[1256] Sample Size

Of the 30-ish small, part, or full-time jobs I’ve had in 23 years, handing out food samples isn’t one I thought I’d be writing about in a dedicated way. The first instinct is always to contextualize and list my previous jobs or accomplishments. There’s a “shame,” in a sense, that I would find myself, ever, doing something like standing in place for 6 hours, parsing chips, jerky, or cold brew coffee into little cups.

It’s all self-imposed. I know how to reframe on a dime. After all, I’m doing the noblest thing my sick and pathetic country pretends to respect. Working! I dressed the part, showed up on time, followed instructions, and await my $240 for 2 6-hour days doing something that also allowed me to power through a giant podcast backlog simultaneously. My coworkers were nice, customers inspiring in a way I will digress on shortly, and in comparison to the thousands of rocks I shoveled with my dad on a grave he was hired to maintain, I’ve certainly put myself through considerably more work for $100 recently. (He also took me out for a baller lunch steak, so, you know, my dad’s cooler than yours.)

My ADHD self is not equipped to stand/sit still. The first 2 times I’ve signed up to hand out samples, I didn’t have the podcasts in my ear. I got by chatting with coworkers, dancing out, play-boxing with the food around me, and finding “creative” ways to wipe down and clean the cart. As the bounds of my sanity get tested, I move towards crowd-work. Often, I get a smile or laugh. Awkwardly, I get zero acknowledgement at all. But there’s this sensitivity and fragility that presents itself in the moment sometimes.

Sam’s Club is like a family spot. There’s so many kids I don’t think I would have otherwise noticed except for their very different posture in the approach and/or ability to grab a sample. Then there’s the parents who almost insist their child take in whatever clearly unhealthy thing I’m pushing. I appreciate the ones who have internalized early that stopping and waiting and asking for permission. It’s nice to see. I seriously wonder about the parents who hand their child something they clearly have no capacity to even hold.

Then there’s the “let me touch every piece of food reaching for one cup in particular” type. These people are under the impression that food taken from a package at the same time as other food is actually fresher in the back. Invariably, they will have extremely dirty, like cartoonishly gross fingernails and/or open sores on their hands really emphasizing how much you can’t just let it go what they’ve touched along the way.

Mostly, though, it’s the weird oscillation between people insisting they say “hi” or nodding as they walk by, and those who don’t register you’re standing there at all. You’re in the flow of a thousand people’s weekend errands. Your status as the bringer of potentially tasty free noms is explicitly indicated well before they actually arrive at your booth. Your existence as a person altogether equally indicated.

It’s the definition of a job that could/should be taken over by a machine. The gig doesn’t even work for Sam’s. The handful of people asking me where things are in the store, and I’m like…I don’t even work for the company on my hat, technically. I remember as a kid being wildly excited about Sam’s Club samples. You can feel the institutional knowledge that has kept it a sizeable franchise for so long. You bet your ass my lunch every day I worked there was between $2 and $5 to get full from their cafeteria.

My supervisor really liked me. She was so thankful they didn’t have to really train or babysit me. She liked that I was polite and on time. She was relieved that I could read the instructions, operate a 3-bin sink, and innovatively served iced coffee, get this, on ice, layering the cups.

Because I’m back to normal broke, 3 shifts, 6 hours a day, 45 minutes away, technically, pays my monthly bills. It’s why I may continue to do it as a side job. I still don’t have running water, which is probably around $2,000 to get fixed unless I discover a magically cheap way to safely pull and repair my own well. I owe my dad about that much as well. I’d like to throw a few grand to a couple friends for work on my car and support in my business endeavors. The bear-minimum isn’t going to cut it.

Incidentally, I think I just got hired onto a new counseling job at 35/hr, independently contracted, in which the executive director already sent me the forms to fill out for direct deposit and logging into their billing system. If it’s not a raging dumpster fire, I could potentially make all the money I just talked about needing in a month of full-time. Full-time counseling, maybe casework, or maybe crafting the team she discussed wanting to build to help scale what sounds like a massive influx of cash they just got. I could work somewhat remotely. I can craft my own lesson plans and hours. It sounds like an improvement on the model of a similarly sized company I had to quit when they just kept hacking away at my paycheck and killing everything I built.

