[914] Teat Fed

I'm entitled. Hey! Stop. I can hear the collective yawn and not-so-under-your-breath "duhs."

The Google definition of "entitled" is "believing oneself to be inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment.

Some of you may recall that my mother used to like to refer to my brother and I as "Serbian princes." My old-world Eastern European relatives were always cooking for us, offering compliments, and just generally being fawning old people. My mom, who was routinely ridiculed for her body (I saw a picture of her skinny as shit once) and mentally abused as a child, did not do a solid job with her resentment for that.

I should get it out of the way to say that I agree. I do feel entitled to some things. I feel entitled to things I consider "basics" like food, life, and respect. One can get lost in the weeds of what really constitutes any of those things, or "enough" of those things, but most people I think would fall within a reasonable mean provided they were from the same culture and class.

My favorite kind of entitlement is what I call "pretty girl complexes." All women certainly suffer from what might be understood as a "barrage of dicks," at all times, but pretty girls could build a calendar out months with, perhaps even otherwise committed guys who they also found attractive. That lends itself to a kind of confidence and attitude I haven't found a comparison to. Even the prettiest guys can't necessarily get the prettiest girls.

I think I'm entitled to the access and use of my "stuff." My things represent countless hours spent otherwise wage-slaving at unfulfilling and often demeaning tasks. I think I've worked for everything I have and am thus entitled to as far as I can stretch those things. There is a parallel universe where I am entitled to months of sitting on my ass reading, playing video games, watching TV, and playing my guitar. Just by the math, no extra ideas about the objective/subjective value of doing so.

If we return to the definition offered by Google, I'm perplexed by the word "special" treatment. Pretty girls might flirt with a cop or whip a titty out to get out of a ticket. The presumed idea being that they are worth more in entertainment or looks than the rule of law. I wonder as well, special with regard to what? I don't apply to jobs like "Apple CEO" or "machinist 1st class" even if they pay what I think I'm entitled to as wages that might keep with inflation and productivity. I've never demanded more time to finish a test. I don't kick doors in when I'm told the restaurant is closed.

I also think it's healthy to inherently think you deserve privileges, at least the exercise of them, if they've been earned. I might be misunderstanding how it's speaking to privileges in the definition, but I think everyone should presume an inherent deserving of *something* related to the universal nature of experience and connectivity. Certainly legally you have entitlements bestowed upon you.

More abstractly, I feel entitled to a certain kind of attention or recognition. I work. You work. We all work. Some of us work because we have to, hate it, and the idea of not working suggests many significantly worse layers of hell to fall into. Some of us work on things we like in really hardcore ways that may sometimes detract from what we like about it. Some of us work with the idea of what more work there is to be done and others with the idea that they never want to work some kind of way again. Surely we've lost or so degraded our sense of what's worthy of attention that it's all but obliterated our ability to act upon the necessary entitlement to basically survive. Anti-maskers should be literally bitch-slapped.

I think whether or not I get the attention or recognition for what I do, I'm pretty aware of my motivations and strategies I adopt. I know that I go about life in a way that often rubs certain kinds of people the wrong way. Namely, the ones who either think they do anything less or anything more than I do. I choose a degree of aggression, zest, and antagonism, and find myself fairly well moving the needle. They, perhaps patient, polite, and tight-lipped, are wondering just where the hell I get off. But, I can only speculate so much. I make a habit of leaning into the things I enjoy, as I'm perfectly aware of the otherwise "even" deadness space I've existed in for long periods of time.

Entitlement, like all mere adjectives or judgements, isn't inherently bad or good. It's whether you're aware of how it manifests, whether it can be tempered, weaponized, or tucked between things. For me, I tuck it between the amount of work I do and the spirit of openness with which I explore ways and whether I may choose to change how I go about expressing myself. I believe you if you levy the charge. I'm then entitled to as many questions as I see fit in examining how you came to it. And I never disagree with how you feel about it.

I hope your sense of entitlement makes you fight viciously for what you've earned. I hope you have a sense of it at all. I hope if you're watching mine manifest in ways that don't jive or you see to be a problem, you're willing to spend as much time owning what you have to say about it as I am.

