[693] Another Day, Another Collar

I'm writing because I ate considerably too much at too late an hour to be able to rely on the "itis" that caught me already once today. I also like to use blogs where I feel very little is on the line to scavenger hunt for something I didn't realize was important.

It seems that right at the "last push" of another month or so of working, where at the end I should presumably have a house that I can survive in, if it still lacks certain amenities, I find myself yearning to take it easy. I noticed that when in a "rut" or pattern, I can reliably wake up 2 minutes before my alarm, and at one point I was waking up with all of the energy morning people claim to have, though I only have my car seat to direct it to. That's gone. I wake up tired whether I sleep 4 or 8 hours. I know a big component is what I'm eating. Of course, because it's me, I don't want to bother with eating healthy or food prep unless I feel I can stick with it and do it right.

None of that is interesting. In fact, the last line is one Derren Brown used on a "personalized survey" to try and show people that with enough vagaries and catch-all sentiments, you can trick a large portion of the population into thinking you've read their mind. No less, I can literally read my mind as I carry on writing, and still manage to express a "personal" truth that I can see manifesting itself in my behavior time and again. For some reason I just thought about masturbation rituals. You get someone feeling really ashamed or embarrassed because dare they share when they cum, they like to shoot it from their ear. Ultimately, there's only so much you can do, and it's probably been done before.

I was thinking that not only do I hate my job, but I hate how easy my job is. I drive around town. I sit around a parking lot. I can do this indefinitely as long as I show up early enough and the business stays open. No matter how long I engage in this activity, it will never bring me joy. I will never feel a sense of accomplishment or ownership. I will never take with me anything more or less than every fabled piece of discontent shared by labor across time. Yet it exists, and people profit mightily from it, and have invested a ton, and make excuses for it, and celebrate the "freedom" one has to come and go as you please, even when that's not a correct thing to say. So many levels of bullshit curate our world, from the delivery boy to the boardroom, we normalize deluded bullshit.

This is an idea I find myself increasingly commenting on with, "I don't understand this." Isn't life hard enough? No matter what I seem to achieve, quickly or otherwise, I'm always anxious and pursuing something new. No matter how many relationships I'd like to trust or rely on, I still have to deal with feeling guilty or ashamed for reaching out and expecting honesty or candor. No matter the amount of money I may make or small villages I'll insist on bragging about helping will make me think any more positively about "the human spirit" or general human endeavor. Life gives you enough things wrong with your head and your daily life, why add another layer? Why perpetuate the lie, whatever it is? Why pretend you deserve the money? Why pretend you're as good a friend as you can be? Why think anything so assuredly that you're willing to tear down instead of preserve and explore?

I think like this because I find myself feeling lost in the woods of diversion media. I had preferences, now I'm constantly trying to mine for surprises. I want to be caught off guard laughing, not walk into something with expectations because it's labeled "comedy" and stars a familiar face. I have little to no contact with "the culture at large" that isn't bathed in internet inanity, so I try to become familiar with things that get popular or make their way to late night talk shows to be promoted. As fate would have it, I get into more pointless conversations about TV shows than nearly anything else, followed my the occasional "How is Trump killing us now" banter.

I could arguably be terrible at preservation. Perhaps it is my fault for literally every person that's left my life or felt some undue burden in how I contacted them or tried to talk. I don't actually believe that, but I'm willing to entertain it. Perhaps I should have scheduled "reach out" sessions and kept stoking some nostalgic flame. I'm the obsessive perpetual child, no? It's my job to drag everybody down into my hopeful naivety that envisions one impractical dire necessity after another. I could claim to do it for my sake or theirs, but doesn't everything fall under my sake?

I think a marginal savior of my sanity is that I don't believe in anything. I don't believe in myself, so when I manage to get anything done it's this lacking-in-object-permanence kind of surprise. The piece of me, the pieces I use to navigate the world, or just my little hopeless bubble, feel fluid. They can get tired without notice. They can run at a thousand miles an hour and whip me into shape. I don't know that I'll stay on to work all day. I should. I should know that's what I want to do because I want a house, and I want to never again hear something so stupid like, "Hey, I have a friend coming over for spring break, do you think you can just...not live here for a while? I didn't consider you could just sleep on the floor, and that you slept in your car before it got cold because you had nowhere else to go, and that you pay rent, but I'd like my friend to be able to have the couch."