I talked with the executive director for an hour, and she both emailed and called me within a day or 2 of me filling out the application. This was already a good sign. I’ve had to beat on doors, proverbially, for weeks/months to get hired on at places allegedly desperate to hire. I’ve spent a week “on-boarding” because they couldn’t be bothered to send a pre-populated email with digital forms. The basics appear to be in place here already, and those in social work long enough know when like recognizes like when you’re talking expectation setting and drama navigating, so clicking on that level quickly did not register as superficial and going-through-motion-y.

I’m not ashamed to do gigs. I’m ashamed of the country I live in where someone as educated, motivated, and capable as me is often finding himself wholly adrift, feeling behind, and lost in ambivalent woods. I know what that means for people less capable than me. I know what that means for those who don’t have a dad who will offer a spot to help him with his extra income job, then feed them robustly without hesitation.

I knew, somewhere, sometime, a job like this one was incoming. My temporarily embarrassed, slightly impoverished or inconvenienced state is, in the righteous telling, a choice about what I won’t do for money. It’s significantly moreso a choice than it is a story of my irresponsibility, disregard, or laziness. I’ve had plenty high-enough-ish paying jobs to keep pulling in funds if I was willing to explicitly destroy what I value about myself or how I learned to care about other people.

Knowing it’s a choice to gig, and knowing how I get there, is an important step-by-step story of agency and the salience of consequences. If I don’t feel like I’m “doing the right thing,” I get very, dangerously, angry. I get self-destructive. Manipulation tips from “tempting” to “practical.” I don’t ultimately really want to be here or alive if I push the conclusions all the way through. I’m erasing myself. I’m lying. I’m so inconsistent so as not to be able to recognize myself. That’s a terrifying and dark place to be.

My “energy” or “awareness” is born of a certain through-line you might identify through everything I write, job I work, and goal I set. I don’t get to just pop in and out of being like the littlest particle. I need to exist somewhere in the noise the whole time, or I seek annihilation. I may not have the whole picture of the many levels on which I can exist, but I can certainly recognize when I’m under attack. Better stated, I’m always under attack, and I can tell when fighting the wrong fight is destined to lose.

This is why I maintain my sense of self relative to time, my relationships, and my interests more than my job or money. This is why I turn inward and contemplative when I recognize I can talk to a dozen people that day, and none of them will be capable of hitting that “real” place without seriously destabilizing their mental health or self-conception. They didn’t come that day to discuss the precarity of gig work, and I’m not offering them the revolution.

It’s “normal” to come to a giant warehouse and pick up a box of crackers that will feed you for months. It’s normal to be tickled pink by the silly joke over the flavor of the latest Dorito. I’ve been in Terre Haute. I’ve seen More U.S.A. and gun t-shirts and hats than anyone should ever have to. It’s normal for these folks to think nothing of what the government they voted for is doing in the background to kill hundreds of thousands overseas as they walk their 75“ TV out on a pallet cart. You could be accused of being in your sober and sound mind just carrying on like it’s a normal Sunday after church milling about the food library in your nicer clothes.

The control that capital has to put us under a spell is amazing. I’m not in that store unless I need money. Many overheard conversations are about the money saved by buying in bulk. It’s a wonder if those who hesitate and question whether they can really take the free sample, are they so caked in capital dynamics, they feel wrong or scared if it doesn’t cost something? Somewhere inside, they just can’t believe it!

And they’re right. You gotta be a member. You might be denied by the flimsy authority bestowed upon me by my hat and apron. What a curious thing it is to witness a dozen people eyeball the treasure on the tray as they slowly creep on by. Then, as if by licensing hoard, to swarm behind an emboldened sampler who heard about how these Doritos are healthy and they’ve been meaning to try them! I sold something like 40 bags, if you think millions spent on bliss points of flavor don’t sell themselves. Audible expressions of joy and the sentiments about the deliciousness did abound.

Simple food for simple folk. Simple consumer role to occupy. Simple jobs. Simple asks. Bound up in infinitely complex power and need dynamics, but if you value new chips, it does a lot of the heavy lifting and cuts through the noise.

[1255] Default

I’m not even a little tired. Had I any focus, I’d do something “productive,” like grade terrible papers or build something out of wood. I want, more than anything, to return to vibe-coding in the endless, almost compulsive, way that generated enough of a site to show people and set up some meetings. The reason I want to keep working on it goes so far beyond the site though. I caught my old spark. The person I think I am and the otherwise mess of my brain was, very slowly yet quasi magically snapping into focus one tortured exchange with an A.I. tool at a time.

