[1037] Shake It Three Times

I'm so thankful. I made it to Chicago, twice, in my truck, and saw Troy Bond, Waterparks, and The Killers sandwiched between in Gary. The weather was fine. The roads didn't pop my tires. My truck didn't scrape the walls of a cramped parking garage. I got to hang out with Smash. I got to spend time with my dad. I got caught up on my TV shows. I cleaned and organized my car. I got great food and good beer. My cats didn't freak out while I was gone. I'm back home at 12:28 AM, wide awake after immediately falling asleep once I got settled in around 6.

I'm living a veritable fantasy in many regards. I'm healthy enough to travel, by myself, to expensive shows I can't technically afford, but no one really bats an eye at the debt figures or downplays their jealousy. I was able to see two of the shows because I work 2 days remotely. In almost exactly 48 hours I should be on a plane to Florida where I'll be gone for 6 days in the "Owner's Club" of Rockville and condo Brandy's parents have up the road. This is arguably the hardest I've ever gone in the "pure indulgence" vein, and I'm counting the party house given I wasn't spending thousands to scale what we were doing.

Big picture, there's a version of what I'm doing that sounds purely selfish and hedonistic. Aren't I worried about pick-your-existential crisis anymore? Don't I think, creepily deeply, that the crowds I surround myself with at shows are statistically full of the dumbest, saddest, and most self-destructive children the world could produce? I mean, they can afford the tickets and get to the venue. I'm often engaged in conversation with people who can't imagine themselves driving for 25 minutes to the nearest comedy club.

I have competing values, but they are anchored by time. I've felt, for most of my life, that time is very short. I've been able to slow it down by hyper-attenuating my experience of any given drama or question. I'm, hopefully, a living embodiment of just how much time we really do have, what can be done with it, and whether or not I can be doctor/astronaut/war hero, I can put up impressive stats on started struggling business ventures, shows consumed, hours behind various instruments, words read and written, miles driven, performances attended, and projects play-grounded. Nothing on that list spot-lit other people.

I read a blog written almost 15 years old where I'm talking about my "robot" or "analyzing" nature. I'm trying to explain why it's impossible to be "friends" with someone I can so easily manipulate. I'm imploring the, college crowd at that point, to not understand me as someone maliciously trying to play with them, just isolated in the knowledge that, in any moment, I can tell the temperature, and I can't understand why they can't. I've never really wanted to have this persistent distance, but it's as real and compelling a fact about my existence as I've ever discovered. It's not me "closing off" or "shutting down." I'm considerably less inclined to entertain the idea I'm a "psychopath" the more I've learned about autism.

I don't just "want" to do all the things I'm doing. I need it. I can't physically function when I come up against feeling too "stuck," be it in a relationship dynamic or a working environment. I need novelty. I need to render some notion of forward movement or progress into existence. I've been thinking about quitting my job. I've been thinking about seeing what I can unlock in myself when I give up the "freedom" to be half-remote 4 days a week to do more in service to my business or breach an entirely new field. I didn't go to school for social work. I didn't want to stay in school until I found a way to make most of my classes related to philosophy, history, and psychology. My innate ability to pick things up or play on familiar human patterns has been plaguing me my entire life. My nearly pathological ability to focus or obsess will manifest in literally any direction I point it, and invariably I will unlock new parts of my story I can't conceive of yet. Why am I not something like a sports-better after building psychological profiles on players and coaches and analyzing stories about their habits and relationships?

It's very weird to psychologically position yourself to fight comfort. I don't want to get set in my ways. I don't want to say, "You'll probably be too tired." There's no more a familiar and shared condition I observe across the people who annoy me the most. I went back and forth for days on whether I should get a ticket to Jeff Arcuri in Louisville the day before my flight. Wouldn't it be "responsible" to be closer to the airport, not spend the extra gas, not throw the logistics of doing your last group of the day into the mix etc.? I felt myself generating excuses to put distance between me and something I sincerely wanted to do. Fuck that, see you soon, Jeff. Let my truck break down on the way to the airport. That just means a touch more in credit card debt or annoying Byron or Hussain with a midnight phone call.

