[1034] Sackboy

At some point, I just have to start this damn thing.

I mentioned to my supervisor that I analogize my work life to the amounts of proverbial shit I have to eat. Groups, while making me eat considerably less, still lets some shit rest on each bite. In an ideal situation, much as when I’m eating actual food, there’s no shit in it. I don’t mean trace amounts because we’re all covered in poo particles. I mean a noticeable, unnecessary smell, flavor, and consistency that poisons the fundamental nature of the meal. Driving 3 hours round trip in a truck, for 10 months now, to conduct a remote role, that’s shit. The shit consists of the sentiment, “Well, you’re technically a hybrid-role counselor. Yes, and you’re technically an out-patient clinic who happens to admit people you shouldn’t and betrays your pill-mill nature with some regularity.

I also recently spoke to my reoccurring dream of being, less “trapped” in a mall or big house, but sometimes I’ll find myself just looking for the exit, and I never find it. I have an idea of where it is, I speed walk my way to where I think I need to go, but then the hallway bends in a way I don’t recognize, or the stairs let me out to the wrong floor, or the final 50 feet extend and get bogged down with rows of obstruction.

My supervisor, in response to my shit-eating analogy said, “Well, nothing’s perfect, right?” I quickly retorted that I’m not after perfection, I just don’t want to eat shit. Whether I found the front door, or safely landed after jumping out of a window, I want to find the exit, and I’m irrationally trapped for what amounts to a lack of imagination or need to wake up.

A common sentiment from the people in Groups is about how they need the structure and accountability. I’m told fairly regularly that it’s appreciated when I, “call me on my shit.” The “shit” clients are referring to is the vague distance-building language they use to skirt past intentionally using a coping skill or engaging in self-care. It’s when they work themselves to death for people who don’t give a fuck about them and then they ask for a dose increase before trying to balance their day or setting a boundary. This is where I can never take credit for your sobriety, because a persistent boundary or a daily balanced practice are merely my suggestion after observation. You either do the work or not.

How do you obligate someone to the work of being their own source of structure and accountability? I implement literal accounting in mindfulness exercises. I hold my people to rules for how the group will be structured. You hold the line and wait. The longer you hold the line and wait, you get “institutionalized” psychologically. We’re the products of a lot of line-holders, healthily or unhealthily. It’s why I have a degree and nightmares in my 30s that I haven’t done my homework. It’s why most of the world, regardless of their health, status, or intelligence, is on some level paying the bills, staying alive, and using language that suggests no genuine desire to be a “leech.”

They’re much more fragile lines than we wish to believe. It’s only a decision away to violate a norm or create something with its own lines that challenges via its very existence. The trap people get into is believing they are establishing new norms or that they’ve created anything in the wake of their reaction to the current standard. To react, destroy, or protest is categorically different than building, protecting, and incorporating. One leaves you at the mercy or folly of what you’re reacting to. The other is filled with work and opportunities if only it can be recognized, maintained, and celebrated.

Work, in my experience, speaks for itself. I, pretty habitually, do as good if not the best job at whatever, at least in a professional context. I clean deeper when I’m scrubbing bathrooms. I’m efficient in my driving and notes. I manage time, people, and policy with ease. This keeps my name out of genuine contention about my value, for all it also conjures regarding my personality. I celebrate myself. I reward myself. I refuse to play along with nonsense when I don’t have to and I don’t lie to you or myself. I work to find the truth of the vagaries in my feelings and ambiguous nature of my motives. The blog, for the infinite amount of things it might say, will speak for itself when I’m done. I’m working.

I had a mild panic moment thinking about my spending. I almost forgot, at least bodily, that I’ve already done the math. When I did it again, I discovered that even including my bills for the rest of the year, all of my spending, driving, food, parking, shows, airfare, etc. amounts to just over one paycheck a month if I stay till the end of the year. If I radically dial back my spending, I’m still out of debt in 3.5 months. 98% of my debt is shows still to come, and my new computer. I, still, just don’t really care, even when my body wants to forget here and there.