I say it a lot because it’s vital to understanding anything about me, but I don’t fit. People instinctively think there’s something “off” or “up” with me. I put them on guard. They play it off, but body language isn’t hard to discern. When I was a kid, I described it as, “You’re either on ‘the level,’ or not.” I glorified a kind of observational or detached space. I thought thoughts and feelings weren’t intertwined. That framing made less and less sense the further away I got from traumatizing forces in my life. The closer I paid attention to what was racing through my brain or gut helped too.

Lately, the disconnect looks like dozens of innocuous conversation hiccups. I went garage-saling with my friend and her family. Her parents are the kind of ho-hum fascists that have lazy faux-news talking points to support their views, and simultaneously are typical caring normal suburban aging white people. As basic as it gets. They have 2 daughters, my friend and her older sister. We’re in the backseat and ADHD older sister is pinging between each thing exciting her, and she mentions data centers.

Part of my project is trying to take complex issues like data centers and personalize them for individual actions in individual areas. This means I’ve learned a lot about them. I shared a sliver. The car took a familiar pause as I walked us into a familiar chapter of my life. I share something about a real issue happening right now where they live, that will not just coast them money, but threaten things they care about from schools to the environment. But that’s a “real” conversation. That’s details. That’s work. She was just throwing “data centers” out here with the same passing enthusiasm as she did the Banana Ball mascot being a pitcher.

I’m not angry at her. I’m not blaming. I don’t feel “above” or “smart.” I feel alone. I feel like unless I’m drinking, I’m physically incapable of finding whatever “normal” page most people are talking on most of the time. And if I point it out or press the issue, another predictable set of outcomes to choose from. Now, I’m either manipulative, cold, or a target.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the difference between what I think and feel. I’ve spent much time differentiating “need” from “want.” I legitimately try to speak as closely as I can to what feels and sounds like the truth, as I feel it, or don’t, or can explain and discern at the time. My friend wants to do something about her bedroom trim. I can’t begin to concern myself about the concept of trim, and am waiting for her to decide if I’m going to help her install new trim or rehab her old trim. This thought can plague her for weeks. I add it to the thousand examples of how neither I, nor anyone I know, seems to have real problems.

But, of course, we do. We live in a horrible state that does everything in its power to kill people and bleed them dry. Health is always a concern on some level, even if mine has been generally good most of my life. There’s always a bill coming due. My friend’s wife getting hit by a car and taking 2 years to get back to like 80% definitely constitutes a real problem. I’m thankful to only be in debt to family any more. More than needing a reliable higher-paying job, I need somewhere I fit.

I fit with me, and in and amongst my stuff and desires. When I have the money, I buy the things I want. I go where I want to go. I eat what I want to eat. I watch my shows, create at random, and work on my dozens of projects around the land. I fit when I’m hanging with friends or my dad, but I still need to stay somewhat alert to the ways in which my nature can violently crash into normal sensibilities. At work, I fit at the top, removed from the discomfort I conjure in people who tell me things to do without the same sense of genuine authority they feel from me.

You might read this wrong and think I want to be in charge or in control. I insist, I just want to fit. I want to show what happens when you move step by step and organize. I want to manifest the truth of words used correctly. I want the space I’ve created for myself in order to get oriented or practiced and specific to work its way deep into you as well.

I think part of the reason I find myself here is because of the work I’ve done. I don’t want to needlessly suffer. I don’t want to have a headache because I’m so confused or my being is so contradicted I can’t think or see straight. That’s why I started writing. That’s why I spent years exploring the conversations and fights around the nature of existence. That’s why I try and fail as often as I can find opportunities to. The alternative is unbearable. I have a choice, but if it’s suffering either way, it needs to mean something.

I respect the power and purpose of self-destruction. I learned how to drink. I text and drive. I stay up way past my bed time and eat like my grandpa never had heart problems. I take the realization that we don’t get out alive to choose the little ways I want to die. I want to die at concerts. I want to die with a burger in my mouth. I want to die halfway through the coolest things I could ever think to create or work on. I want to die with even the vaguest memory of as much art and story-telling as I can fit into my brain.

I think in normal people terms, it comes out as “I don’t want to die.” There’s a fundamental denial and fear driving a familiar narrative around saviors. There’s an array of gods to worship depending on which propaganda pipe organ is blaring the loudest that day. Are people living, or running? Are they “having the conversation,” or orchestrating generation after generation with a wholesale inability to even conceive of “the conversation?” When you listen to some guru tell you to “wake up,” what do you think that means?

