[1270] Tax Code

I’ve been decently frustrated recently. It ranges from a series of very specific things to familiar, but broader, existential sources of angst.

I’ve been working my new job for 17 weeks starting tomorrow. I didn’t get paid for the first 2 months of that job, and I didn’t get 2 months of back wages on the day I finally did start getting. In that time I had to borrow money. In that time, I got a ticket for not having my car insured, then my license was briefly suspended, and all the fees associated piled on, including what it cost to get the body cam footage from a persistently prejudiced police officer.

I get paid well. I have a schedule I can more or less dictate. I’ve managed to be “extra productive” by utilizing my time commuting less and pocking my days with more and more shows. I still feel “broke” and “stuck.” Why? The police interaction has cost me approximately $1,300 of money I really don’t have or would have loved to use in paying my dad back.

But, I’m a particular kind of cunt. I can’t let it go that I was at the ass end of a needless presumptive fishing expedition and wholly invented fantasy of an over-eager gun-carrying power broker. My stomach has got to drop over and over again as I reflect on the anxiety of that night, as I pour over the footage from the body cams and dash cams, and as I look, helplessly, to find a lawyer to put the information in front of that seems to clearly display an aggressive violation of my rights, and even disingenuous attempt to pretend otherwise.

That’s just me personally, who has been invited into a fight I know very few people are willing or capable of taking on. Had I encountered this bullshit a few months earlier, I wouldn’t have had the money to get the footage. It’d feel like needlessly dragging others into what is my fight in soliciting money for anything but necessary essentials for the time being. For the woo woo types, it’s almost as if “the universe” was presenting me with a scenario to really test if I mean what I say.

I mean it when I say I’m disgusted and violently angry at the idea that people in positions of power abuse that power. I’ve held incredible amounts of power professionally, socially, and physically at different points in my life. I wanted to enable with it, share it, and explain it. I wanted to find other people who could exercise power like I felt I was capable of doing, and see what we could do together. I’m still attempting that project.

I have to*fight, because if I don’t, “I” don’t really exist anymore. I am the fight. I am the “fuck you.” I am the one who is literally writing the variable book on why it matters, what it means to him, and why you’re kind of a hopeless fuck if you don’t pick your fights and stand on principles too.

The Shererville, Indiana Police are not the only thing I’m fighting. I’m fighting an extremely disingenuous and aggressive bully overseeing Recovery Works. Now, I’m fighting them less than the owner of the company I work for, but they’re coming for the money that pays to run the whole program. They’re doing so in ways they’ve been dumb enough to write emails about. They’re doing so in violation of their own published policy. They’re doing so in a way that threatens the safety and security of the people in our care, and I’m deeply looking forward to the court appearances articulating all of this.

I listened to a podcast recently where they relayed an idea, “Give a busy person something to do, and they’ll get it done.”

I volunteer myself to try and attack my greater existential woes. I try to create. I try to prepare. I’ve been working on not just digital infrastructure that makes under-resourced social work easier, but civic-mirror.com, and other pieces of local software that I’d like to eventually get listed for sale or components developed into workable software in other domains. I spent 2 solid months of 22-hour days creating something that was finally worth trying to share and connect to people with. It’s cool enough that, while no one can figure out how to make it work for them yet, they see/feel it’s potential, but are inevitably bogged down in their own work and lives.

I’ve cold-emailed hundreds of people in the informatics department at IU. I got a couple bites, but nothing they’ve otherwise followed-up on. I’ve got components to the site that my computer can’t run consistently, but I could run or build things separately, if I had the time or money not feeling burdened by other obligations. I have this golden wonderful project that speaks to literally dozens of issues I have about the current media environment as it pertains to getting information or becoming locally informed or involved, and it just kinda gets to mock me as I think about the job-in-and-of-itself that it would take to create a kind of pitch-binder and tutorial in searching for paid help.