I do feel trapped, which is nothing new. I’m trapped by the absurdities of my business relationships, the insurance fuckery and capitalism, and even the weather. A tornado blew away houses kinda like mine about 30 minutes away, so now I spend another $1,000 a year in insurance. I can’t make our therapist answer the phone or troubleshoot a login issue preventing us from moving forward to get empanelled with Medicaid and Medicare. I’m born to a country that doesn’t believe you should pay for anything related to health and goes out of its way to corrupt the systems that tried. Where’s the exit?

I suffocate on just immensely oppressive irony as well. You know how I’ll find a girlfriend? Get verbally and physically abusive. I’ll find someone willing to bail me out after I go to jail after we fight. I’ll find someone who in private will defend me and speak highly of how good and honest I am in how I contribute to working things out together. If I start gaslighting, the desire to have kids will overwhelm her. If I develop a drug habit, we’ll get a prime opportunity to discuss all we’ve overcome together. If I just cheat instead of look for a way to be open, she’ll cry that I’m not fucking her enough!

You have a lot of money? Cool, why don’t you use your position in life to back yourself into a corner that needs someone like me to prompt you to be mindful about how often you’re screaming at your loved ones. I hope your newfound peace and clarity will allow you to thrive. God knows I’m not working to open my pool, fixing up my side-project house, or getting together with my extended family that doesn’t try to eat each other alive.

My most panicked and desperate friends will occasionally reach out to me, either looking for solidarity of the sort I’m often unable to provide, or because they know, in fact, how I will respond and then that can be used as the pretext for lashing out. It’s very weird. I can tell they can’t tell they’re doing it, but in magnificent feats of irony, the once (for “fun”) time I might ask for help (or hell, lunch), it’s crickets, excuses, distracted distance, or inevitably wholesale silence if not outright banishment. It’s pretty crazy-making actually, and I think it speaks to why I’m so enthralled with compelling messy family depictions on TV. Do I really wanna be one of the Shameless characters? Fuck no. Do I want to be on the verge of death wandering about the ‘verse? (if you know, you know.) Again, fuck no.

We don’t see what we have. You might profess to want structure and accountability, but it’s baked into what you’re doing, or not, already. You have to look for it. You have to know what it sounds like and speak the truth of it into the world. If I carried on, you might get the impression I’m envious or jealous of the people I see living with relative blindness to the nature of their different privileges. I’m lucky enough to know it’s not about me or them though. We’re all plugged into the inescapable. There is no exit, and the task is to make peace with wandering around. You can wander with an abusive partner, all the money in the world, or with a series of habits that serve to distract, but you can’t not wander unless you choose to stop, set up camp, and draw a line.

I have a lot of lines. Probably more than can be accounted for, but they come through when I write. I’m not going to get caught up in lies. I can’t think straight, feel good, plan, stay organized, be righteously indignant, or care about literally anything if I can’t find as true an understanding of something as I might. You get up and arms about the issue of the day? I’ll keep asking the annoying question until you remove yourself from the reactive space. I think J.K. Rowling is running that program at present. I pay attention when my body crosses lines and explore why. I’m willing and practicing the habit of asking if new ones need to be created and if I’ve crossed one.

I’m not going to be pushed at work into a space where every time my phone goes off I feel stressed or performatively sigh. I’m not going to let my finances get lost in a sea of favors or sentimentality. My cats aren’t guaranteed a spot in my lap. Everything I’ve achieved so far, and plan to get in the future, has been me building the kind of environment in which I hope to thrive. I get to make the drives to my shows, I don’t “have to.” I get to build on my land. I get to play, read, and watch what I want as I please. My conversations about my business are about what meetings I can get invited to, not “If I had my own, I could…” I have my own, and I do.

There’s $700 sitting in my account that wasn’t there a month and a half ago. I’ve spoken with most of the surrounding probation departments (those people are incredibly hard to get on the phone.) I’m showing up on provider lists and getting called. The larger context is still a series of larger mouthfuls of shit, but there’s my miraculous unsullied seed waiting to sprout. The watering can, soil, air, and gardener are all covered in shit, but the work and the ideas that allow the seed to grow form the protective lines worth holding.