I think for longer than I’ve had the words for it, I’ve been stuck “awake.” I don’t claim enlightenment. I don’t claim special privileges or awareness. I claim “noticed patterns.” I noticed the emotional patterns from my abusive mom so I could anticipate whether or not I was going to get beaten, something I cared about destroyed, or could be safe-enough that day. I noticed people’s relationship patterns and dancing words. I noticed how people exercised or squandered power. I noticed how people responded to me when I presented the same information in different ways. I noticed how I felt before, during, and after writing. I found more words. I found patterns that couldn’t be found any other way.

Naturally, I alienated myself that much further. My goals and desires so diverged from normal, I moved away. My whims so freely arbitrary sometimes I’m cruising too-rich neighborhoods in a too-expensive truck with “Little Boxes” playing on repeat in my head as unironic fascists fail to figure out Google Maps. A normal person would tell you about how they’ve invited me to dinner and always been polite, because that’s what’s important when you’re thoughtless and complicit; you’re still part of the team.

My witnessing of consequences for corrupt and incompetent uses of power feels more caring, thoughtful, committed, and truthful than whatever “love” ties most people or families together. My effort to learn about messy complicated things and attempt to break them down into something actionable or workable is the language I want reciprocated. I’m not operating on a default setting no matter how often I adopt normative ways of getting alongside.

That’s where I am. Next to you, if and when “you” show up. If I get a return text after I send 10. If I can wait patiently for the exact right window to say something that won’t register as my otherwise burdensome invitation. Pause for a second and resist the urge to read this as “woe is me.” I’m not sad. I’m not describing a pitiful existence. I’m just alone and don’t really fit. I didn’t “do that” to myself. I’m not choosing it like some fancy martyr. I’m only the kind of alone in that I’m writing, and you’re reading, and I’m never going to get to read about you in the same way.

[1254] Turn Baby Turn

Today is a good day. Most of my days are good, but today is an “official” good day where one of my longest-standing problems, a pending bankruptcy ruling, was resolved. I’m back to normal broke instead of under the heel of predatory debt service. After much otherwise stress and increasingly frantic emails with the law firm, this little chapter is done.

I wanted to compound my day. I’ve been thinking about my former “best friend” and our dynamic. He tried to get into politics. He made a lot of connections that, ultimately, didn’t seem to really serve the goal, but practically speaking might, remotely, serve mine. I’m building Civic Mirror. The handful of local organizers I’ve started talking to are getting jazzed and throwing out more and more names of people they want me to talk to, perhaps present to, and we’re exploring ways to get it funded so I can focus on the vibe-coding and not have to spend a week door dashing in order to afford the ability to do so.

It’s been…maybe a year or more? since I last said anything to my former best friend. But I was feeling inspired. I wrote what was mostly a dunking-on “fuck you”-esc message about how embarrased he should be about his lies to his mother, the police, and the aunt of the kid he’s pretended to adopt. I told him I resented him using my work and time against me (to rehab a house that, when flipped, only cost me money, making him and his parents even.) If you don’t know, this prison-destined child pulled a gun on me, who he lied to the police about what happened. It was the nail in the coffin of our dynamic that had been deteriorating for a couple years.

Predicatably, he did not take my invitation to support the project at $200/month in tax deductible donations. He didn’t like the poetic justice I was seeking in the idea that he’d be working or sacrificing anything in service to my goals, ironically politically. He didn’t take kindly to the suggestion that his behavior in any way needed to be materially accounted for or met with any standard of truth or humanity. What’s tragic about it, is that it was predictable. When you become as broken as people like my mom or uncle in that I know precisely where you’re stuck and how you will respond, that’s the special kind of death.

I’m an idealist. I believe in trying to maximize potential, even if it’s explicitly cold and caluculating. Him, as a person, means nothing to me anymore, and didn’t the moment he picked his selfish lies over our 25 years of a dynamic. Would I turn down a political connection? I’m not under any illusions about his capacity for guilt. I’m not looking for him to validate my effort, apologize, or admit anything. I wanted $200/month to keep working on a thing celebrating what he forsook. He even gave me an awkward political brush-off in the text lol.

We can’t have nice things because they don’t exist unless you bring them into the world, protect them from the people who will destroy them as reflexively as a reactive cat, or as methodically as a hateful, still reactive, supreme court justice. The value, the goal, the practice…they all have to exist outside of and independent of any story you impose. It’s not about titles like “best friend.” It’s not about years spent. It’s not about any given despotic detail you want to offer about your dismal interaction. It’s about right now.

