[1102] Once And For All

I really need to talk and think "big picture" right now because this day in isolation is proving several orders of frustrating.

I'm about to hit about half as much as I typically make a year in debt. The largest portion of that is the investments I'm making in grant writers, fundraisers, and the infrastructure to keep my website, insurance, and credentials up to date/alive. Thinking about my needs in isolation, there's hardly a grant that could be granted that wouldn't cover my expenses for a year easy. Whether I invested $500, or $5,000 in landing a decent grant, in theory, I have little to worry about with enough exposure and submissions. It's the same story for an individual who might donate or securing funds from a corporation. I hit 30K, I'm not just out of debt, but the rest of the bills are paid all year.

Well, you ever hear about how hard it is to find good help? Even, it turns out, when you're paying $40/hr or, considerably more than $40/hr. For reasons I'm sure I'll contemplate the rest of my life, I can neither be too specific nor too communicative about what I need. If I use one word, they'll hear another. If I use 3 pages of words, they'll arc their head like a dog and ask for "more." I don't know what part of my insane younger self thought he wanted to be at the center of dozens of people's terrible interpretations of words, but some days it gets to such an overwhelming degree, you want to flush it all and just go fuck off at a factory or something.

Not a day goes by that I don't hear some horrifying mental health statistic. We're, broadly, getting dumber, less equipped, less accountable, and we somehow pair this with "positive jobs report" numbers while our psychological well-being is mercilessly dragged through raging gaslit fires. I have a company now poised to live or die on the back of our perception and goodwill as it pertains to what is, literally every day, described in numbers of tortured lonely souls, and I feel at constant battle to be allowed to address or work to make things the tiniest bit better for those in my orbit.

My state doesn't want anyone to get better. Insurance doesn't want anyone to get paid. "Competitors" want the same clients dependent and afraid and ignorant. Other do-gooders and "passionate" people passive-aggressively lay claim to the dignity and insight of their particular bubbles and ways of conforming to suspiciously blind norms. Everyone I talk to, even when they're not trying to, uses a tone that says something like, "You're new, or not enough, or not credentialed or organized or equipped in the way that suits me." I feel like I'm fighting for acceptance in a field that I've got years of demonstrated exceptional competence in. It creates a very cognitively dissonant place.

Am I a punchy little naive start-up looking for a big-brother sponsor and to have my hand held? Like, no. I'm a social work professional who's materially influenced and changed people's lives routinely for years who just wants the bare minimum "keeping the lights on" in return, even for the first few fucking years! This despite the personally-experienced level of need observed and engaged that should allow for more than subsistence living. Your extra year and a half in a Master's program or social work school specific degree isn't decades of experience and competence creating an obscene gulf between us in how we might relate or help each other.

It's a multi-layered "attack" on what I'm trying to do. There's the practical with taxes, start-up fees, online infrastructure and credentialing costs. There's the personal, with my business partner an almost perfect stress machine dealing with his severely injured wife, or battles with his school and the licensing board. There's whatever you want to make of my own head and things that make me want to pop. There's the language and communication barrier where everyone I speak to has to be online or mostly via text and email, and no matter what gets said, they find a way to capitalize on it in a way that has me spending more and getting less, or nothing at all. And then even the good-natured genuinely capable can't help but occupy overt and increased skepticism that tends to cripple the path towards a problem getting solved verses a path that doesn't wish to be bothered.

In any given moment where the weight and racing thoughts about all of that rush in, freeze me, or feel way more persuasive and compelling than waiting or looking for the next opportunity, it's about as bad as I can ever feel without being sick. Even looking at the next thing that might cause any level of stress feels unbearable. So, you can pull back and watch TV or fuck around on a guitar. Good luck in that moment not shitting on yourself for not powering through the discomfort. That's, of course, unfair and unrealistic and unnecessary. Tell that to how you feel anyway. Also, be by yourself pretty much all the time. Then, all of the disconcerting words and feedback exist as a kind of fogginess and extra steps removed from ever getting resolved.

I could pack what I do or what I've done into 4 sentences appropriate for an elevator. I'll have to write a fucking book or ten about the infinitely infuriating process, barriers, and human condition that makes remotely achieving anything feel like a fucking miracle. It's not one step forward and two steps back. The paradigm isn't backwards or forwards. The paradigm is now and whether now is aware of how to make now actualized into one moment over another. Every moment I'm trying not to sound disorganized, incomplete, exhausted, or like a cunt because I think you've just taken advantage of me or wasted my time, suggests I have no fucking idea how to make now better than it feels.

I'm gonna try again tomorrow. I'm gonna fuck around with my shows and instruments tonight. I'm gonna keep waiting and seeing if I can meet or talk to people that don't complicate things more than they need to be. Thankfully, if I know nothing else, it's that I'm at least as wrong and full of shit in my despotism as "they" are in their ignorant optimism or pride in how they engage me. Their persistent, almost motivated failure it seems, is all the more evidence that I shouldn't act like them against myself. Don't I trust they're blind cunts? Don't I trust they'll be sly and calculated in their denial about trying to fuck? Of course I do. I'm inviting them in to do so. Why react when you get proven right with anything but joy and confidence? I mean, that's obviously an incredibly dangerous path to self-deluded hell, but you know what I mean. Of course, you don't.

Do you have any idea how much I don't want to be right? I think an obscene amount about the idea of, "You can be right, or you can be happy." It's one of those lines that has never left me and nags like an old crow. I want to be wrong about so much shit that keeps proving true in the most consistent and painful ways. I wish I could trust the things I feel I need to exist in a healthy mental place, but I need to doubt, aggressively so, or I can't function. I will literally lose too much money or people to work with in any capacity if I trust. That's fucking crazy to me.

If I treat the environment I'm working within as though it actually cares about people, you know what happens? I get targeted and taken advantage of. I behave as though problems are there to be solved, therefore, in violation of the reality, I become their problem. I get lectured and condescended towards. I get "good luck" sentiments. I get gossipped about. This shit isn't conspiratorial either, word makes it back to me. How could you not? I stick out. I fight. I'm angry. I don't give a fuck how you feel if you're doing dumb wrong shit that conflicts with the smart good shit I'm attempting. I illicit that look and pause and exasperated airy sentimentality that really does not wish to be bothered, but doesn't want to be blamed as more complicit or indicative barrier than support.

I have exactly 5 relationships in my entire life that have maintained a fairly equitable investment/output kind of dynamic that weren't otherwise mostly superficial acquaintances. Whether we're talking literally financially, or emotional work and time to maintain. 9 out of 10 people in my life cost me money, will gleefully draw from my time to their own ends, ignore the work of maintaining their own sense of balance or mental health, or will levy endless commentary or judgment about me that I don't, or at least didn't feel or return about them as it was raining in. This most often manifest as silence as I'm expected to deal with whatever the fallout becomes of their negligence.

And I aspire to counsel people in situations where 9.5 of the people in their lives are pulling the same shit, and the shivering half of their own self that they can still recognize and respect feels as dark, overwhelmed, and made to feel as crazy as I described feeling above. Sounds like a fucking party.

One of my clients called and texted several times, waking me up too early, to freak out about information I'm not inclined to share with her PO, and am also bound my confidentiality regardless. After calming down, she brought up speaking to her friend who she has implored to start speaking with me, especially after I said I'd hold sessions for free. Don't you know? Her friend said she "definitely" would, but it might take a few weeks because she has doctor's appointments and yada yada yada. My client doesn't understand her friend isn't going to call me. My client is my client because she genuinely wants to get better. Her friend is 9 out of 10 people who pretend they don't have an hour to sort themselves out, at least a little bit, one day, between the moment you find out about it, and the weeks or years you'll spend pretending it doesn't exist.

I let myself suffer unduly for about a half hour before I started writing. That's practice. I identified things about me that reflexively catastrophize and conceptualized my fledgling feeling effort. I broadened the scope. I denoted the indifferent or impartial patterns people follow and depersonalized the particular cunts who drew focus. I feel a little better than when I began. Shouldn't we all get really good at our own version of this? And is it not existentially right to pursue a way to sustainably help people to keep practicing if 1 in 4 have a substance use disorder?

[1088] Stay Humanism

There's two ideas I want to explore. The first is a swing back around to the word "entitlement." The second is the various layers involved with "cynicism." They're both in quotes to emphasize how much I hope to transcend any initial connotative assumptions that might already be swimming through your veins. They are the first layer on the feeling wheel, and we need to find the core.

Sometimes, I like to load up my Amazon cart and see what everything I think I want to buy would amount to after shipping, financing, used "like new," and proper quantity. This round was just shy of $3,000. It was mostly books, some tools, and a couple high-priced toys I have no genuine need for. I couldn't help but think to myself how "small" or "undramatic" it felt to look at the price tag.

I've pulled the trigger on a loaded up cart in the past. I still like and play with everything save a couple of the wood-working table equipment pieces. When I pan out, I think how "easy" it should have been for me to afford everything I've got now, and the next things I aspire to. I'm 35. My last job, when I played with an inflation adjustment calculator, would have been worth $350,000 a year in 1973 at my current salary. The ethic, respect, and priorities have massively shifted culturally, and I'm just along for the ride.