It's incredibly lonely, but not lonelier than playing dress-up and pretend. I can make peace with my missing perspective regarding the relationships I thought I was forging. I’ll run on the fumes of my spite until it kills me. It’s movie-magic that puts the whole crew or family on the same page. It’s fake. It’s not something to aspire to what you see on screen, anymore than it is to aspire to the cartoonish mythologies that plague pathological families and religious ideologies. You’re working regardless. Either to normalize shit-eating, sound-making (a lot like saying words, but not quite), and distancing from even the memory of what it takes to be an accountable world builder.

[641] Dream Fever

It’s late. It didn’t used to be late, but now it is. My eyes have seen enough for the day. The movie reel of my mind is smacking the end of the tape over and over again against the inside of my forehead. I find myself, per usual, writing because I have to. Because I have words stuffed somewhere in there that have to be coaxed out like a frightened animal. They’re stuck. I’m stuck. And I suppose if you don’t know how to get somewhere “out there,” the only place left is traveling inside. Spelunk the cavernous soul and try not to provoke all the bats to fly out at once.

It’s getting weirder. My days don’t so much run together as they “are” together. My past feels as bright and relevant as the days I lived it. I’m back in my old bedroom. I’m walking my high school hallway. I’m in the fight, zoned out in front of the TV, and crying as I piss myself 10 steps from the bathroom. It’s one thing to have a good memory, or god forbid enough trauma growing up you can’t ever forget, but how do you describe when it changed. How do you say, “I didn’t live it, I am living it?”

It’s as if something is out to get you. Not catch you. Get you. Like you represent something. Like you actually are something. Asking about whether or not that something is “meaningful” seems to miss the point. Imagining some kind of god or advanced civilization powering on your program just feels vain.

You must consider how perfectly delusional it sounds. How perfectly delusional you actually are. So what? You have a handful of flashbacks or compelling memories. And? The past is the past, and my poor understanding of quantum mechanics blah blah blah. It’s not like you can remember every single day. It’s not like your brain is like a videocamera. It’s not as though you can even process that amount of information, let alone have someone you expect to believe it’s running you like you’re poorly describing.

It’s not words though. It’s a sense. It’s not an itch or a faint echo. It’s a whale. It’s an intense pressure and [BOW] that twists you up like you’re being looked at as though light is bending around you. It doesn’t pulse. It doesn’t sound. It just encompasses. It is, here, deal with it.

It’s not just to do with the past though. The future also feels here too. All of it, any of it. I can feel myself rich and I can feel the pavement of me sleeping on the street. I’ve seen my death countless time in countless ways. I have the most beautiful family that started under the most inauspicious circumstances, and I’m as lonely as anyone has ever been. It’s all true. It’s all real.

My heart is racing. I have no power to stop it. It’s excited about all there is left to accomplish. It’s dreadfully afraid the worst has come true. It longs to be trapped in the moment where it complimented the butterflies instead of wishing to set them ablaze. My chest is always so full. Fuller than my stomach could ever be. Full of rage and heartbreak and desire. Full of hope. Full of every possible future it feels in earnest and wishes could spill out like a broken dam. My head pounds away for the answer, some way to release the pressure valve. Some way to zero in on the infinity. Some voice that holds true in the blur of noises and colors.

I scowl. I snarl like a dog who knows what his teeth are really meant for. Beneath a somber and pathetic brow I breath through my nose and twitch as the lasers from my eyes attempt to transfer the debris to the page. I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay. Each utterance sends chills and water wells. I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay. I have to believe it? I mean, it’s not suspicious that I said “have to” instead of “I do.” I’m okay. My hands slow down wondering why I’m bothering with one more. I’m absolutely not okay.

How can you be okay when you’re everything? How does one (1) class human male (xy) 6’2” 220 pound bag of meat and hair and electricity and water feel he’s in every moment of his past and feel every possible future? This delusional fucking liar! What’s the angle? What do you get out of this? You’ve made a brand out of being a nutcase? But you’re not angry about it. You’re scared. You want an identity. You want to believe even one thing about everything remains the same. You want the words where they don’t exist and direction in the void.