Right now, can you be honest? Nope, lol. Right now, can you see the harm you cause? Nope. Can you be bothered to expand your perspective to include things that don’t make you feel good, but are no less true? That will tell you the story of every corrupted heart up and down chains of power. That will tell you every story of love and loss. When your romance, your idealism, your “hope,” start to get the better of you, make a prediction. I didn’t think I was going to walk away with $200/month on top of my good news today. I thought a selfish, stuck, ugly no-longer-an-individual was going to keep up his act.

What you need to understand is that so will whomever has been on your mind as I’m writing about him. He’s not special. They aren’t special. They’re the banality of evil bred through neglect and denial. You can choose to play with them, play off them, or get played by them. You can choose to practice a different set of values and exercises of your time altogether. Me, also kinda psychopath-y, probably autistic if not, pokes my head in from time to time to, in a manner, emipircally test my biases. Do people change and get better? Maybe 1 or 2, little by little, over time. Ones who lie, dance, and lie again? Never. People are animals. You gotta protect your individual.

I imagine dying a lot. Of old age, of course. But getting to a point where it really does start to feel appealing. After I’ve outlived everyone I give a shit about. After I’ve accomplished basically everything I set my mind to. After I’ve watched everyone and everything I care about die in 1,000 ways before they ever actually die. This is just part of that rotation. One more cliche spoke on the wheel that never made it anywhere.

[1253] Howl At My Ass

I don’t think I trust democracy. Take a really deep breath, because I can already feel your assumptions overwhelming the many different points I’ll be attempting to make that usually aren’t heard anyway. I certainly don’t trust any authoritarian. What both have in common is my distrust of people.

I don’t meet many people. I, generally, spend my time navigating reactive animals. I don’t meet many individuals. I don’t hear many novel insights. I’m mostly stuck, awake, trying to “survive” the circumstances launched my direction while trying to stay in touch with my own sense of being, values, motivation, and perspective.

That’s a lot packed into 2 little paragraphs already. My first line was shared by the founders of The U.S. A constitutional republic is not democracy. We gloss over this colloquially. Our historical, baseline disposition, is one that was shaped by the horrors of our behavior towards one another. We have good reasons and instincts to hate our neighbors, fear invaders, and protect whatever we’ve established as an adaptation that got us this far.

Widen your lens a bit and think about where trust actually lies. I, more or less, trust processes. I don’t “believe” in them, I get to regularly account for their consequences and add up stats. The process of evolution by natural selection trumps your opinion of what looks or feels best-suited. Scientific processes of concurrent independent verification and falsification are more trust-worthy than vibes. I trust people’s timeless inclinations to be greedy and selfish, so the consequences of capitalist expansion and exploitation are predictable.

I think people understand intuitively they need structure, tyrannical or otherwise. A cell needs a boundary to exist. You’re made of atoms. Your energy is itching to “die” and diffuse everywhere.

Is it unwise to seek a resolution to that tension? When you’re “exhausted” or “overwhelmed” by “politics,” are you just adopting a cliche and fundamentally empty sentiment about the nature of being altogether? What could you trust when you’re fated, in a sense, to be stuck with a fundamentally unreliable, inconsistent, and often extremely dangerous “choice” of who to surrender a meaningful amount of power over your life to?

You need a process. You need a regular exertion of your energy that reconstitutes a reliable enough structure to keep surviving, and hopefully not just so. Part of my process is writing. Another part is creatively expressing through wood work and music. I try to structure my life so it is fundamentally “open” to new experiences and allows me to speak truthfully and consistently to the powers I’m often at the mercy of. 

Have I “failed” in having 20-something odd-jobs over 22 years, working often less than a year at each or not working for months or years at a time between them? The alternative is eating away at what I think it is to be human. I could make excuses. I’m better than “good” at any job I take. I could cash the checks, keep quiet, play along, and then in no uncertain terms I might snap and actually kill myself when I can no longer even see where I exist.

The stakes are pretty high for me. It’s real life. I can come up with all the fun analogies and “game” language about what things are like, but at the end of the day, I respect and fear my power to destroy as much or moreso than I do to build or protect. I’m fundamentally tense and angry. I’m fundamentally exhausted and overwhelmed by all the stupid. I’m fundamentally and desperately overflowing with hatred for what I know intellectually is akin to millions of dogs barking, but as an individual, refuse to believe they don’t have a choice.