In a simple way, I feel "entitled" to whatever book, tool, or increasingly expensive music toy I could ever want for the rest of my life. I feel my output certainly warrants more than I've received, but moreso, what I want isn't about lavish spending and excess more than it's about creative potential and expression. I don't feel guilty about what I want. I don't feel like I squander what I have. I don't feel I demonstrate a lack of appreciation or respect. I want "more."

I want more out of myself. If I can handle the drama of dozens of families and help put fires out again, give me more. If I can direct a budget to equitably pay people and grow a company, rack the dollars up. If I can cram more good habits into every one of my days because I've designed efficient systems or transitioned away from things I could train and allocate, please, leave me to my music and travels. It's been many years of nonstop "first-world poor" living standards. I'm nowhere near equitable amounts of time spent properly doing, enjoying, or exploring what I want with the simultaneous headspace to do it.

I'm obligated. At some level, if I don't pursue or have something like my own business or some challenge like navigating the impossible circumstances I've been, that's first and foremost on my mind. I just watched American Symphony about Jon Batiste who said music is a spiritual practice to him. That's what "searching" or "fighting the ignorant cunts" is for me. When I see what exists and how people use it or get used, there's little else I can think about than what I might do to exist in a more just paradigm. I'm not going to bitch and chainsmoke. I'm not going to disappear into a video game. I'll never capture it in a song. Every day I run through some dream vision of getting to bite a horrible person's throat out (or the metaphorical equivalent) of putting an evil dumb cunt in their place.

I know some of this is prompted by the perpetual injustice I felt growing up, but if anything, actually growing up as taught me the truer extent of the program my mom was on. It didn't have to be hell back then anymore than you have to needlessly suffer today. But I don't think we get that message nor trust ourselves to find the paths to which we're most suited or destined. I don't think we get the message because I see the same error perpetuated by my most intelligent friends, and by every client I can't literally push over a cliff because there's nothing left they need but a boot in their ass to fucking fly.

I think I know what I'm worth. I think I know "at least" what I'm worth. I think it's more than a shed, for as much love as I have for it. I think it's more than working as a food delivery boy. I think it's more than double any salary I've ever been offered. I think if you were me and heard as many well-wishing and thank you thank you thank you and "hand to god" sentiments as I have, you'd be on the verge of having your ego take over completely. Thankfully, I don't really trust people. I trust work. I trust sacrifice. I trust what I see you spending your time on. I trust the silence you offer in service to the things I care about.

When you embody a level of "entitlement" you can start to develop a form of "confidence." Think "confidence man." You know the trick. The more you practice and normalize it, the easier it is to pretend it's not a trick. Whether you're a hapless overgrown child trying to guilt trip your next lonely 30-something target, or a salesman of any type, you spin the same tale. You hook an emotion, and you twist it around your ends. The means by which you do so justify themselves. It's built into a capitalist ethic. It's built into smarmy pickup advice. It's laid on aggressively when you're wielding unearned power.

It makes my stomach drop to imagine behaving like that. Like I'm going over the hill on a roller coaster. There is no end to the drop when you start to behave that way. There is no corner of hell you won't explore. And here we might start knocking at thoughts about "cynicism." It's where I feel many, many people are operating from. Doubt me? How many millions vote for fascism, murder, rape, etc. Nothing but faithful cynics pretend to "see the world as it is" and "just follow orders" by locking step in service to behaviors that make the worst seem inevitable.

Cynicism provides a sense of "freedom." Elon Musk is cynically letting people treat Twitter like 4chan. The fancy fairytale ends justify the means. When what you're selling no one is buying, you get airy and philosophical, pretentiously bludgeoning your point down unreceptive holes. I am not free, very explicitly, to conduct myself in every way I've imagined to achieve my goals. The less I respect that merciful boundary, the less I'll have anything left of myself to recognize or respect.

I think I've done a lot of important work that ripples in ways I'll never know. I think I don't believe in karma, but I do know everything is fundamentally connected to everything else. My "success" or "luck" is intimately involved with the "hope ripples" or "work ripples" I've created so far. When I watch a musician play with every other musician under the sun, plugging into the infinite wave meeting you when you need it, it can serve as a constant visceral reminder if you let it.

I'm about to embark on soliciting funds. I'm not going to sell anyone on the idea that they should give me and what I'm doing money. I'm going to talk about my ideals. I'm going to explore their questions and concerns. I'm going to dip into the well of hope and sincerity that everyone wishes they could believe and take a dip in a little deeper than they do. I haven't cynically given up on the previous ways I've tried to get up and running. I'm evolving my approach because I either believe in the feedback, my work, my potential, and my message, or I don't.

I practice believing in my message through writing. I practice hope in myself every time I encourage Hussain or hire a new Upwork person or "happily" choke down the costs of keeping business requirements up and running. When I feel I'm coming from the right place in how I speak to the "How do I get money" question, then I trod off down that path. I may have a distaste for speaking too often about the "mission" and "values" in the gross normal-empty-speak way people care to hear about what you're doing, but that doesn't mean there isn't a real mission or value I'm looking to espouse.

Fuck, just working out that contradiction is rough on its own. The fact that our language has been so hijacked by so much bullshit that has in turn been rewarded makes it incredibly hard for me to parrot. I don't want to be anything like what exists, but I can't be so divergent no one bothers to engage or finds themselves trusting at all. It's hard to overstate how much this has contributed to "idle" time regarding how to build a proper foundation.

I do need to guard against cynical thoughts as it pertains to assumptions about other people. It'll be hard to listen to the fumbling excuses why a successful business can't find the money, care, or concern to contribute. I'll reflexively think to myself about how much I've spent in service to my friends or dad and think, yeah, fuck you buddy and whatever your irrational prejudice or assumptions. The wealth is out there, and ever-more concentrated each day. You think the ones who cling to it for dear life give a fuck about my values? I don't, but some of them at least want to look like they do.

[1023] Waiting For My Wake Up Call

Something’s not right. It’s not “wrong,” but it’s definitely not right. I can’t seem to figure out how to get moving. I can’t seem to find the drive to push the outer limits of the experiment. I can’t find the fucks to give and barely discover the focus. I envision what I might otherwise be doing or what will happen when I arrive, and instead, well I’m doing this, this time. I might just as well go to sleep, start a show, or find myself vacuuming spider webs that never bothered me for the last 9 months they’ve been there. I’ve been keen to theorize this has something to do with “undiagnosed ADHD.” I’m beginning to suspect there’s something darker and more insidious going on.

I just returned from a comedy show. I saw another one the night before with my dad who came down the 3-hour trip to visit. At the show tonight, the audience was very chatty. Although Joe Pera was encouraging answers to questions he posed to the crowd, one woman took it upon herself to share a mini monologue during a punchline. I’m absolutely fascinated by the complete lack of self-awareness when something like that happens. More to what I think is echoing in the back of my head though, her doing that is almost the norm. It’s an abysmal and disrespectful norm, like so much that modernity has presented for us to choke down, but you don’t really know if you’re going to hear the person you paid to see more than the assholes they’ve attracted to the room.

I feel like I hate this in an outsized way because I was not the person going to 65 shows a year. I might have made it to 2, more likely 1, if any at all. I didn’t have the expendable income to just write off a negative experience. I might have saved and sacrificed for a while to get a ticket at all, let alone one with a decent view. Then I get drunk bitch chiming in? Her selfish interjections stealing my invitations to connect and laugh? I might lose my goddamn mind, especially if I haven’t felt like I was connecting to myself or anyone, artist or otherwise, for a long period of time.

I’ve griped about having to tell idiots to shut the fuck up in every 3^rd movie. The people at the show yesterday weren’t any better in terms of staying quiet or paying attention. Literal conversations going on all around. Drunk over-blasting discussions about the bill. It’s fucking trashy and embarrassing and it’s this kind of stuff I think portends the end of man.

I don’t know if I’m more dangerous when I don’t know what I’m doing or believe that I do. I don’t have any real and proper compulsions, but I can savor a moment that registers as an excitable opportunity for change or chaos. I have so many tasks and chores and dreams that feel like so much plodding and errant hole digging. “Any word on the counseling business?” The refrain from onlookers after I get tricked by the word “paid.” I don’t know, I can spend money to build a website and offer text-based super-low-priced counseling. I can spend money and look for a lead generator. I can spend money and outsource outreach or access pools of people. Or, I can wait until the only seemingly remotely feasible way to get paid, even meagerly, long-term is being contracted.

It all feels like wheel-spinning. Meanwhile, I have a job allowing me to live as close to my “extravagant” lifestyle as I’ve dreamed so far, but it’s proving as unfulfilling and incomplete as I always knew it would. Just because you win the lottery doesn’t mean you have a purpose, and I’ve won many lotteries. As the parade of “general audience” members continues to suggest, even the notion that I might “escape” into the world of persistent viewer/laugher/analyzer is a farse because the attention will always be drawn back to the loudest cawing asshole in the room.