[912] The Hunt

I think it is exceptionally rare, if not nearly impossible, to do anything in “light switch” fashion. The two ideas that embody light switch change coming to mind quickest regard brain injury a la Phineas Gage, and the phrase in ceasing drug use immediately as going “cold turkey.” Perhaps the addict relays a moment of epiphany in which it became almost mystically possible to stop. Perhaps most of us need something tantamount to a rod shooting through and eliminating the most objectionable parts of our brain.

I feel generally stable. This has not always been the case. When I am unstable, I can usually trace it back to a handful of pretty common or familiar things that, presumably, would destabilize most. I might be hungry, tired, or physically exhausted. It's not really a secret that when I donate plasma, that day I shouldn't be battling the heat with a power tool. I know Tuesday when I forget to pack a lunch, I'm going to be grumpy at 11:30 as I anticipate eating. In a fleetingly small amount of days, I sleep wrong, and perhaps there's a knot I've worked my head, shoulders, and back into that creates a tightness and unease I can't really shake. Those are all simple and anticipated.

I can still work myself up about all that I wish to do and be. I often point to other people's inconsistency or intransigence as “my” biggest hurdles. I reflexively frame issues as a series of any one person or group of individuals who appear, at least superficially, to have more to say and control over my fate than me. It's a long road to travel in attempting to discern where and when this may be the case. I may know that I can't save the planet replacing my light bulbs and recycling, but after I learn my statistical insignificance, do I continue to do so in service to the larger narrative? Do I more deliberately inform my conservation efforts going forward, or give up, hopeless and confident my example does not matter?

The story I tell myself at that point is an existential one. Am I seeing any light but one shining on the mockery and futility of my effort? Am I discovering creative ways to plug into and revolutionize what needs to happen at the macro scale? Can I parlay my individual effort into a series of compounding consequences and create something no one expected or could originally conceive? Just what does it mean for me to exist as someone who wants to recycle their cans or save a little energy one bulb at a time?

For me, every moment is something of an existential crisis. Whether I'm negotiating whether to wash dishes, write this, or find the steady and determined mind to knock out a more laborious task, answering “just who I am and why” is feverishly knocking, insisting to be let in and entertained. The different parts of my personality answer the door and generally keep the question satiated and engaged.

Well, how? Why?

How I've come to understand myself is an evolutionary process. I had to first discover what it meant to be embodied. I had to test and find my limits. I had to baste in the anxiety and angst of whatever I deemed to be a crisis. I had to figure out what the words I used to understand myself actually meant, for me, and how others employed them too often against me. I'm still doing so. It's a never-ending adaptation to whatever being presented to you in any given moment. It's work, but before it's work it's an awareness that it's the only real kind of work you ever have to do. Evaluate your circumstances, consider choices, make peace with the consequences of those choices.

One of the reasons the mental health discussion forms around the trauma experienced in childhood is that child brains don't have the capacity to engage that process. What does a child know about a sexually exploitative environment? How can a child be said to be responsible for their choices when we know their brains aren't even completely formed until their 20s? How can a sense of “resolution” for a “choice” be determined when accurately determining what you're even made of is functionally impossible?

Now, you get to your late 20s, 30s, and beyond, and perhaps for the first time you're even presented with the opportunity to “really adult” or “responsibly evaluate” your circumstances. Surely, we're modern creatures, so the wisdom of different cultures, schools of thought, and science are introduced early if not arbitrarily. Does merely teaching about slavery or The Holocaust mean you'll never behave like a psychopathic Stanford prison guard? Obviously not. The lessons of history have to be worked for, not merely handed over. I just completed the series Human Planet, and not a single tribe member said they inherited that day's meal from their ancestors. The knowledge of what to do had to be put in practice, the same risks taken, and the same respect for the nature of the task given. Or, you die.

I realize something in this moment about why I get anxious when I don't feel busy. Somewhere deep, I know hard work is the antithesis of death, so even superficially, too much comfort is synonymous with being dead. I don't wanna be dead yet, so every moment my subconscious screams I'm dying kicks up some butterflies and tension. Some level of work needs to be done, no? Add another reason I'm thankful for writing and the peace I'm able to make examining what constitutes my anxiety. It's not irrational nor uncontrollable, it's just complicated and hidden, and you never know what you watch or hear that's going to provoke, obscure, or illuminate.