It’s a tyrannical idea that lingers over everything I do or say. I make choices. If I’m going to claim that, I don’t have a choice in whether I believe you have that same capacity. I don’t get a choice if you don’t. I don’t get to dignify and explain my conscious experience if you’re an NPC. The weight is nearly unbearable.

Why? Well, I want to live. I want to live well. I want to live abundantly. I want to create and express and speak the truth. I’m choosing those. When you’re not, I’m literally under attack. I’m drafted into a war I did not choose. I can’t just live like I want. I have to carry the weight and implication of your lies, your policy, your grift, and your mythological story of your power and importance over me and to my life. I have to suffer you whether I want to or not.

I grew up in an abusive household. My mom was the tyrant. Her irrational emotionality ensured I lived in constantly aware fear every single moment. I developed months-long headaches. I spent years in anhedonia. I became an avatar and extension of her cruelty. I wasn’t making choices, I was embodying reactive subjugation. I was at the mercy of forces that are incapable of mercy. I was dressing it up as pride. I was a bully. I was ambivalent to how you felt because I could no longer feel.

I’m still a product of that. I’ve, technically, spent more time under that spell than I’ve been an actual adult. I still don’t feel much beyond visceral anger, occasional happiness or joy, or kinda nothing. It’s easier to feel with a few drinks or under a hallucinogen, but whether I’m actually autistic or broken, I’m absolutely something different than a “normal” person. I have distance and dialogue that either interrupts my reactivity or accompanies it in real time. I’m watching. I’m recording. I’m checking. That I’m narrating my experience at all is “weird.” Animals don’t do that.

I trust that if I maintain my sense of truth or honesty and demonstrate it like this, I will have something reliable I can return to when I’m lost. If I wasn’t doing that, this wouldn’t help. If I can’t see the flow and path of where my thoughts are taking me, then I’ll arrive at consequences I probably don’t want and remain confused and upset about what’s happening to me. It’s work. It’s work every day to pay attention and try to dig out a real and persistent answer to “why.” And now you’re bombarded with algorithm assumptions and answers to keep you “engaged” and infinitely disconnected.

My sense of well-being, rightly or wrongly, is often tied to my sense of financial security. Even if people never care to nor develop the capacity to really see or understand me, money talks. Money buys their reliable complicity, silence, or movement in my preferred direction. Any rich person can functionally treat your will like an Uber. That’s why they focus on paying off and forcing NDAs on your “representatives.” You, little one, can kick and scream all you want, but your predictable helpless reactivity is already built into the equation.

This is the threat of violent revolutionary moments. It’s not what anyone prefers, but when all outlets for the expression of power or grievance get blocked, the most truthful underlying process makes itself known. One, or both of us, will die. If you’re chronically under an abusive dynamic, that doesn’t really matter to you. You don’t really care if you live or die because you don’t have the capacity to care anymore. It’s not that you can’t do the math or see the future, it’s that there’s no emotional resonance for either better or worse.

I think culturally we’re in the same space I was growing up. How you felt didn’t matter. What you want was decided upon in an arbitrary or predatory way. Your closest allies or theoretically most trusted friends and family are weaponized against you. Your logic rebuked. Your honesty, or, especially as a child, your inability to regulate criminalized and you’re basically told you deserve to be tortured and every level of suffering that comes with the reactions to your behavior you’ve earned. I think we’re in psychological hell. I think it manifests physically and socially. I think that because I can reliably predict the reactive dismissive nature of basically every online interaction or forgone conclusion sentiment from nearly everyone I ever meet testifies to the extent of the damage thousands of times a day just in my own life.

Maybe I’m lucky that the pain of trying to be human is less than the pain of playing along. My anger at myself and the confusion about how I should best conduct my day pales in comparison to the “I’m going to get arrested” energy I have in response to the absurdity, complacency, and excuses of people I’d otherwise wish to get along with, if only practically. I’m not a forgone conclusion. That’s an important space for me to protect. There’s a real chance I burn down and contradict the things I profess are the most important to me in maintaining my identity as an individual human. I can’t claim to be making choices if that isn’t true.

You, though? Do you feel that in any sense whatsoever? You fit, right? You belong. You know how the bills are getting paid. You know what power you do or don’t have. You know how accessible the irony and detachment can be deployed. What are you if not judge, jury, and executioner? Do you feel attacked by my abstract invoking of “you?” Who do you think I’m talking to?