I feel myself get tired when I get home. I don’t want to do 10 minutes of notes. I don’t want to fill out another reference survey. I don’t want to put the paperwork together to apply for another empty well-wishing not-so-promise that some organization “loves what we do” and “wants to work with us” but won’t be available for a year to “maybe” pay and only if we meet “specialized criterion” that will change with the wind. I don’t want to get up and drive to Bedford tomorrow to be rushed into conversations about nothing to nowhere. I don’t want to do anything right until the moment I do, but can’t. The weather was brilliant today. The first time I’ve felt I wanted to break down the pallets since the last time when it, of course, rained indefinitely weeks ago. I was on my way to Indianapolis. Even if I wasn’t, I haven’t fixed my water, so when I get immediately sweaty and grungy, I get to sleep in that and take it to work? I get to drive to Bloomington for Planet Fitness fresh-shit-in-the-air showers?

I’m feeling more tired in the way that has nothing to do with the physical. I watch as too-driven Hussain tells me he’s not sleeping and repeats “this has to work” with regard to the counseling business because he, like all of us, has his own debt and bills to pay. I gripe about 2 to 4 paychecks of debt as I spend freely to rock out and laugh, he’s 200K for school, has a mortgage, and a wife with a decent desire to spend. He said recently that he was experiencing heart trouble as he’s constantly stressed out and arguing with the school or companies he works for. He’s like me when I started the coffee shop thinking 20 steps and years ahead, and letting what hasn’t happened act as a weight or unrealistic anchor on the future.

I feel like I’ve never really wanted anything that complicated. Before I had the opportunity to be infinitely humbled, I just wanted to work. I wanted to work and get recognized and rewarded for all the work I was doing. School led me to believe that grades indicated something special or important, saying nothing about the safety it afforded me at home. When I thought I had a friend group, the goal was time together. That turned into an endless series of resentments. In relationships I feel myself occupying that “How can I help?” roll, whether it’s spending money, physically working on something, or just there to listen indefinitely to what most often amounts to a problem that’s not going to get fixed. I don’t know what to trust most of the time, and it’s leaving me very disoriented and dispirited.

Work ethic doesn’t mean just or persistent reward. It means exhaustion, exploitation, or maybe hurting yourself. When you connect with so many “friends” you have to run that experiment for 20 years before you maybe luck out and find ones who haven’t succumbed to their mental health disorders or fallen in with all manner of crazy on planet Also-Alone while left to their own devices.

What was the point? I find myself constantly asking. I look at all the crap I have in my little house. What was the point of buying these books I’m not reading? Why do I have a sewing machine? Why do I have 4 guitars and seven other instruments? I have woodworking equipment I’ve never opened. I have cooking tools I’ve used once or twice. I’m existing in this persistent fantasy where these are all tools I’m able to use in a consistent and convenient way. You know, the future where I’m meal prepping and have counter space and water that’s more water than copper silt. The future where I’m playing my instruments with nothing on my mind than the subtle differences I need to make to get my fingers right and next set of chords memorized. The future where I’ve loaded up on sewing material and spent all day watching videos until I start making custom bags and pockets for the crap I have.

Instead, I’m watching TV. And even with that, I’m not getting all of the episodes renamed so I can continue to build my channels and lists. I’ve gotten so far, and am watching what I’ve gotten. As though completing the task would leave me with too arduous of things to do next and I want it lying in wait as an excuse. You know how I bought a weighted-keys piano? Just so I could learn “A Thousand Miles” about 90% correctly, forget most of it 3 weeks later, and now stare at the piano literally at my feet as I occasionally turn it on to confirm it’s still plugged in and ready to go.

I’m sick. I’m stuck. I’m floundering, hard. I made it real and started flying around to see shows. Oh, shit, well I confirmed that airplanes exist, people are people wherever you go, and you’re gambling if you fly cheap. I’m incredibly happy and thankful I can do and say that, but it’s only a small part of the puzzle. I think people go the other direction and try to make their families or their jobs account for the whole of their puzzle. No one’s got money or time to come with me to the show most often, but they’ve got all the family time, talk, and obligations you could ever ask for. They don’t need me as a friend in the same way that I don’t need a hug from the kids I don’t have.

Maybe I’m an addict. I must be addicted to something that persistently finds the runaround discussion about what I should or could be doing, but can’t seem to be invested and intentional about changing.

[874] Mind's Eyesight

When I was kid, my dad told me about his beer can collection. When he went to college, my grandpa, while cleaning out the attic, found and threw the cans away. My dad said my grandpa thought it was trash, and didn't realize that classic or out-of-business brands of cans would be worth thousands. Even after attempting to tell my grandpa this, he didn't believe him or understand. He came from Yugoslavia and worked on a farm. Trash is trash. You work hard, you make enough to live.

I started collecting Pokemon cards with my dad's story constantly in my head as a kid. I double-cased them, arranged them in importance of perceived value. I didn't fall for the shady trader who ran the card store in town who offered to trade an array of cards for my holographic Blastoise; I had the price guide as well. I wanted to build my little investment just like my dad's beer cans. I got older and had the same impulse when the first run of Marvel Legends came out. I never opened the boxes. I bought entire sets when they were $20 a piece.

Both some of my cards (including a prized Charizard), and all of my Marvel figures have been stolen. My foresight disappeared in an instant to the hands of children who were invited to my dad's house while I was in college, and either meth heads or scammy builders when I was trying to get set up out here.

In my experience, to invest in yourself is a rare character trait. No doubt it's easy to understand how heart-breaking and precarious attempting to protect something like toys or cards for decades can be. There's also no guarantee that what you choose to invest in is going to become as popular as Marvel and Pokemon (though, even in 5th grade, I knew Pokemon was what to go with over Digimon).

When I was 16, I tried to start my own “business” with a friend who knew how to build computers. The idea was to drive to Tiger Direct, get parts really cheap, and sell gaming computers. The internet was less robust, so we found out the hard way that the inventory wasn't exactly lending itself to be worthy of the hour+ drive. The idea failed pretty quickly. I then proceeded to work 2 jobs, practically 3 with band, and continued to do well in school. I dreamed of college as the chance to take my, at the time, insatiable desire to read about religion and science, and let me turn it into something worthwhile. After being immediately humbled by my naivety about what college is, I turned to trying to profit from throwing parties you might see in the movies.

To invest in something is to have an eye on the future. It's the clearest indication that you're trying to control the future. I think it says considerably more about your present. I think it tells you about your genuine morals or values. If you are unable or unwilling to invest, it comes with a predictable set of ethics. You seek the shortcuts. You want the momentary wins and are subjected to the tumultuous whims of your feelings or latest influences. This is where the “conservative” impulse that strikes many people as they age kicks in. They can more easily see what has retained value and why in the midst of constant change or chaos.

I've asked, and continue to ask, people to invest in themselves and me. If you can't extract an extraordinary dollar amount, then I want you to feel the impact of the effort or knowledge. The knowledge that my start-up coffee shop could gross $2000-$3000 a month with all of the constraints and difficulties is extremely important to me. That there's an extra room I built attached to my house, for all of its negotiations, is the exact same kind of extremely important knowledge. When I think I'm too fat or lazy, I walk by a mountain of bricks or ¼ acre of tilled soil.

You can't see it at first, but it is impractical to live under the idea that you can always rely on the paycheck, the benevolence of the powers currently in charge, or what's most familiar. Modernity has done everything in its power to put us into little boxes of what to expect from ourselves. Advertising told us what the future would be. Consumer trends dictated your diet. You consider your relative worth in terms of '”minimum wage” and “benefits.” An endless cycle of call-and-response means you can only find protest and disobedience as the means of redressing grievance instead of infiltration, preservation, or iteration.

The people I hold in the highest regard are the ones who respond to the metaphorical theft of their plans for the future with the reiteration and celebration of the means in which they are going to pursue it anyway. This doesn't mean you have to be deliberately naive about the practical constraints. It doesn't mean you are more or less likely to get anything like what you were after. It simply indicates that your mind is oriented towards what is possible. You're not defeated by default.

When I write, my habit is to shit on people for not acknowledging how defeated they are. You'd be deliberately missing the point if you think I'm upset about not having enough money, not running my little empire, or not finding enough “on the level” people willing to indulge my every fantasy. I see the spark of the divine in so few people, I think it is a catastrophic moral and intellectual failure for those people not feel the guilt or shame that I might associate with the impulse to improve. We still can choose, every moment, to acknowledge all we've been given, either in material resources, or in each other, and explore what that can turn into. Or, we can stay lodged in our asses, hoping the waves of change leave us undisturbed at the bottom.

On my “day off,” I'm about to head on another scrap run. I cut my fingers deep while working on the room extension yesterday. I maintain my “practical” job that barely rewards my ability to play by rules and brings me zero mental peace, even if the value of it might be argued by a client or supervisor. I'd have to construe a very long karmic chain of quasi-bullshit to conjure how it speaks to improving me or my circumstances baring practical throwaway statements about money. I'm never “off,” and I work to keep myself reminded of that. I require a dozen occupations to thrive, leverage, and balance. You do too.