But you’re chasing a shadow. Your perspective is off, and the closer you look the farther away it becomes. It’s not about your gaze. It’s not about your brains. It’s not about your wishes and feelings or hopes and dreams. It’s that. It’s that thought. It’s those words. THESE WORDS. Right here is as close or far as you’ve ever been or ever will be to anything you remember and everything you could ever be. It was true then, and it will be true again. True is as you as is. True was that, is this, and is moving right along to now. You’re the hero! You’re the despot. You’ve got a future! You’ll be fixing your car every week until the day you die. You’re a ball of confusion and anxiety well beyond your conscious control. You’re abject power to dig and beat and bite that ball until it becomes a choking hazard. You don’t have to make sense. You don’t make sense. You are sense. You make words. You make. That’s what you do.

You make tears. You make shit. You make food and people laugh. You make up stories in your head about how you might relate to the stories other people have made. You make excuses and predictions. You make the world around you fall into the same existential black hole until they’re dying to get away from you because you make 10 minutes feel like 10 years. You make your stomach rise and fall when you make yourself focus on your breath. You make clicky noises as you make yourself...finally just pick this way to end this sentence.

If there’s anything that makes you different, it’s that you're undyingly aware that it’s all coming from you! You know what you make! You know how much more you can make! You know why it’s necessary and worth it to be scared. You know how much harder it is to make some overflow of love or acceptance, but it’s not impossible. You know you can make the hate dissipate. You know the migraine can subside. Your heart has figured out how to get bored with itself in the past, and maybe one day you’ll figure out how to get there again. Except, it’s already there. It’s already as scared or as calm as it ever was or is ever going to be. You made it that way. For your own reasons, but it was you nonetheless. Why don’t you trust your own work?

Because it hurts.

[634] Savage

Fair warning, I can tell right away, this isn’t one you should bother with. I don’t care if it’s the most redundant thing I’ve ever written. I don’t care if it goes on for a dozen pages. I don’t care if you immediately get the sense that the lacking and pitiful voice used to launch this warning remains intransigently smug yet full of woe.

I’ve tried to write this blog before. The one where I state plainly my stupid brain attached to my stupid heart that gets it pumped up and stressed out. I tried to find a context for why it made sense. I tried to explain the path forward in spite of it. I tried to understand it like there’s a reason.

If I get another person to tell me to “just breath” and “relax” and “don’t think about it” with regard to slowing the speed of my heart, I may slowly steer my car into oncoming traffic, making sure to choose a semi so no one gets hurt. I’m not a monster.

There’s nothing even at stake. Progress on my website? A strawbale addition to my garage? The moving van getting fixed? A riding lawn mower? I can, in theory, make half the amount of money in the same time I would have been gone. A month of my life then? What am I nervous about? It’s the wrong question though.

I’m stuck in this moment. I’ve been stuck here since, I think around 14. It’s why I can’t let shit go. It’s why I have to try and understand instead of forgive. It’s why I have the same dreams as an over-eager child. It’s why I harp on the relationships in my life that have lasted longer than a class period. It’s why I read blogs from 10 years ago and find the exact sentiment I needed today. I’m nervous about exactly what got me fucked up from the beginning, my entire life crashing down around me for no good goddamn reason.

The only antidote I’ve found is some measure of progress. Never a simple dollar amount, but a structure or a tool. I haven’t progressed until one of you assholes figures out what it is I’m doing and is working along side me when it’s not convenient. I haven’t progressed until people I admire see something I’ve built and begin to wonder how it can help influence their lives and endeavors.

I’m stuck in this moment, and I don’t want to be. This moment is horrifyingly lonely. This moment doesn’t sleep on a bed most nights of the week. This moment is sweaty basketball shorts and awkward conversations in a parking lot wrought with bees, flies, and the smell of garbage, occasionally interrupted by the world’s most obnoxious train conductor. This moment has my head swelling beyond comprehension at the temples for something trying to get out. This moment is a sunken hole at the dead center of my chest that can’t be breathed away or beared down on.

I spent a little gas money. I ate too much shitty food. I put a little more wear on my torn car. This didn’t even really matter, and I couldn’t get it done. I couldn’t sit politely and calmly for a procedure that’s the dead easiest fucking thing to pass! I used to love getting the cuff put on! As a kid I thought it was cool. After marathoning ER I was particularly interested in what the readouts at the Wal-Mart booths said. To fail one has meant to fail them all, if I can hijack a bad paraphrasing of some philosophical statement someone made.