I don’t think “it” or “things” will “get better.” I don’t know that they’ve been as good as they are often described. I think, objectively, we’ve coasted on the backs of a relative handful of technological breakthroughs and incredible insights of individual thinkers, researchers, or conquerors. I think we live in a kind of runoff space. It think we’re the residue of efforts “we” will never constitute of our own volition. A small sliver might create something that reconstitutes what it takes to survive for the briefest moment, and “the masses” will do as they do.

What’s my individual responsibility to that thought and how it makes me feel? Ride it in a self-justified way until I die? Weaponize it and excuse my capacity to exploit how I know it makes you vulnerable? Sit alone and pretty in my space doing whatever it is I do? All I can do, all I should do, is trust the process. Keep watching myself and seeing if that thought or feeling changes as I inhabit new environments. Keep looking for the words I didn't know I was going to type until I typed them. Keep expressing what anchors to me independent of me feeling like I had any choice in the matter, and then choose to reconstitute my brain matter.

But, my god, there’s just so much fucking barking.

[1252] Won On One

Over the last year or so, I’ve started to “feel” like my life makes considerably more sense within an “artist” frame. Whenever I caught the movie about the group that made their secret mall apartment, it kicked on a light that I’ve been unable to dim. I listen to Joel Madden discuss the work and mastering artistry with other creative people. His insights track with my experience and desires for how I conduct my life. I get hung up on what I might be a “master” of, or what I’m attempting.

I can say with confidence I was a master at the religion vs science space for a couple years. That was a very tangible, count the number of books read, citations I could put behind anything I wrote or argued, bring up questions in class that stumped the T.A. level of “mastery.” I’ve mastered individual video games. I’m extremely adept at persuading cats to like me, but we all know they can never be mastered. After 2 years I think I had finally just started to be considered masterful as a DCS assessor.

I’ve always been a smart kid, though. The kind of smart that knows how much you don’t know regardless of how much you may have learned. In a deep way, I don’t know that it’s possible to “master” something in the colloquial sense. I think you can practice. I think that’s why they call it practicing medicine and martial arts.

So much of my focus I think appears superficially on myself. I’m not that complicated though. I’ve had to navigate as many ridiculous, arbitrary, and confusing things from ignorant places as much as anyone. I write because “things,” rarely, “make sense” to me. In order for something to make sense I think you have to care. I think you have to feel consequences. I think you have to really want something.

I care about my experience of my life. When my brain is flooded with stupid shit, fascist posturing, or edicts and power attempting to put me in my place, I revolt. It’s very straightforward. It sounds a lot like, “Fuck you.” I care about having to experience the consequences of people’s stupid behavior. When they wield power irresponsibly or from an entitled place, people die. When they project their religious mythology onto reality, they don’t just die, but those who killed them feel deeply that they deserved it.

The things I think I’m good at both took practice and also took nothing at all besides a decision. I learned how to be more patient, even if my insatiable instinct for “now” is as volatile as it’s ever been. I choose to tell the truth. That can be the truth of my feelings, confusion, hatred, or ambivalence. I can feel when there’s a shivering child tempted to lie, and choose differently. I’m serving myself, not a catastrophic vision and set of assumptions about what that truth will negatively impact.

I don’t fit in. I don’t think I look very “adult.” I don’t pass in the minds of most people I meet as the kind of thing that will just let them carry on in whatever manner they are. It doesn’t mean I don’t accept them or that my head is flooded with negative judgments. It does mean I will almost immediately catch the point in which you’re hanging your self-conception on excuses. I will, begrudgingly, accurately, see where you start and stop, and you’ll know that I know.

I’m a fan of saying a reason is something that brings you closer to the story of your responsibility for something. An excuse is something that puts distance between you and the thing. They function very differently. I like to claim a lot of reasons for my behavior, whether it’s to leave jobs, “friendships,” spend money I don’t really have, or pick some number of months to engage in what seems like “random” projects or tasks. Again, I think it looks indulgent. I think it looks immature. I think it looks like I just can’t be bothered to find someone to settle down with and a job to keep me “secure” or “humble.”

I’ve been chasing the life I want to lead my entire adult life. Lead being the operative word. I’m often given the responsibility, but only a few times have I been able to play lead. The house parties, the coffee shop, and what I still hope to accomplish on the land. Ok, sure, I was the head of “The Gs,” our little lost boy troop of friends in elementary and middle school, but that hardly counts.

