[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.