If I came across a post for extremely cheap living circumstances, and all that was being asked of me was to use your tools to tear apart washing machines and list them on Ebay, I'd be sure it was a scam. What the ever-loving fuck would that even mean? You don't want rent? You're not trying to fuck me? You don't want me to stay hush about your meth operation? People don't “get it,” because there's nothing to get. There's no subtext and no secret. It's just a deliberate and methodical practice in service to an ideal of future circumstances. It's physically and verbally practicing respect for that work. We've been given the world and feel miserable because we didn't have to work for it. We didn't have to see behind the scenes or feel the ache of every shovel full of dirt under the convenience store.

No one takes me up on it, besides a few friends and the support we've received from our respective parents because culturally we're defeated. We don't have the language, practice, or habits that lend themselves to actually believing in ourselves. We don't know how much we already have and how much we can do without. We don't have an eye on the future, because we abandoned the responsibility of what it takes to maintain the system. We chose, continue to choose, unsustainable ideas about what's convenient. We choose the “comfort” of what's familiar and “reliable.” We're not choosing to respect what we're made of. We're not choosing to challenge and work with the best parts of what we see in each other. We're left with constant last-minute and desperate attempts to patch holes in a submarine that's been shot through. We're literally contending with fascism.

I'm not saying you absolutely have to move out here, sacrifice your worldly possessions, secretly hate everything about your life and how it's oriented, or that I have the best or most thought out plan for engaging with it all. I am saying that I find it incredibly suspect that one could take from the constant cultural refrains and diagnose the problem as a measure of *too much* respect and understanding in the nature of our problems. I'm saying the hostility and resentment for my offer is a telling sickness. If you think you need to spend more, work more hours, fight the thoughts a post like this plants in your head, or hit a donate button, you're not doing the real work. You don't recognize, you don't respect, and you're giving the future away.

[858] Thrives In Chaos

 This should be brief, I just wanted to mark the occasion. I left the job at Boston Scientific. I woke up after nearly no sleep at 4:54 AM to hop in my coffee van as my truck is full and acting questionable. I park at the BFE end of the lot, show up a minute late, and take my spot on the line. The next-in-line manager wasn't in the building, but I opened with, “If it's going to be a problem my only 3 days a week schedule, I can just leave now or put in my two weeks.” I was assured things would be fine. After an hour and a half our first break to shit from our morning coffee started. I walked up to the floor supervisor and said, “I've been over there for an hour trying to rehearse a good way to say that simply, this job isn't for me. I'll stay if it's going to fuck up your line or if you anticipated me being here, but I have to be honest with myself.” He said he totally understood and that as far as he's concerned, he sees it as I have the whole rest of the day to find something new.

I'm now home, thinking about how happy I was to be driving back, singing, whistling, and preparing to get my new little shed shell built. I'll get to go to a birthday party on Saturday. I'll get to unload my truck and get it dropped off to be looked at. For lack of a better way to say it, I thrive in a certain kind of “chaos.” I don't know where the next appliance is coming from, but I'm betting I have the time, search habits, and inclination to pick it up before the next guy. I don't know how much my truck is going to cost to fix. I don't know how many houses are going to appreciate verses judge my door-to-door pamphlet regarding my hourly rate or DCS concerns. I do know that I've never been served better than when I acknowledge and work through what's most pressing and frequently on my mind, and I'll make no greater impact nor set a better example than in doing so.

Part of me regards the ability to just step out on a job, any job, as something of a privilege. At the same time, I worked a fuck ton for my floor, both in my physical location and acquired tools and my disposition. Part of me was more concerned with going out respectfully than going out at all because I appreciate the difficulties of being short-handed, constantly training new people, and despair that comes with a lack of investment and appreciation for the different skills and people available. At the same time, every several thousand dollar piece of equipment workers make equals 0% more to their bottom line or next paycheck.

I think both socially and psychologically you have to own your effort and have a sight set on the future, or you destroy significantly more than is often spoken to. You have to build the right kind of pressure to succeed where only you can. I need to have the fire under my ass of not having enough savings to ride it out until I'm 100. I need to be mildly stressed about my next good find. I need to weather the injuries (I burned my thumb yesterday), sound a little precarious in my thought process, and continue to show what I built. There's two modes of being, do or don't. I absolutely need to do me. I need to keep demonstrating that I can make decisions in service to what I want and not what I'm putting up with. You do too.

[694] Don't Know How To Hate That

Lately, I've been feeling a little lighter. I can usually only tell such things based on how many times I refrain from cursing students not showing up on time or from leaving my car horn alone. Still, I find I clench my jaw a fair to excessive amount regardless, so nothing's perfect. What's weird, I suppose, is that I'm looking forward to being broke. Like, just broke. In $80 I won't even have credit card debt. I won't be bleeding. I won't have something quite yet in works, but I'll be broke, and that will be basically okay. The last chain I adopted is $95 a month on an installment plan to keep tax assholes out of mine. I could beg for more money. I could pay that in plasma.

I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be an “entrepreneur.” It's kind of a stupid word to me. How I've conducted my life has had exactly nothing to do with a job title or some sort of “free” or “independent” spirit and connotation. I just want what I do to manifest in as great a measure as I can make it. When I was hauling ass at my first jobs, I expected raises and promotions and free shit. People were happy to give them to me. When I was doing my homework before the first bell rang and amassing a small fortune, my first spark as to what I was truly made out of flickered on.

Recently, I've heard accounts of people who knew they were going to be on a famous stage or knew they wanted to become some arbiter of justice or peace after they encountered a hero when they were younger. It's a familiar conviction. What is it about some kids that just know something about who they are or want to be? Why do some stories look like this massive build up of compounding forces until the inevitable finally clicks?

I've also been reading about how randomness effects whether or not people as “talented” or “smart” or “motivated” and “gritty” manage to get anywhere in life. The role that luck has to play is not inconsequential. Born with more money and better contacts? Get a “small million dollar loan?” For me, I had to wake up to the reality of my situation pretty quickly. I have support, but not fail spectacularly and bankrupt everyone around me kind of leeway. As time goes on and people grow comfortable or more precarious, there is no few grand hiding just around the corner to fix a big issue.

So then I think about my lifestyle. I take care of my shit. I live within my means. I guilt trip myself over indulges. I had an older acquaintance tell me that I should take more time to stop and smell the roses. I explained to him that I've already lead a perfectly self-indulgent life, and I could bother to be steeped in meaningful work more often. My concept of what that looks like has changed considerably over the years.

The biggest bit though is how I look with all of my built up potential hanging out in my field. Everything I do I try to treat as a down payment or investment. Money spends easy. Building something that generates it and enthusiasm is considerably harder than anyone bothers to cope with. It's why I hate forums and attempting to reach out. You learn extremely quickly that, well, at this point, literally no one will even take a hand out of the chance to buy into property. I try to wrap my head around what I'd be filled with if I stumbled across a post where someone said, “Here's my field, what can we build in it? You get your half, I get mine.”

When this kind of shit happens, where I'm made to feel, not just “different,” but like out and out wrong or perfectly backwards and annoying for going about things the way I do, I start to mythologize myself. Like, surely, I can't be the only one! I have so many examples of people doing what I want to do well. I didn't conjure this shit from the ether. And what part of any money-making endeavor, particularly if you didn't come from money, is supposed to be easy? No one talks about the last minute trips hauling supplies in the middle of the freezing night on your ill-suited car so you can help get something complete on a time crunch. And maybe while you're doing it, you come back covered in ticks, and you dropped a board on your foot, or shit car decided to die on the ride back. That's what “entrepreneurship” means to me. You do what needs to be done, now. You take it in stride. You ask for as much failure as quick as possible for as little money as you can make it cost you, learn, change, and try again. I'm not “gambling,” I'm barely “speculating,” and I'm not taking any more or less risk than I would with my life as it's managed to look so far.

The “failure” of the things I do comes to mind at this point. You know what a “failed” coffee van venture is? A great work van with a generator and equipment to work with whenever the time comes. The “failed” coffee shop was proof of concept for even shitty business, and a shit ton of supplies that don't just disappear. You know what happens when you buy land and build on it? The value increases dramatically. You know how you live comfortably when you're old so you don't end up working until you're 70 after your pension got wiped out and now you're waxing your poorly conceived business ideas to the enthusiastic “kid" at the bar? You start now. You invest now. You try and fail and work right fucking now. You accept that you're already dead, and your only shot at heaven is this life. If you can do better, do better. Be better. Fix the obvious, then fix the subtle, then double down on the exact right thing you should be doing to get the best out of yourself every chance you get. To the best of your ability and understanding is what you owe yourself. Anything less is death.