What does it mean to lead in today's world where corruption wins? Where racism reigns supreme? Where complacency and complicity are as thick as the air the EPA is probably no longer allowed to scan for pollutants? For me, it’s looked like a ton of interpersonal sacrifice. I leave jobs that pretend to be concerned with the well-being of their clients. I stop talking to people who talk so much in service to one conclusion, “It is what it is.” I take chances with people my gut tells me are “doomed to fail,” and then time proves it.

And then I return here. I examine. I look for things I might have done differently. I see if the pattern has repeated. I arrive at the same conclusions, now with new flourishes and details. If I don’t own it or it’s not really mine, it’s not safe. If I can’t enforce the discipline or rules I’ve set for myself, they don’t exist. If I’m spending the majority of my time emotionally wrought about any individual, the past, or some personal failure, I’m taking too long to learn what it is I needed from that situation and probably need to shut the fuck up and get back to work, or eat something.

It’s been a struggle to write recently. I’ve had nothing to write about. “The world,” is still trending towards fire. I’m still first-world broke. I’ve found vibe-coding, and despite my lack of knowledge, money, and the competition for my time, I’m on a new track of meeting people and exploring the potential of having given my life over to “what could be.” I’ve worked incredibly hard to get my website to where it is and see where I wish to push it. I didn’t let my criticism and cynicism of AI prevent me from noticing and running with the opportunity it seems to be providing. It’s important to me to be that pliable and capable.

What is that? I think about it like the fluidity with which comedians shit on each other. The hate isn’t hate. When I’m picking something apart or poking holes in an official story, it’s an exercise in curiosity. I want to know how we get to a place of shared reality. That’s where the real work, potential, and magic happens. I can’t just believe you like you believe you. I don’t just believe myself. I see what it would take. I speak as though I’m trying to get what I wish to happen. I don’t know that many people who operate that way.

I think that’s part of why it’s been hard to write. If I’m disoriented, who’s orienting me? If I’m perfectly oriented, who’s validating it? I’m not looking to be reassured or celebrated for their own sake. I want you to actually like the things I’m trying to build, find utility in them. I want you to actually feel the sense of ownership or relief and possibility that I do when I talk about the land or how we might work together. There’s a reality I’m experiencing that I don’t register from almost anyone.

That is, I feel their obligations. I feel their responsibilities. I feel their “adulting.” I feel the infuriating intransigence of their memes and vague-booking. I feel everything that they claim they can’t do, don’t know, or won’t try. I feel how impossible it is to do everything I both want to do, or demonstrate in perpetual spite, practically every day. I just took a temp job where I likely pissed off 15 people who wanted the task of applying stickers to calendar misprints to last another 4 hours. I wanted to be home, and I work quickly. We got done at 11 instead of 3:30. To me, a fool thinks we got paid less, because I got my time back. Time I’m not watching obnoxious lower-class people “joke” about how slow we should go.

The reality is that we live in a stupid culture if we’re concerned about paying 15 people over the course of several days to waste time and resources covering “Decmember” on a wall calendar. You have the money for that task, Staples, but not to pay your employees a living wage? You, poor person gig-worker, think the solution to your problems is an incidental squeezing of their stupidity for an extra $100? I don’t have the kind of brain that can “check out.” If I’m not working as well and as fast as I can, I’m in pain. I’m angry. Not just at my circumstances, but at you in your childish blindness, and ever-abstractions of systems I’m ill-equipped to alter while being consumed by them.

On some level, it absolutely sucks to know what you’re capable of. That memory persists. Whether or not it’s going to antagonize or reassure is news to me each day. There’s a story I could tell of my grit and genius that’s managed to figure out things in weeks most couldn’t in years. There’s a story of my entitled indulgent desire to be entertained and own “pointless” things like black T-shirts while I go bankrupt and build half-assed fences. What makes either true? I know neither, by themselves, is true enough. I’m not one framing of my behavior. I don’t “feel” either is true. I can see the arguments for the extremes and every step between. I want to protect that. I’m not indecisive nor a devil’s advocate. I just understand how the spell of a story works.

I can see the story because I’m writing it. I can feel what feels like mine versus what’s been imposed. What feels like it desperately wants me to believe or go along or ignore the implications. Your stories are inconsistent, at best. Lies, often. Unflattering, unhelpful, and deeply uniformed. I want to be nothing like that I hear and navigate. I want the deeply personal evidence on display truth. This, again, whether an “artist” framing feels helpful. Biggest band in the world, or “merely” paying the bills, you’re either singing your songs or you’re not. I don’t sound like you, and I never want to start.