Once again I return to probably the most repeated line in my head from Waking Life about what is the most universal human characteristic; fear or laziness? I'd have to look back through blogs, but I pretty readily answer laziness even if my first instinct might have been fear. I view the vast majority of everything good in my life as an extension of what I've been willing to work for. I think the narrative of that work is highly susceptible to kidnapping by self-aggrandizing and lazy understandings of “just who I am, and why.”

I don't think the entitled insurrectionist dipshits are afraid. I think they're too lazy to do the work of accepting how bad they really are or how good they could really be. That's when you find fear. That's when the reasonable fear of the consequences can take hold, when you embody the work and feel what's missing in threads of fabric it takes to weave together existence. I'm afraid of myself when I decide to grant myself the license to retaliate or methodically target. I know what I'm capable of. I'm afraid I get the money and power and control, and too comfortably slip into a kind of ambivalence about the values that drive my working ethos. Those are good things to worry about, stay mindful of, and bring up in conversation often so you don't turn into a rotting mockery of your potential.

The work of survival is endlessly obscured by modernity. You're situated, too comfortably, by default. I've never been hungry a day in my life. When my air conditioner breaks, I can burn fuel and sit in my car, or meander about a Wal-Mart. We're also given psychologically pacifying (another mockery) narratives about our place in the universe and heavenly desserts in spite of our abject sin. Why work when I can simply believe in the guy willing to take the crucifying for me? Why conserve what was given to me by right? Why learn for myself what can be easily recited over and over and never put into any real practical practice?

This is how I've come to understand my responsibilities and get excited about the nature and purpose of my work. When I say I'm a “spite engine,” it's my deep resentment towards people unwilling to get off their ass or ask the next question or allow themselves to feel the deathly consequences. I don't have to know what's in your head to see whether or not you're doing the work. I know how your entitlement manifests as you unfairly latch onto the meals the workers provide. Because we have so much food, we've severed our connection to all of the intangible nourishment that comes from pursuing protein for days and maybe leaving empty handed. Maybe this is the fascination modernity has with hiking and climbing, trying to reawaken the necessary danger that doesn't really exist anymore. Of course, it does exist, it's just manifesting “over there” and “beneath” us who've insulated so well. We may not physically starve to death, but there's an undeniable hunger and unquenchable thirst.

[910] Shoot The Moon

What's new? Well, my buddy got the license we need to open up an independent counseling shop so as to become vendors for probation referrals and the ability to bill Medicaid. If we organize this properly, with even 5-10 clients each, I could be richer than I've ever been in a shorter amount of time than I thought would be possible without a dozen businesses running simultaneously. So, that's potentially good news.

My girl wants to do something “dramatic” to change the pattern of get along for two weeks, bicker about something incredibly small until she's driving back to Kentucky to reset, get along for two weeks, on and on. Does that mean her continued stay anywhere remotely close to me or the state? Who knows? So, that's potentially bad news.

 

I'm tempted to defer to one of my favorite stories about the monk who continually asks, “Is that so?” about the various circumstances of his life and things people bring to him. You might consider me in a “cold” or “calculating” space about how I attempt to organize the next few weeks and months of my life.

 

I've taken a lot of things for granted in my life. While I'm not keen to be shamed about “privileges” with a Woke Wokerson, I do concede that I'm a legacy of a level of work and care that a great many people do not get. I've felt obligated to match, to whatever degree I can, the stories about what my grandparents did or dad has done, in service to providing and creating the circumstances for me to be where I am. The details matter. The culture that undermines or protects what's there matters.

 

All of my grandparents' children were able to fend for themselves, get through school, retain jobs, and 3 out of 4 figure out how to get acceptable partners. They've still fallen prey to unprocessed trauma and regrets. They've still managed to steal from and resent each other. I certainly don't know the details of the households my grandparents were brought up in, but I know if they're even half of the kind of people I've experienced them to be and that my dad has talked about, they would never accept the kind of behavior I've been witness to from their offspring. That said, I still can't shake how my uncle was allowed to speak so shiftily towards my grandma.

 

Either way, for all of my privileges or “born with its,” I could have, by default, had more. I could have started this cousin-fuck Indiana experiment with the money from the sale of my grandparent's stolen house. My mega-rich second cousin and aunt could have thrown me the money they wipe their assess with to make it so I wasn't spending 22 hours a day working and navigating the exploitation of mall leases and politics. Money I don't feel entitled to, mind you, and worked to account for other ways. The details matter. The culture that undermined or protected my efforts mattered.