What else in life offers that kind of perpetual effort for self improvement? I saw a post on facebook about a famous pianist getting asked why they still practiced at 90. They said, “I think I'm getting better” or something similar. Do people feel that in their day to day lives? Are you practicing and improving and learning something new with your job? It's great if you are, I just have never managed to figure out how to feel the same way about anything I've ever been employed to do. There's usually “the way we do things” which, try as you might, there's usually pretty severe consequences for pushing against too hard.

As I'm rounding 2^nd base on my way to 30, I'm wondering, what's the alternative? If I wasn't navigating the things I am now in service to my desire to own and create with relative freedom and abandon, how else could I have gone about it? No “real job” has provided me the kind of mental security or self-respect to think something as drastic as, “I can totally do this, just for these (x) amount of years, and then my real life begins!” Like, at least I'm killing 2 or 3 birds with one stone in marathoning TV, books and podcasts, and drumming when I do ClusterTruck. It's basically just the thing that interrupts my otherwise attempting to be occupied attention.

A weird hard part about going about things the way I do is the endless waves of bullshit enthusiasm. I don't mean from people who've been following along or friends I know who are up to their own important things. I mean if I post some Maron-esc rant describing the kind of partner or help I need, and then 2 idiots chime in with how cool and motivating I am. Am I? Motivating? You read my story, my begging appeal from my knees, and your take away was 5 empty lines about your new motivation? Don't talk to me about your dreams, work on them. Incorporate them into what I'm doing. Stop wasting our time.

Here too I think about if differences in people just become more pronounced over time, or if they were already huge and there to begin with, but each either succumbs to their particular life forces or not. I could be 5 roommates deep, gaming all day, working IT for IU, have a car payment, and resolved myself to the excessively-average girl in the office after I watch the carnage between the rest of the pack failing with her. That's something I could've done. I could have screamed “fuck it” and went buck wild with my land cash and traveled or gambled or bought something showy under the deep understanding that “you only live once.” I could have catfished lonely OKCupid girls with dyed hair and nose rings into thinking I was deep and super nice and then moved us towards some kind of family unit. Try to be “normal” and “resolved.” It's in trying to imagine myself doing anything else that I start to question “free will.” I literally don't know how else I can be for it to seem even remotely “correct.” When I actually get back to practicing music every day, lose 30 pounds, and find where I left my half-inch of hairline, I'll be like 90% of my best self. It's presumed philanthropy and political engagement that might round out the last 10%. My honest desire and pursuit does most of the work for me already.

My ongoing freak-out concern about time notwithstanding, I have 1 month out of the year I need to work to live as well or better than I have lived since getting out of college. There's no gun to my head that says I need to spend $1800 RIGHT NOW to fix the moving truck. More than half of my yearly bills aren't even due until the fall, or don't necessarily need to be hooked up in the first place. It's just by definition lighter. I've erased variables that work to clench my jaw. I've consolidated the big mess of expenses into a story about number of days and hours, and how I'm going to corrupt those days to fit my agenda even if I'm forced to work in service to someone else's. I don't know how to hate that.

Here seems an important point. How often do I talk about things I hate? My driving force is about moving to a place where I'm as befuddled as I could possibly be in trying to regard my circumstances as anything more than impossible to hate. That's the voice in the back of my head. That's what sees me through drama and broken relationships. People won't talk or help? You can't find a reason to hate ones that will. Want to complain about your job or future prospects? Better get to creating in all this empty space you gave yourself. Better use your former rent money to promote and build. Tired of being surrounded by idiots? I suppose a desert would be more remote, but no one's going to bother you there. I can still find plenty to hate about my circumstances for sure, but it is possible for it to fall away. I can subject myself to a different environment that hopefully breeds the best kind of me. And since no one cares to build it for me, and I can't change for the better without doing so, nothing really matters that doesn't speak to that. Smell the roses? Help me learn how to grow them, and I'll smell the hell out of our effort.

[683] Clear Eyes, Full Hearts

I feel as though I've been corrupted. There's a file in my operating system that's degraded and broken into little pieces floating about the rest of my body causing problems. There's a statement I've made often enough that I truly believed. I write for me. At the same time, what started as a build up of feelings and confusion I had no grasp of was, from the beginning, an appeal to the outside world to help me better explain. As much as I needed to get it out, the sentiments often lived or died by whether or not they were challenged or reinforced. Talk about women in abusive relationships? Easy enough for people to get on board. Make sweeping generalizations about sex or the utility of school, people feel the need to chime in against.

That is, they did. There was a point in my life I could count on some measure of feedback whether it was a “I didn't understand this at all,” or “Hey, you know, you put that in an interesting way.” There were 3 and 4 conversations going on across each other back when you couldn't type as many words into comment boxes. People seemed to feel things with a measure of intensity. They seemed to care, at the very least, about putting their view out there even if in their response a qualifier like, “I know this will get jumped on, but” existed.

There's no denying the difficulties of having a conversation at any level. Text removes all the extras conveyed in person. Language is fairly ambiguous by default. Sensitive topics cause people to respond to their feelings instead of the point raised. People go into conversations with different agendas or may not see the purpose to engage at all beyond a kind of bored antagonism or devil's advocacy. I can't tell you the number of times I've been met with, “but the implication!” of something I've said that acts like a springboard into wild conjecture and anger. Considering how often I attempt to connect or make the appeal, you'd think I'm a glutton for repetition dying for a different outcome in service to insanity.

I thought I wanted to write last night, and then I second guessed myself and tried to sum it up in a status. I was annoyed about the different snippets into the past I had read. There were segments I barely knew what I was getting at. There were fights. There were all of the enthusiastic, “This is what I'm gonna do!” statements, and the day to day realities that cost obscene amounts of money and time. One thing I will give myself credit for, I do try to capture the moment, and I do feel the brunt of what I was getting at remained as true then as it does now.

The problem with not writing last night was a sort of anxiety I felt about saying too many of the same things at too close an interval. The idea that, “I write for me” would be worried about alienating a crowd that rarely if ever still reads, let alone responds, seems to betray the sentiment. I have more to say. I always have something to say. I should be able to write about it every day if I want and not think it's some undue burden for eyes I'm not forcing to be there.

There's layers to this picture though. At a ground floor layer, writing is like eating. I have to do it. I literally will start developing chronic headaches, will actively chase people away from me, and likely slip into what's perhaps been a persistent depressive state reminiscent of growing up. The next level up is my persistent appeal to try as often as it strikes me to get a conversation. It's not “only” attention seeking. It's not meant to be exhausting. It may function as both and it may never register as anything but in the minds of some, but honestly, I'd rather just be in an ongoing conversation. It's how I conceive of the best relationships. We can crack jokes and relate our troubles and give the benefit of the doubt that no line was meant to sound like screaming condescension, if we so choose. The final level is a kind of insidious, kind of experimental one. It's to track the changes in people I know have read me, but refuse to acknowledge they've done so besides indirectly. Even knowing this fact, you won't be able to help yourself.

I have what feels like a giant list of reasons that people wouldn't respond that range from innocent to a measure of what I'd deem, “life threatening.” Every time I think to type it out I wish to push for a greater point about the times and places we inhabit and why instead. I've said a number of times that I can put myself right back in the center of a past fight. I can catch a whiff of elation at the awesome party moments. I can inhabit the deadness of staring at all things as equal measures of pointless, guiding me nowhere, but existing nonetheless as a description. I suppose a positive view of aging is the idea that you can give this sensibility to people by default. I don't actually believe that, but I think it's a comforting cliché of de facto wisdom via time spent, and given the small amount of “rewards” we might achieve in life, everyone stands to feel gratified that they actually matter a little more, if only eventually.

What constitutes a relationship seems to be as much your own understanding of yourself and what you bring to the table, as what exists between you and another person. I've argued for both sides of how life plays out, calling it extremely personal, in that you always retreat back into your own head, and wildly impersonal, in that no one much gives a shit about you and you're at the mercy of incalculable forces. It's two sides of the same coin, but the only way it seems possible to tip the scale in life-affirming ways is to be paying attention. It's to bring your attention not to the circumstances you merely have to survive, but in your shared understanding of a raised problem.

There too, you have layered ways in which you need to speak about “problems.” I'm a fan of saying I don't have real problems. That's more true than not. It doesn't mean I won't call my car breaking down, dead end job, or unhealthy eating habits problems, but it does mean I'm not fleeing for my life, about to get deported, or were born into an era where I would have had to say goodbye to my uncle guaranteed to die from his recent cancer diagnosis now cured.

Keep the idea of describing problems in layers in mind and follow me down another idea. I went into “friendship” as fumbling and naively as I did “love.” I'm Mulder. I want to believe. I want to believe that anyone who meets me at an intellectual level will also meet me at honesty or morality or work ethic levels. I want to believe they know how to get their dispositions best oriented and their time best spent. I figured if we were all laughing at the same horrible jokes the same way, could rally around the same TV shows, could be pushed to do things like climb or hike (in my case) against any real desire to do so besides the company involved, that it signified a kind of “higher” form of being that spoke to kind of the point of existing at all.