I said some time ago that I haven’t been me for a very long time. I get hints of it at a house party. I can get lost in the flow of some work out on the land. But it’s few and far between. This money would have suggested I could move faster. Something in my mind’s eye might have been able to take up residence next to the garage. I don’t know, none of that sounds dramatic enough. Or, it’s not the heart of it. I just would have been able to work on what matters instead of work at what’s paying me.

I don’t matter. At least, I don’t know how else to state it. I know I’m one car in traffic in the suburbs of Chicago in all his grand failure glory driving past an infinite array of disappointments and ailments that are a universe away from being a headfucked asshole who didn’t get to nab an extra 5 grand. I know I’m small. While my heart defiantly beats harder and my breath gets shorter I try to persuade myself. Fuck me and what I want to do. Fuck me and what I could create. Fuck me to the degree I believe my own bullshit. Fuck every selfish aim and its incidental potential impact. Fuck thinking you have any control. Fuck blaming yourself over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and fucking over and over again. Fuck trying. Fuck visualizing yourself hanging from an extension cord because if your head’s already about to pop, might as well seek a direction that will actually feel like a fucking relief, right?

I’m so tired. I’m so tired of talking. I’m so tired of waiting. I’m so tired of thinking the exact same things because they’re right and worth it and when they can’t be done you don’t get to move on.

Enough times it’s happened where while I’m writing I manage to just knock out of the park a line that sticks with me for weeks. Something like that happens or a calm will wash over me. My breathing will return to normal. My brain will feel less packed. I’ve never been able to do that thinking about this study anxiety. Maybe I’ve talked around the edges of it, maybe not. Maybe I have even the basest understanding of psychosomatic responses, maybe I’m such an inbuilt contrarian I’ve robbed myself of the capacity to change.

The last paragraph was started after I put this down and just forced myself to sleep. I pick up writing again after 13 hours. I had a dream that isn’t exactly recurring, but it’s a similar theme. I find myself in a giant bathroom with many different doors leading out of it. Some are locked. Some seem like they’re going to lead somewhere. Some have people's names on them like they’re reserved. This one had someone telling me about a space I had occupied being taken over by some people who didn’t really have any business taking it over. Someone led me through this giant bathroom that was supposed to act as a shortcut, but only ended up as a dead end. I try every door on the wall on my race back to where we entered and realize I’ve wasted a ton of time not just going to my space the way I knew how instead of following their advice and direction. The last door I tried had “reserved for Elon Musk” which I reasoned harked back to a time when he occupied that hallway or room and nobody had taken down the sign.

As far as my psychoanalytic capacity goes, I find this dream pretty on the nose. I’m anxious over the wasted time. I’m sick of terrible naive advice on how to do something or get somewhere people have no experience contending with. I want my name on a wall. I want to know that were I to leave my shit somewhere it has every right to be, someone’s going to remove the interlopers without me having to make a mad dash to keep a lid on things.

A previous bathroom, again it being large, related to me being unable to find a stall or urinal that wasn’t absolutely disgusting to use. So it was kick open a door, huff, move on, find the layout of another one provided no privacy, find the floor flooded in the next, then 4 loud ridiculous people I knew I couldn’t stand might be ambling closer just beyond eyesight so I move onto the next. Every option shitty.

I don’t take my problems seriously enough. At least I don’t respect them. I don’t know how to perpetually wallow. It gets boring. On the car ride back I couldn’t help but recall things I recognized that made me think of some stupid or hilarious thing my friends and I did growing up. I have a kind of blindness for what things are “supposed” to mean. In the same way that I use words in ways that constantly piss people off for what I consider “no reason,” I don’t know what it means precisely when I don’t get into a study or if I were to get colon cancer, as has just happened to my uncle.

I don’t believe in karma, so trying to play some metaphysical math game is out. I don’t pretend like I know the future, so I can’t rule out my highway tragedy on the day I leave the center, having spent my last 20 days confined to kinda shitty food and odd company. I’d prefer imagining myself with more money right now, but there’s an infinite list of things that might happen in the same amount of time that speak to an infinite amount of potentials, if my head doesn’t know how to drop the anxiety as the cuff inflates, it certainly figured out how to drown itself in the ambiguities that follow.