I think so often about what a world without the added layer of incoherent dishonest bullshit would really look like. I want to know what it's like to be able to trust 50 or 100 people. I want to know what it means to have things get fixed and go right more often than wrong. Moreover, wrong for deliberate and ridiculous reasons. Someone like me, who's proven adept enough with money to at least navigate business ownership, land stewardship, and house construction, should be able to get that less than a month's wages loan from the bank to get work done in a timely manner. I should have been able to work the coffee shop in the mall for a quarter of the rent, and been made whole when they fucked me for the electricity. There should be resources and outlets for those who achieve that aren't exploitative contests and game shows where you humble yourself to gods of money and excess in order to try and fail once where they've been a thousand times.

What if people actually took my advice and wrote? What if they came to well-reasoned positions about me or my behavior and our relationship, and we didn't have to have an awkward text or fight because I asked a question? What if I was correct, and acknowledged and rewarded for being correct, like we attempt to with children, and we built from there? What if I never needed your "faith" because you allowed yourself to realize the day to day work? What if we all have our long and convoluted story as to how we came to a place that was always "on" and assessing and willing to engage? What does the world look like when we all decide to take considerably more responsibility for it than any of our fellow failures insists upon us? Aren't the dimwits from Parkland showing us what a dozen pissed off people can do for the Left? They're barely more coherent than Tea-baggers if you let them talk too long, and it doesn't matter.

I've said in the past that once the house was done I've contemplated just sleeping for a week. Just sit out there and soak up the idea that there isn't a bill just around the corner urging me to get up against my will. Just take in the idea that it exists, and now I exist in it, and it took considerably more effort and bullshit than anyone will ever care to hear the details of. I know I won't be able to sit still for very long, so it seems like a worthwhile challenge. I dream as though I already have memories of living there. As far as what I may make of the probability wave concerning my future, the house is done. I'm there, I'm blasting music and practicing instruments all night. You should see how quickly I retaught my fingers to speed pick.

Before the headache, eyestrain, chest pain, knee throb, sore ball, or knotted neck and shoulders get me, I hope I can remain there as I keep finding ways to persuade myself that a southern Indiana parking lot, waiting to be stuck in traffic and stood up by an entitled Indian kid, is exactly where I need to be. I'll keep drumming and building wrist chops. I'll keep doing vocal exercises. I'll keep the TV marathons goings. I'll try to talk myself out of wasting money on McDonald's. I'll proclaim the niceness of the day or lament the ongoing rain. Never let yourself be fooled that what I'm doing has anything to do with "me." I'm preoccupying my brain with half measures and distractions so I'm not driven mad thinking about what I can't think about. I'm desperately clinging to shades of the vibrancy I'd rather paint with so I can bother to say there's at least still color in my world.

I want to create and live in a world that makes sense, but I'm forced to operate in one that does everything in its power not to. I want to feel like the taking up of responsibility for what I create or who I let into my world is a measure of my worthwhile perspective. I want to reacquire the time to contemplate complicated ideas with the details. Instead, I'm sat, fat, tired, and downtrodden about my inevitable future, because even one day of tyranny is tyranny nonetheless. The added dogma of man superimposed on the guy so worn down he's chosen a field in the middle of nowhere as a bastion of last hope, if only in one day using the value inherent to escape his circumstances one way or another.

Here we make it to the end. I feel the eyes starting to hurt, it's late enough that I'm guaranteed not to get enough sleep if I want to go in as early as I need to. I'll probably sleep a little longer and try to go in a little later. While I claim to already be living in a version of my idealized future, what I know seems to have considerably less bearing in the face of all I don't. I could stand to know more. I could bother with the responsibility to help, fix, or sustain more than myself. I could matter as the social animal with at least an ounce of personal integrity that works overtime to combat my chaotic impulses. I'll get there, just in the dumbest way possible that keeps me longing for death by the time I do.

[666] Better Half

Where's the mute button for your brain?

My computer fans hum. I have an incredibly fast computer for the relatively little I put it through, but I seem to have missed how to make it not sound industrial. They're a great analogy for my head.

I'm back in “the grind.” I spent the whole 11 hours at work basically comfortable. It was not because I packed enough or adequate food. It wasn't the solid tips and mostly shorter runs. The weather ensured I'd start feeling frozen if the car was off too long. No, what gets me through brain dead monotony is the week leading up to it where I reinforce the idea that it's what I want or need to be doing.