So, then what should we ask of our “friends?” I thought, in sharing, in trying to talk, in rooming together, in planning a way to collaborate and save and create that I was doing something “good.” It didn't feel wrong to ask friends to help me throw the coffee kiosk together. I don't feel guilty calling someone to give me a ride when my car dies. I had an open-door policy at the party house and it felt weird if you knocked. Mind you, no one asked me to shed them of their obligation to knock. The first words out of a friend picking me up aren't usually, “Now, where's my gas money?”

Certain things don't really concern us at those levels unless someone's struggling pretty significantly financially or we try to be too familiar with an acquaintance who has a claim for knocking. What about bigger problems? Where does the friend cliff drop off? It's surely not the majority of your old party crowd that would feel obligated to drive you to and from chemo. Maybe you have a cause you support that they'll throw you $20 for, but they're not going to mail out a hundred invitations. We start venturing into how to describe the “problem,” and at what layer people feel comfortable or not contributing to alleviating it.

Say your problem is hard to nail down. Well, then absolutely everyone else is going to be as well. Say they have no regard for their own voice or opinion. Asking for it a thousand times isn't going to make them any more willing to potentially sound foolish. Say you've been painted into a corner of being “impossible” or “difficult.” It's as good a way to be losing before you begin as any.

My “problems” run the whole range of big to small. I have a problem of living in what feels like a dead-end environment. The marginal ways I think I wouldn't is to get into conversations predicated on the things I think about a few pages at a time. No one wants to chime in? Another problem. I have “big” problems in that I want to create a generally large enterprise that, either through conservation and saving, or cornering some market, nets large amounts of money. That begets small day to day problems detailed in past blogs to the problem of rediscovering the underlying truth of what motivates it all after things feel stagnant and oppressive. It all becomes great fun or a testament to human resolve, if you can mange to feel like any humans are involved.

The consequence of having “too much” to say is a level of depersonalization. I have very cold, “rational,” reasons I want the things I do, even if I can feel in real time the comfort that comes with having “enough” to ride it out to the end. Every new pain in a muscle or joint says lay down. Every broken “friendship” over something stupid suggests choosing malicious shortcuts. Every small attempt to assert the dignity of an evidently stark-raving truth of how to respect the individual and time met with censorship and excuses shovels more on the pile of hopelessness.

But if you have a friend. If you have something behind the reflex that likes likable things, then you have a reason. Then you have a plan with a better likelihood of success. Every blog is a reflection of me back to myself. There's only so much “new” I can put in from the media I take in or comments I catch from people I'd otherwise never speak to at length. That was why I started being more deliberate in picking you. That's why you have the chance, nay, the opportunity, to be at the ground floor of anything we may create together. And yet, so far, that seems to only speak to that measure of my initial naivety.

I think the story of why the conversation died is pretty straightforward and alluded to in a few of my recent blogs. “Kids,” with their protected environment and enthusiasm in college just became “adults.” They reverted to “people” who've been developing their capacity for excuses and throwaway placations for centuries. It hurts to dream. It hurts enough to live from paycheck to paycheck without thinking about all of the things you'd rather be spending your time or money doing. I'm struggling to cope with not having a bathroom yet! Well before we begin on my musical or entrepreneurial aspirations. But I think people have humbled themselves with regard to what life has provided. The growing list of their responsibilities hijacked them like it hijacked their parents, like society let itself be hijacked into the emotional out of control roller coaster that begets fascism.

Did that feel like a leap? It's layers though, right? For everything you're paying attention to, there's an infinite amount otherwise you're not. If you don't incorporate the “negative” aspects, the suffering, and the inevitable death of all things into that, it's easy to flow on that river out to sea, dead in ways you never saw coming, that left before you got the chance to fix them. That's why when I'm fed and comfortable watching my favorite show I get anxious. That's why when I can count on both hands almost 3 times! how old I am, I'm constantly reevaluating my time-schedule and peeking back into my old blogs about just why exactly it is I'm not a millionaire this moment. Even in documenting my capacity for change, there's plenty to miss.

The pragmatist knows that if I never get another comment, I can still probably mostly rely on a handful of people for larger order problems. I know that the conversation is always going on in my head if nowhere else. I know that no matter, if likely in spite and in fact because of how jaded I can be, it's still immediately easy for me to never play the game that uses words like you don't like. You remember, I always get invited back to the after party before I decide to start in on my target. I know that as long as my very being, the one who basically always has something to say and is stuck focusing on the things that don't make him nor anyone else happy, I'm not going to have very many “friends.” And given my enthusiasm to jump into things and live out the consequences one layer of skin at a time, the experiment has at least provided another thick callous.

I also know that I haven't lived up to that vitally important aspect that I've called out in the past. I haven't provided the environment to plug people into. I didn't get movie moments at parties or girls to think I was cool by doing anything less in the cultivation of my environment. With this in mind, I always find the accusation that I “think I can control things” odd. Of course I can. I controlled the environmental layer, so people got drunk and naked. I push away from people who hand their feelings over to me because I find it highly irresponsible and immoral to pretend it's your place to exercise that amount of control over people you profess to care about. I control my own proclivities to name call and insult when I see after 3 words you're not pleased I decided to chime in on something you shared. I control whether the conversation exists in the only way I can walk away describing it as “going well,” or one of a dozen ways it would register as fruitless despite my efforts. If nothing else, I retain control because I'm actually trying.

Here, I wonder what you're actually trying. It's not to respond to me. The only “kind of” goals I've seen documented are different trips to the tops of mountains and rocks. I'm sure you're plugging away at your jobs or something. But I don't really know anything about you. You know by the dollar amount and day of the week when I might have something less fatalistic and bitchy to say. Or, if you were wondering the information is at least readily available. Is it useful even in a small sense of solidarity? We all get fucked by surprise things. We're all kind of struggling at least a little, right? But I still like hearing when a friend is paying out the asshole for insurance to keep on her meds. Maybe there's more to be mined there about “our” societal next collective push on a referendum regarding healthcare. Maybe more personal testimonies will push over the edge what needs pushing.

Only once has someone told me how little they think the “average” person reading me is feeling regarding the circumstances of their life to change. They don't feel this moment is precisely the one to start an important conversation. They don't think the idea they had has any value. They don't think the problem they're currently trying to surmount may ever be overcome. Then again, I have to ask you, what are we doing being friends? What are you afraid to ask of me, at what layer, may I be able to contribute? Or, why don't you think it's important to describe why you think I have nothing to offer? I'm certainly trying with regard to you.

I'm a big believer that it's the small amount of radicals of any ilk that are tending to control things. And I think that's a problem. My voice, no matter how persistent, shouldn't be the be all end all, and I know this, and I ask for it not to be. Radical tea-bagger oligarchical ideologues steering an entire country into the ground are making sure things get pretty goddamn shitty before you pussy-hatted bitches decided to wake the fuck up and get into the streets. There are profiles of the actually psychopathically monied and motivated dismantling each piece of what's brought us to a relative stability and civility today. Shouldn't we be talking about those things every day? Shouldn't we be probing for creative solutions, even conversationally, in how we understand the perpetually shifting landscape?

Or, do we return to that being too high-level of problem to ask of your “friends?” It's too much to talk. It's too much to read. It's too much to care. It's too much to challenge. It's too much to think. Black out, live and let live, cross your fingers and pray all those someones out there have a healthier and proactive response that will save us all. If it hasn't been stated, we can make sure it is now, but if you don't have the words to describe how we relate to each other, I'll reduce it to something simpler, something “negotiated” and conditional. Every positive memory and emotion I've ever felt towards you can be corrupted. It's absolutely not the direction I want to go, but I'm compelled by my otherwise empty and selfish environment. I'm whispering to myself and a handful of chat boxes.

It's funny that after typing that I had an immense momentary calm. I always come back to that “cold” baseline. Once I get the excuse to go into robot mode, it gets easy. It doesn't hurt there, I'm not angry, I'm not empty, I'm not hopeful, I'm just “do.” I like to just do. There's a significant point and measure of irony in the description of being driven there by my environment and circumstances. I have to acknowledge the new conditions under which I'm to regard friends, but I didn't create them. To achieve the calm, my “choice” was to observe what I conceived as the best alternative. It's why I will always and forever be fascinated with what you're observing in your own lives. It's why I comfortably say I don't think you're thinking when you've nothing to say. It's why, as long as I try, as long as I see and introduce those sights, I'll retain a kind of control you've dispossessed yourself of.

It's how I can see any number of futures for myself, but a primarily shitty one “in general” as the consequences of impersonal forces describe what's happening to us across problem layers. At the level of the individual, what's that? Phone zombie? Polarized and distracted ignorant wage slave? The environment? Dying, flooded, getting literally exponentially worse in mass-casualty categories. The law? Still in “white-lash” mode, doubling down and dismantling what got us this far. Interpersonally? I find people arguing against their own interests and discover piecemeal my college cohort barely interact or regard each other as people; my ego thinking I was the only one :,-(. The stats on where wealth is going? Horrible. The future of the jobs that still exist? Nonexistent. The numbers to care for the sick and dying? Inadequate. The funds to at least attempt keeping things from falling apart? Drying up and stolen. Consequences for the worst actors? Not even the memory of what those look like. One metric after another begets more and more shit. It's not your job in this moment to provide reasons for optimism. It's your job to acknowledge and consider fixes at different layers. The work of your job should take place in the form of a polite discussion between you and your friends.