I’ve said before that I’m not a fan of life. It’s still true. It doesn’t mean I can’t be or there aren’t features I enjoy, but overall, I’ve spent considerably more time as a toy of ignorant forces than I have being anything I’d genuinely like to consider calling “me.” I have no reason to be a fan of that. I have no reason to consider my circumstances particularly blessed. I lucked out. It’s not my responsibility to mask “luck worship” as “deep appreciation” or pretend most of the examples set for me regarding other’s luck are anything beyond escapist selfish indulgence. I was lucky to be born smart, if you ignore all of the mental health risks and social isolation that poses. I was lucky to be born good enough looking if you want to see how fast you can race to considering the vast majority of the people you meet as “unfuckable.” I was lucky enough to have a few solid examples of how to behave even fleetingly morally even as I see what befalls those who bother to give a shit.

I haven’t felt able to enjoy the fruits of what I’ve set up. Sure, the “rent” on the garage is paid up for 2 months, but I still only took a day off a week, and that was usually because I had shit to do errand wise, or really needed to shower, so it hardly felt like a day off. I work all day, at the expense of my muscles, my attention, my car, so I can move faster, not because I have to do anything. I can work 2 days a month and still have a place to sleep. Add another day a year, I pay off that gym membership for that year. Add another, there’s my car insurance. I decided to hang out at my dad’s for another day, because I can, this place has air conditioning and a bed.

I’m living my poor man’s version of the billion dollar deal that didn’t go through to bring a football team to a new city, if you want to consult a recycled plot Ballers took from Entourage. Now I need to piss off to do whatever poor billionaires do in the meantime. Try to make more money they hardly need and look for opportunities to pat themselves on the back for “giving back” in wanton fashion. I need what every fat girl with fatalistic confidence who hit me up on OKCupid needs; a friend or partner to share in the future with who matches my private wit and intensity who can see past the surface and cultivate a life on the things that matter! Now, I can’t do that for them, I don’t expect anyone to do it with me.

So it’s the wrong way to approach the question. What do I really need then? I’ve always had the answer. The attractive environment. I need to be that bird who decorates his nest and puts on a dance. I’m just a horny bird who can’t dance hard enough and who knows the choice decorations are a few miles beyond where my wings start cramping. People fall for the artifice. They cultivate their personal illusions, and yours can’t be any more damming or less inviting than what they’ve rehearsed. Beauty is an illusion? Tell that to a soft cock in a sexual neighborhood it doesn’t belong. What you need is the capacity to deceive and maintain that deception. This explains why at the front of my years of writing there’s so much talk about manipulation.

I’ve found myself pretending I want what others have. I’ll think I want “the regular job” with “benefits” and a retirement account. I’ll act like I want to get up and put on clothes that make me unrecognizable. I want to pretend that they’re getting paid much more than I am or have any more free time or free mental space. I don’t exactly fall for this illusion of “security,” but I know the social animal in me is screaming for an environment that I might fit into without buttoning up my shirt and lips. Baby rape and crackhead jokes fly pretty freely at the local DCS office? Hey, I might fit in where the reality is always considerably worse than the joke.

I know I don’t want what all that entails though. I know it because I’m not there. I’ve never really been one to force myself into an untenable situation for any longer than was necessary. Is that what this moment is? Necessary? Are there forces at work that squeeze the fuck out of my chest that know more about what needs to happen down the line? When you run out of answers, appeals to the unknown unknowns are always tempting. I can entertain the thought, but I’m not that big of an idiot to claim it’s real.

I’m sure here shorty I’ll get bored of sitting here and drive back to town. I’ll line up in the CT queue, start the next episode of some show I’m barely interested in. I’ll make another $100 and then pull my car into the corner and beckon back pain until the morning where I’ll do it again. I’ll try to keep a lookout for any “reason” “the universe” “decided” I don’t require money in an even easier fashion and the “purpose” of pursuing my goals “alone” and “too slowly.” I clearly don’t understand anything, so the idea that I’d even be able to identify it if I saw it is suspect at best.