways. I'm happy to do it at the minimally viable means available to me. It's why I live in a shed. It's why I have so many things for their "potential." It's why betrayals and humiliating questions or accusations penetrate beyond the mere annoyance or absurdity offered by an individual playing their part.

In what feels like a cosmic ironic nod, I wrote several paragraphs I felt like they captured the feeling well, and in spite of hitting to save, several times, they disappeared quicker than they arrived.

I caught a video talking about Mamdani advertising $30/hr for people to sign up and engage in emergency snow-shoveling. Everyone showed up, the snow got shoveled. The statement from the girl in the video was, “We’re not used to this,” and “You mean paying people a living wage motivates them to work?” Idiot-proof instant accountability from both sides of the equation is not the world I’ve grown up or worked in.

Are there bombs going off? Are their Epstein survivors recalling their PTSD for decades? Never will the greater atrocity prevent you from suffering your antagonists first. They’re a product of the same forces. It’s another’s ego and neglect they’re meant to suffer. It’s undue pride for privileges and access that have been systematically denied. What about their stories suggests you’ll find any justice for your own? It’s girls in tank-tops and skits getting told “you asked for it.” It’s Iranian protesters matter-of-factly told to “rise up.” Good luck! Yeah, fuck you too.

There’s a temptation to claim there’s a “lesson” here. Like all the suffering is worth it or adds up to some grand takeaway you couldn’t achieve otherwise. It’s just a fancy and convoluted way to make an excuse. There is no deliberate and conscious effort for something to be taught. This isn’t about a grand narrative of redemption, finding solace in the persecution as some Christ-like figure. Isn’t that why he’s so popular? “Why have you forsaken me!?” And then just don’t think too hard about not really being dead, and it’s YOU who sacrificed you, bro.

If “we’re” going to pretend to have learned anything over the last decade, it’s that there is no bottom to the amount of humiliation and depravity. Your reasons and story doesn’t matter. That you dance subjected to power’s will is all that’s fundamentally being demanded. Every time I show up in earnest, I feel like I’m being puppetted. Every time I try, I learn why I get to fail, fail alone, and should have thought about why I had the hair-brained idea to try in the first place.

Where do I get off being so entitled!? To my time and to be more or less left alone to decide how to spend it? That’s fucking crazy. I need to work to death for people who will die never having seen me. I need to sacrifice, not just the idea of an indulgence, but every remote joy to combat the narratives about who I am or what I deserve. And I continue to refuse, so life continues to string me along.

I’ve jumped into many hundreds, maybe well over a thousand, people’s lives regarding the drama of their terrible families, addictions, or child abuse allegations. I’ve felt the second-hand stress of trying to figure out how I would handle or escape their “impossible” circumstances. It’s made it abundantly clear the difference between the places you’re stuck and the places you stick yourself. Many can only make a terrible or slightly-less-terrible “choice” that amounts to hanging on and waiting to see.

Simultaneously, often in the next breath they’ll feed the excuse narrative. “It is what it is,” like the cunt who would decry the “lesson” of suffering is that life is, in fact, suffering - not it’s mitigation, sublimation, or incorporation. The first and worst experience is the rule and reactivity is the key to unlocking a win. Seeking a savior is always the answer, and he’s always on his way, or deny the nature of things altogether.

I feel like me at my worst isn’t what I observe from most people at their best, and it means nothing. It might mean something to a handful of friends and family. It might mean something if there’s some cosmic karmic bean-counter. I’m severely doubtful. I think I’m trapped in a tabloid. I fear I’m going to lose the capacity and desire for a just and reasonable existence because it just gets too exhausting to keep fighting and spite isn’t sustainable.

The sense of injustice and arbitrariness I feel is part of a self-reinforcing loop. Once you feel the string and trap of being subjected to it, I think most turn into a force for taking advantage and punishing the next person. Overzealous prosecutors of faithfully executed consequences. When all you've ever known or been made to believe in are ones that happen for no reason or bad reasons, why not? What else is there? Actually follow your Jesus and forgive? Ha! Find the power and choice to weigh things more scientifically or accurately? Way too much work.