I suppose I take a fair amount of comfort in what I've heard described a few times recently as “having a chip on my shoulder.” There's people who never achieve enough, destroy enough, fuck enough, or whatever else. No amount of awards appease them. No praise will ever live up to the ideas they conjured about themselves. If there's a “different” qualifier about me, that's one I jive with. I shouldn't be guilt-tripping myself for having too much to say. I'm responding to the world that isn't saying enough of what I think needs to be said. I'm playing games people aren't. I've expectations that I've only scratched the surface of meeting. Consider, I actually did want to be “retired” by 30 when I was 15. I won't have a pension, but then I consider neither do the people who worked for 40 years and then got fucked by Wall Street and their “representatives.” If my car could stop breaking down, owning my own house to one day die in, and the land it sits on, at 29, are still feasible. It's leagues away from not knowing who my roommates will be every year, or living back with my parents, or renting from extortionists, or donning a 30-year obligation to show up to a job I hate for the mortgage.

If my shifting, invisible, fake as shit interpersonal layer is gone and my work setting is “independent” employment, I seek to fix the problem of my personal environment and set it up for the potential to grow or save my ass when things get pinched even harder. We're all “entrepreneurs” now. I like to believe my acceptance and understanding of the world at 15 speaks to my position and behavior now. And I think at 45, you know, after the consequences of the “tax reform” bill, partisan gerrymandering, or the 2 or 3 degrees rise in the planet's temperature, that my designs on off-grid sustainable living will prove to have been worthy of concern over the details today. I hope all of my worst predictions for how I've seen my “friends” respond to their lives, problems, and our conversations won't spill over. I really do hope that. Points for paying attention if you know what I think about “hope.”

I feel like I ask for so little. The catch is that I'm asking for attention. I'm asking for detail. I'm asking for something you have to work to even discover you have and is at the mercy of your disposition and various stresses in life. I worked 3 jobs and would come home in the 5 hours I could sleep between them to write about how more fucked than anyone cared to think working a job like Kroger really was. I'm writing this at midnight after I drove my car from the mechanic basically straight back to work until close. I'm not even reading nearly as much as I used to, but I snuck in several hours of lectures, interviews, and podcasts on my forced days off. I've habituated the burden of keeping up on things I profess to care about. Maybe you have too, I just never hear about it.

[386] Hard Out Here For A Pimp

I hope I've never convinced you that I have much of anything besides hatred for most things. Sure, I can make a ton of jokes or explain my veritable regal lifestyle in a historical context. But, when some dreaded moments sound an alarm like a bomb next to your head, it really sobers, strangles, any hope for budding optimism.

Consequences carry. I knew back when I was a freshman that blowing 70 thousand dollars at a bullshit institution to get a degree I didn't want was a bad idea. I had no real choice. I was told the degree mattered. So I started my entrepreneurial endeavors on what was left over aided with a partner's savings for a year and our parent's help. Mind you, about 1/7 of my college fund would have sufficed. 1/7 of my total college fund, had it not been in the hands of my deplorable and fat fucking cunt of a Tammi, who allowed it to fluctuate, downward, with the market. All the while criticizing my laudable budgeting.

So I make the calls, get the permits, pass around the questions and plans. I need to immediately be a pseudo-everything from lawyer to accountant to woodworker. I operate under what I've been told by the “responsible business parties” who've given me the rules. Your first mistake is to think you can trust anything to be what it is. This, I learned far too late.

Because then I get fucked. I get fucked for a few thousand dollars, because people lie, that follows us the entire time we're at the mall. It amounts to several more thousand dollars that I had to sell my car to alleviate. My car to my uncle who, not only has, and has had more money than anyone could ever need, but uses it to hoard. Yes, hoarding is real, and exhibit A is the thousands and thousands spent on whatever is lining the floor of my grandma's old house. But hey, he needed to make a profit on his nephew, and figured he could fix and resell the car for more.

So then I get to sit. I get to wait around with all the supplies and knowledge and motivation for about a year. My “saving grace” being the death of my grandma. Then I get to have wheels turning again. I immediately buy the van. I tell 2 people I have a little extra cash. Incidentally, they're 2 people who could use a little extra cash. I give it willingly, because, let's say family. I get things done on the cheap, but not too cheap, because when the job costs $150, the people you're working with will make sure it costs an extra hundred or two, just for, let's say reasons.

But the van gets done. And it doesn't get used for months. Because right around the time you think you're getting money back, you're not getting money back. This means you can't afford a permit until a few months later. This means the insane insurance prices you've been paying, that you have to prove you have in order to apply for said permit, have been going towards a van that stares at you longingly from the parking lot.

So you wait. You get the permit. OH! But did you know your insurance was canceled 2 days before you had the money to pay it? This means you get to spend another huge chunk of money that was only going to go towards something modest anyway, like supplies. Here you go insurance, $600 bucks in case a car bomb goes off next to my van. You know, because this is how the terrorists actually win. I wish this was an exaggeration.

Enough time has gone by that you are noticeably less enthused. You go around flyering, trying to make an instant connection with someone who doesn't want to be at work, let alone talk to you, and explain to them you've got this awesome convenient coffee truck! And wouldn't you know it? These people have the same level of enthusiasm and capacity for empty promises as almost-customers in the mall! “I'll have to try it sometime!” “Oh! We love coffee around here!” “That's a really good idea! It's a wonder no one's thought of it before.”

Meanwhile I'm pretending these people are in a much higher place financially than I am. Sure, the branch manager at an investment bank, two of them actually, love the idea and are helpful and can afford it, but people have settled into their routines and already get their Starbucks on the way to work anyway. Here I go trying to ruffle feathers with an untested, inexpensive (because that means low quality somehow, thank you psychology background and perception documentaries) product. Brand awareness after all, brand awareness! You should charge Starbucks prices! Presumably out of spite because I have a tit-for-tat machine that runs like they do.

But wait, do you hear the insurance payment coming back around? Because here's another opportunity to pay $450 for 2 months before another $450 will be due in 2 more! The $300 to the health department, the $350 to the mobile permit people, the $300 to the push-cart police aren't enough. You need to be insured for millions of dollars in case Grand Theft Auto plays out on the square. So while you're already basically flat broke, trying to run your coffee van in that between realm of popular enough to prove the concept, but not so popular you have to beat away orders and get into a drug trial, here's half a year's future security just begging to be pissed away again!

And you have to do this because people around you think you're either dumb, lazy, or perfectly unreasonable in not pursuing the kinds of jobs and lives they lead. I had $3500 left from my college fund. My grandma dying netted close to $12000. I've done 4 studies for a total of around $11000. You know what my bills are a month? $350 if I choose to drive too much. I've been out of college 3 years. If I did NOTHING but read, watch shows, and go out from time to time, I'd still have TWELVE THOUSAND dollars today, leaving aside arbitrary Biolife and birthday/Christmas cash.

I'm a fool who has to try. I legitimately believe in ideas changing the world and building engines of wealth that aren't just counted monetarily. For as much as I carry on about hating working for people, which is true, or thinking most everything around me is the stupidest fucking thing I've ever seen if not for what tomorrow will surely bring, I've still done whatever it took to handle business. I'm broke, but I'm not in debt, and with my time I'm always trying to learn.

It's frustrating that I am sometimes spoken to as if I don't understand my circumstances. “Have you ever thought about working as...” “Hey, if you get sick of all your hatred and reading, why don't you become...” “A psychology major, that's so interesting, why didn't you...?” “You know, I have no idea what your plans are, I certainly never asked, but you'd be really good at...”

I hate how things are run. I hate the endless barriers to even live modestly. I hate that no one can seem to see themselves in a future that makes sense or lasts for longer than a year or two at a time. Effort and intelligence need to stand as more than a road to complicit exhaustion. Let every one of my friends run the other experiment and ask them how happy they are and well they're doing.

If I just wanted money, just to sit on it, just to have it, that's what I'd be doing. If my ego or pride still puts me in front of a Steak N Shake grill until 6 am, it's nothing if not pragmatic first. Can we stop fucking pretending I don't know what I'm doing?

[278] What The Fucking Fuck! A Love Story

What the Fucking Fuck! A Love Story

I am currently in a state of profound unhappiness. I imagine it’s like losing someone you’ve mapped the rest of your life with; never entertaining the idea they could be gone in an instant. It’s losing something foundational and part of your core. I don’t even know if I have a simple name for what I think I’ve lost, but the more I focus on it, the more I want to lose control.