I greatly admire Derren Brown. If you don't know who he is, you're not British. Derren demonstrates in the greatest fashion how suggestible we really are and the lengths someone can push you to. While I doubt someone's taken a month to program associations into me, I can feel the urge grow a little stronger to eat the same food someone's brought in or catch the latest movie getting all the buzz. Just because I fundamentally disagree with “everything” (even when I don't) doesn't mean I don't experience the pull.

There's no stronger pull than the story I give myself. If I can convince myself that the next month or 2 or 5 is a part of a massively liberating life lived with reckless abandon story, I can shut up and marathon The X-files and brush off waves of non-tippers. If I “really really really” want to see something I think can be accomplished quickly happen tomorrow, like were it not for the snow maybe my solar panels set up, it's hard to make it another 5 minutes. I mean, I've only recently been introduced to the wonders of credit cards. Foolish me for almost 30 years thought if you didn't have the money now, all hope was lost.

I have a problem keeping a consistent narrative about myself. Anymore, I feel I mostly consist of a very specific general impression I wish to espouse. If that doesn't sound like it makes any sense, it's because it's a series of completely easy sentiments that don't have a word to describe them all at once.

For example, I never want to be told to turn the TV or my music down. How many places or circumstances on Earth does that exist? I want to go a step further though, and be able to play instruments whenever. Practice constantly and never piss someone off or have to travel somewhere special. Once I have those things, I'll feel really good. I also want to work for a weekend, and spend that money on literally anything. Whether I make $50 or $500, I want to know that I won't have a second thought about the drinks or the trip. As long as I still have to pay off my house, I can't quite be there, but even still, the remaining balance is less than 2 years rent at where I stayed for the last 7.

That's the floor. When the floor is there, I want to get into the specialty things. If I get a business and have employees, I want to be able to compel people to adapt to me instead of the other way around. If I want you to write, you will, or you won't get paid. If I want the job done today, you will, or you won't work with me. I want to compel people to act as efficiently and reliably as me so that I can insulate myself with people who's words I can more or less trust. Trust, insofar as I've conditioned the trust into them.

Bringing up trust makes me think of this line in the Christmas special of Victoria. “Men don't give you their hearts, they only loan them.” As I've watched nearly all of my relationships, friendly or otherwise, dwindle into informality, I can't help but to think of this kind of relating to people and that which good parent's seem to espouse. What keeps a parent pot-committed or “hodling” longer than the most wizened bitcoin enthusiast? Or, what's the glue that makes one person become your “best friend from childhood?” The rest relegated to wherever those people go.

Is it just a story as well? Another line from that special was when a gay character asks a woman who knows he's gay to marry her where he says, “There's different kinds of love.”

I've wanted to write something better about those terms that seem all-encompassing but retain a certain pragmatic use and undying cultural relevancy. I've said before there's as many kinds of “love” as there are people. If love is as much a function of that story-telling tradition and spell of a compelling narrative, it stands to reason the “deepest” and “longest” loves are those who's story isn't about the pain and precariousness of the moment as it is about who they want to be when they die. Things like “honor” and “freedom” make considerably more sense that way.

Perhaps that's what got me over the hump of expecting anything from anybody. I don't want to be the angry lump on a hill recalling the money you stole or the lies you told. It doesn't mean I'm not going to keep you safely boxed away while I'm alive, but my worst feelings and reactions to you are not who I want to be. And truly, they're not what I mostly conceive of you as.

Maybe it's here I've discovered what the first half of this has to do with the second. I'm still “forced” to work, like I'm “forced” to reevaluate and tear down unhealthy social dynamics. I'm this automaton who's tasted the freedom and good-life, but got dragged into being a reactionary force. My good builder didn't appear until after I'd wasted time and effort with the idiots, so poof goes money I thought might be a modest savings. One disaster after another with cars makes it so I can't even reliably get to doing the thing I don't even want to do in the first place. I put myself out there to try and learn from or rely on “experts” who leave me hanging. The healthiest and most uplifting conversations I get into are resolving some conflict in my dreams with people who I'll probably never talk to again.

Seems a simple difference after all. You get into a relationship with yourself expecting everything to be as terrible as it can be or as amazing as you wish, then you can keep your head on. You extend the same courtesy to your friend or spouse, and vice versa, you stay together forever. You find a story about your job that takes you beyond the demeaning and exploitative power dynamics, you can stay there for years as your mind keeps occupied by what truly matters. Are you lending your heart to a fleeting infatuation? Can you write your way out of the corners you've been shoved into? It's the difference between the active acceptance and resolve, and reactionary pain. I wish every moment my capacity didn't feel up for grabs.