I also haven’t had running water at my house since December of last year. So if I want to do a yard project, I’m either hauling buckets of water to set concrete, or needing to ensure the project makes space for me to drive to Bloomington to shower at Planet Fitness. Pretty much every physical project or just yard work itself stays stalled because I need to build in 2-3 hours to get clean.

Oh, and my job is to field the drama and asks of a sober-living house for women, so, you know, nothing related to that drops giant piles of shit into my weekends or nights every 2 days or so.

I, technically, have just over $6,000 on it’s way to me so far. I won’t get paid for another week, where that number could, in theory, go up another $1,000. What I’ve already made pays back what owe my dad, buys a cheap car from my friend, and then still pays the bills for a month. Yet, with how much I’ve had to pay to clean up police misconduct, I’m hovering between $200 - $600 for weeks at a time, trying to keep my balance between “fun” and “work” and “free” and “busy” without looking too stupid spending money on things I, never “have to” in the same way I have fight the powers that be, but no less feel like I have to in the sense that…what else would I be doing?

The whole structuring my life around living out of a shed in the middle of nowhere is literally so I can try. It’s so I can try to create what I want to create. It’s so I can pick the fights I know need to be had. It’s so I can go to the artists I enjoy and stop debating and negotiating myself out of having fun or owning an overpriced t-shirt that reflects my values and interests. In the horse race of how or when to express yourself, when should one value trump another? I owe my dad money that he’s told me explicitly he’s not hurting for right now. I want to buy a car my friend has offered I take for free (Seriously, get yourself a friend from Saudi Arabia, they have different rules.) I want to keep sending chunks of money to a friend who supported my effort to run my counseling operation. I also want a one, maybe two, Dewalt nail guns, and 50 bags of concrete, and to get my water working again.

Literally every week of my working life could mitigate one or more of these problems except the state of Indiana and its incoherent tyrants at the grant wing can’t help but betray how much they wish everyone poor and addicted would just die and get it over with already? The ambivalent yet predatory state thinks I owe it hundreds of dollars, weeks of stress, and my time and ingenuity in order to meaningfully account for and address an abuse of its power?

I want to write a letter to the officer and describe in the excruciating detail the nature of his fuck ups. I want to be able to collaborate and develop what I know is an incredible idea and useful tool that is Civic Mirror. I want to be able to say “I’m not in debt!” without an asterisk because it’s not to a credit card company, and whether a dollar amount was attached or not still carries an emotional one. I want a lawyer with domain expertise to take some of the burden off my shoulders to make sense of what happened to me.

I’m, always, the one who has to make it make sense. I’m fighting “my” battle. I’m supported, but it’s mine, and I’m alone in that specific kind of way that gets very hard to navigate when you’re trying to figure out if you want to do “the thing” or are desperate to escape from “all the things.” If pointless TikTok likes and followers are any indication, there’s plenty of solidarity, but no one does the work.

This, is part of the work. I don’t need convincing that I’m a good person or capable or going to pursue every end available to me the moment it’s possible. I need to see it articulated and organized. I need to see it as one more blip in the endless sea of thoughts I have about how to orient and see straight.

I’m gonna see at least 100 shows this year, and pay everyone back, and buy a car, and the tools, and get my saxophones fixed, and fund the back end to keep the AIs churning and Civic Mirror infrastructure online, and fight the state, and juggle my clients, and keep reading, listening, watching, to the thousands of hours of podcasts, shows, and articles. Then I’ll get new shoes I’ve been complaining about getting for, checks watch, 2 years at this point, and then maybe somewhere in there I’ll meaningfully continue to build on and around my house before the weather turns impossible.

It’s taken 4 months to course-correct considerably more dire financial straits. That’s a blink of an eye in which plenty of other shit happened too, but also that. My head routinely wants to jump years ahead, and this is the first time in a long time where it hasn’t felt like patience was more or less imposed.

Anyway, if you know a civil rights lawyer, website developer, or where to find DCN680, DCN681, DCN692 and DCN694 nailers that fell off a truck…