Maybe it’s my idea that if there is a problem, it can be fixed, if not relatively easily. Once you break it down into parts you can see every kink and immediately know what needs to happen to change course. Right now, it feels like some problems are so established or entrenched, the memory of how to fix them has been lost. The collective will-power or effort necessary is a shaky suggestion silently predicated with “if only” and “given a miracle.”

It’s one thing to try and fail. It’s soul crushing to try and know there are people, who without hesitation, will doom you to fail before you begin. When I think my cynicism can know no bounds, I find another layer of humanity to stomach. It’s one thing to read about it or watch Youtube clips exposing the corrupt and evil. Let it into your life, your bank account, your relationship with your family and friends. Try to explain anything without sounding like you’re making an excuse. Be “the most motivated” the “bravest” the one to take a “chance” and come face to face with the people who aren’t simply uncompelled or unimpressed, but make it their business to take advantage of you.

I develop or adopt the philosophy. I make the calls and meetings. I crunch the numbers. I pick the wording and keep the smile. I fit the puzzle together. I’m the boss whether I want to be or not. I get the stress and the drama and the stupid details you don’t care to hear about. I’ve worked 23 hours a day. I set myself to OWN what I use. I try to learn as much as I can in the time that I have and press forward because that’s the only direction you can go. I’m not the cabinet maker, architect, maintenance supervisor, plumber, electrician, or lawyer yet am expected to be as an entrepreneur. And if I’m not, I’m seemingly expected to catch the fallout from not adorning those capacities.

I can’t say I know it isn’t hopeless when I’m up against forces like these. I don’t mean in that I can’t succeed somewhere at some time. I mean with things. Like, life and morals and any remote sense of the word justice. I haven’t experienced genocide first hand or I’m sure I could’ve come to this sooner, but…to genuinely fear the loss of your resolve. To entertain the idea that your life is meant to be a cautionary tale about thinking and doing right and still having to content yourself with just what you have. To think that problems aren’t there to be fixed, they’re for keeping you in line.

It’s at this point someone tells me they know what I’m capable of. That one way or another I’ll bounce back or understand the consequences of doing one thing over another. And they’re right. We can both safely point to obvious character traits I seem to take reverence in. I’m also the person who is all of those things and still finding the capacity for hopelessness. What short term gratification it would be to just destroy. A surprise ending with a wave of conflicting feelings about legacy.

And it’s not like people can help, right? Even if they wanted to they’ve got class or their own bills or own sense of moral outrage and obligation. That was your charge Nick P. You explore that world and check back in with me when you start throwing parties again. Not that you can blame them.

I say I want my life to play out like a movie, and maybe I’m just getting everything I asked for. I really should have been more specific about the genre.

[262] Housing a Counter Culture with My God Complex

Within a few months here, I should be able to start making bigger leaps into creating a counter-culture. Most of my speech and actions will be about the prospect of making money. It will be all about the money. Money does buy happiness, at least for people like me who want to get things done in a world controlled by idiots. Money speaks to idiots. While I’m distracting people with money, I’ll be able to sneak in all of my ideas.

And what are my ideas? One is being small and sustainable. Another is fulfilling actual needs. I’ll go further and say sacrificing in the short term for a better long term outcome. I think accountability and humility are important as well. I want to open businesses right next door to ones I think do it wrong. I don’t view things as competition that don’t stand for the same things I do. Starbucks in Target is simply a target, and an example I get to shine against.

I want to get the grunt work out of the way and make it easy for people. I want to play with the immoral people so they don’t have to. I want to create a pyramid scheme that rewards your effort instead of exploiting your good nature. I operate under the, what I’ll no longer denigrate as an assumption, that people are idiots. They will act from their ignorance well before they know how to act in their own best interest. I’m not going to appeal to the idiots. I’m going to give the people that understand and opportunity to be an example that the idiots will feel the consequences of ignoring.

These are monetary consequences, of course, because again, money speaks to idiots. When I get a building full of Hatsam’s that want to be comfortable and spend their time having fun, while getting the work done, then I’ve done something right. With a bottom line that depends on dependable people who motivate themselves and see problems for what they are, I don’t think you can lose. At the end of the day, when one number is higher than the other, the numbers that say “fuck all” to your opinions and ideals, you know to keep pressing forward.

I can only move as fast as the people who agree with me. I don’t make the endless appeals for people to get onboard to tell me their ideas for nothing. Culture changes when behavior does. Until I find the people to stand with me, I’ll keep having to invest my time in how I appeal to idiots verses refining the full implications of standing with good ideas. And I’m okay with that, for now. It’s why I’ll work 3 jobs and opt out of sleep. I refuse to wake up when I’m 30 and wonder where the last 6 years went. If you think it takes 10 years, I want to do it in 6 months. If you think it won’t work under the current paradigm, I’ll show you how it works in mine.

Changing and adapting are easier when you have the resources, and people can change more than they give themselves credit for. We live in a world that charges you to use money you’ve earned. Punishes you for using a service a handful of colluding companies provide. Persuades you that change takes a lot of time and is very hard. And all of that is bullshit once you start acting differently.

For as many reasons as I have to hate much of this world and fucking people in it, ultimately I am the keeper of my mood and my acts. I will always be more motivated by my ideas and what I can do for my friends than I will be dragged down by the oblivious idiots I will no doubt collaterally help while they rain criticism. I’ll try not to be the guy who adopts a puppy and then kicks it for shitting on the rug.  

[261] Brain Vomit

Legalize all drugs. From a “moral standpoint” if people die from alcohol your inability to swallow the connotative impact of the word heroine doesn’t make you more moral or logically consistent.

I’d rather not have hope then meagerly grasp at the frayed tapestry of the current state of our species. In other words, I don’t respect when people pray for things to get better because of their isolated and small perspective related to acts of kindness. Problems are systemic and take practice to alleviate. Your short term solution and hope mean DICK.

If there was a god, the only sin would be being unaware. You’d think of this being that is supposed to be in and around everything, seemingly existing to question and get to know itself, so the parts that just float on by and pretend like there isn’t a world around them would be the bits you want to weed out.

I’M NOT A FUCKING INFORMATION KIOSK. I’M NOT A FUCKING HAND SANITIZING DISPENSER. YOU WON’T BE BACK. I’M NOT A FUCKING BANK. YOU CAN’T BORROW A CUP OR PAPER TOWELS, THAT SHIT COSTS ME MONEY.

I understand that most people don’t want my ideas. I’m reality based. I must have no ideas how to get around this. How naïve I must sound when I say I’m in the business of ideas. Clearly, I must not know how successful businesses got that way. Clearly, I’m thinking too small.

There’s something wrong with a system that has you graduate college, open your own business, and still requires you to work all night on the side while the corporate umbrella you’ve chosen bleeds you with rent. That second job has 2 ½ hour orientations that go over how to wash your hands and mop a floor. Why bother with school in the first place if our fast food jobs can teach us? In universal terms, I’m no better or worse than anybody. In the realm where we pretend judging people matters, I’ve never felt so degraded. I’m hopelessly better than someone who needs to be explained to them how to carry on cleanly in a workplace.

I get the feeling people shy away from talking to me or offering advice because they think I’ll jump down their throat or won’t appreciate where they’re coming from. This isn’t the case. I simply don’t want obvious advice. I literally never again want someone to tell me I should advertise. It insults your own capacity for thinking and only wears on my spirit.

I think people need to be controlled by something, but they should pick better things than the banks, Wall Street, and the government to do it. I want to take of the world. “I” is a collection of the ideas that would serve to show cause and effect tendencies that have proven to result in improved human happiness and productivity. “The world” is simply the medium in which we actualize my intentions. It’s an easier task than people realize and it can manifest in a million ways.

If everything isn’t designed to screw you, we need better metrics for establishing what those things are. It makes no sense to say “corporations are evil.” The “We’re No. 1!” status of a company is irrelevant. I don’t really care if you get free lunch and sing on a jukebox at your company, how are you using your employees and your influence to change the very corporate world? What other standards are you holding yourself to once you get beyond the flash?

90% of the music I reject sounds like a failed attempt at something “electro” or played out super chill indie crap. I won’t say songwriting is dead, but I think ease of access and a completely retarded younger generation has pushed it to the margin.

One of the integral factors for why I will always and consistently win, if only eventually, is that I am not afraid. Better said, I don’t allow myself to be arrested or impeded because of fear. Given that I don’t live a ridiculously troubled or traumatic life it’s hard to site a “hardcore” example. Just, when shit gets serious, I get very calm. I’ll look more hysterical at seemingly stupid and petty shit than I ever will if a bomb actually goes off.

I need to get more organized. If you’ve tuned in this far, I offer this blog as evidence. I read once that the more we try to multitask, the worse we are at it, and I only keep adding things to my plate.

A driving force for my actions, or inaction, is the idea that all things are connected. Why it can never be “just think about the money now” is because the moral has to carry or I’ve defeated the purpose. Nor can you simply push a moral without caring about how and if it’s understood. People may not know, or just forget when I tell them, nothing I genuinely care about or have worked towards, have I ever failed at. It’s an extremely long game I’m playing, and it’s something I’ve never stopped caring about.