 

I've stated on more than one occasion that were it not for my dad, there's an out-sized chance I would be in jail. At 33, in 9 days, a person who has demonstrated he can work high-stress, high responsibility jobs, build a little homestead, and otherwise be “boring” enough to keep an earnest TV habit, it might be easy to dismiss the idea of the wanna-be hood rat and violence I was itching to ratchet up. I don't continue to obsessive compulsively count, tap, collect, read, or literally physically and mentally exhaust myself, routinely, trying to satiate my underlying need to be recognized and cared for. Anyone who's listened to me for a prolonged drunken rant on a patio or been stuck with me in the car as I went on about lady woes can be confident my mind is begging for the excuse to spin out at all times.

 

I wrap a lot up into the things I say. I'm the running dialogue of my experience and effort in the world. I don't expect to be “perfectly understood.” I don't think, especially if you are unwilling or unable to provide the means of doing so, I'm capable of wrapping my head around any given individual. I see trends. I pick up on choice phrases and body language. I know history rhymes. That is often more than enough to navigate most people most of the time. That is how I can wiggle my way out of the worst consequences of my propensity to give myself over to anyone I've deemed “individual enough” or perhaps back in the day “on the level.”

 

The first part of the work of appreciation has been to do the actual work. Speak to it. Repeat it. Remind yourself of the standard and compare it to what's come before. It's important for me to know who I am when no one is around or who I've been when I've been awash in personalities. It's important for me to know the nature of my compulsions and utilize their power without getting burned. My stomach still drops with anxiety, and now I can deliberately meet that with another TV show, a meal, or a smaller task than the capitulation to pretend I'm addressing all of the drama and hatred I have for the world by over-achieving or doing “everything” in the moment. I'm lucky that I've built a repository of reminders on how to engage temperance and not a list of excuses for laziness. 

 

It's not lost on me every single detail it has taken to enjoy a measure of comfort or “stability,” and even still, I have to work and convince myself there's anything remotely stable or there to enjoy at all! I need a specific kind of spreadsheet that lights up green even if the numbers are the same on the one I normally use. I need to use the microwave and stove more than 3 times in a row before it clicks just how much food there is I don't have to drive and overpay for.

 

You know what I can do? I can build a house, and work DCS or casework or counseling, and pull up 200 saplings, and spend entirely too much money on shitty cars or gas, and eat out too much, and buy concert tickets, and tools, and find, transport, and carry heavy free shit, and build a fence and room and fire-pit-turned-pond, and watch 1188 days worth of TV shows and movies, and fuck nearly every day! I'm a fucking beast. I can also remain open, mostly tempered, and willing to learn more, do more, and spend or sacrifice the comfort on hand if it will help you. I've got plenty enough going on in my own head and that I enjoy doing with my time if you won't convey how you wish to better relate to it.

 

My friend, who needs brain surgery and couldn't find a ride so it had to be rescheduled, asked me yesterday what I wish I had if I had to start all over. She wants land, to be off-grid, enjoys camping, and is dealing with her own obligations with kids and work. I told her I wished I had more help. My situation struggles with the same cultural tides that are begetting fascism and learned helplessness. The faux obligations, lack of civility, and broken concepts of truth or dignity pervade at all levels. People don't believe in the future, their agency, or that there are creative and incredibly tough ways in which you build things to believe in. They don't trust themselves to be satisfied, at any point, in the process which precludes their ability to enjoy the ride. They've been met with the same crickets or betrayals in service to their ideals as I have. They're taking for granted as many things as they can claw away from their circumstances.

 

I continue to ride the begrudging gifts bestowed upon me. I want to enjoy the ride and know that if it all stopped this instant, I'd still be a king, I'd still be full, and I'd still be hyper-aware of the difference between what was “me” and was given to me to work with. I'm not feeling guilty over the dozen things yet undone. I'm not ashamed I like TV or just spending time chilling with chill people. I appreciate that immediately I'm prepared to throw on the work gloves and not stop until the job is done. I've reflexively thrown myself into months of debt to help check off things on the to-do list. My baseline is to accidentally overdo it when I'm not paying attention or practicing the patient, calculated testimony about what I've done, am doing, or plan on. If I want the world, I want to ensure it's balanced enough so that the pull of the moon remains a mere wobble.