Time is running out, after all. The people who make me laugh or sing will all be memories eventually. I haven't regretted going to a single show. I haven't felt guilty about anything else I'm not spending my money on. I'm merely on the latest iteration of my mission to be what I wish to see. Will a super-fort, health insurance, or sense of community ever make it into the equation? I don't know, and I don't know if I really care or if it matters. Is the world burning down? It seems like it, but I don't really trust myself enough to catastrophize my thinking in how I wish to approach the premise.

I missed my house and worried about the cats. I feel like immediately falling asleep let me reclaim a sense of ownership and safety regarding the space I've built. I have so much to do the next few days. I have so much to spend, be awake for, read about, and drive to. I have so much.

[1036] I Hate You, You Hate Me

I've been listless. You wouldn't think to notice were I not saying it. I'm still "busy." I still work full time. I still see, or attempt to see, clients in service to my own business. I'm tending to my bills and house chores, though apparently not close enough to have enough replacement litter after meeting the scent of my house when I opened the door this evening.

Let's just start there. I came home after seeing Hussain and him showing me how my car needs an alignment after the work he's done. He's predictably frustrated with our therapist who can't be bothered to communicate with us why a 20 minute task is going on 3 weeks to complete. The car has needed $150 or so in parts, he doesn't charge me labor, but it also needs tires, which I just bought for $270. Add in the cat litter, air fresheners, toilet cleaner, and some other "house supplies" things, almost $400 of crap, not fun crap, not wholly-unnecessary crap, just crap to live, drive, and clean, is on the way. Also, all the bills email me at once. $106.50 for the internet, and finally a nice surprise a radically reduced $150 for my electricity as the weather has improved. $8 for my seedbox. and $800 to my home insurance company because I figured, why not keep the spending ball rolling and avoid installment fees? I've been home for approximately an hour, and it only took me 20 minutes to spend $1400, $1600 on the day if you add the IMAX movie, gas and food I bought earlier. I also discovered a leak in my roof, and the rubber tape I suspect I'll need to fix it, $50.

I didn't buy truck tires. I don't have kids. I didn't have to pay my insurance for the year all at once. I didn't have to spend an obscene $17 on a bacon, egg, and sausage sandwich and large vanilla latte. I didn't have to see a movie. I could cross my fingers and pray for a few more months regarding my tires or just replace the worst ones. Do I absolutely have to have $5 air freshener? Of course not. It's not that any one piece of my day can't be sacrificed, or excused for, or defended in the spirit of living once and simple pleasures. It's that the whole premise and project that I'm working within, in my view, is irreparably broken, so it all feels futile and arbitrary fundamentally.

I'm smart and did well in school, and it doesn't matter. I've worked myself near to death across various industries, and it doesn't matter. I've attempted to start my own business several times, and it doesn't matter. I've lived as broke and hermit-like as you could reasonably expect a person to live, and it hasn't mattered. I'm as honest as a person can get without it becoming pathological, and it doesn't matter. I can get all the praise and positive feedback in the world, and it doesn't matter. I can be as giving and forgiving as you'll ever find in life, and it doesn't matter. I can live without things like running water, working toilets, air conditioning, or a bed, and it doesn't matter. I can create as open and freely accessible environment to live easier, play, experiment, save, or create, and it doesn't matter.

Nothing I do fucking matters. I'm not going to get paid enough, I'm not going to get recognized. There is no reward at the top of the hill. I'm not maintaining my access to heaven. I'm not winning friends and influencing people. I'm just telling a story of a wretchedly ironic caricature of the hero's journey. Perhaps in an anime you'll see them training. Each session they level up, or after they nearly die fighting a bad guy, they unlock new powers and potential. In One Piece the truly destined get a conqueror's aura that can paralyze or incapacitate through sheer will. Everything they do matters. Everything contributes towards them building strength, a reputation, a team, and a story that will transcend any given life or death struggle.

When I say "it doesn't matter" I don't mean "there's no consequences." I'd rather be in my paradigm than my paradigm but a little dumber, a little poorer, a little sicker, a little less well-connected, or a little more psychologically at the behest of my mother. I mean for you to think that the answer to "Everything happens for a reason" is "Yeah, shitty, shitty reasons." My schooling was a joke designed to extract money. My job(s) over the years the same thing. The business environments I've attempted to work in keep the tradition going. I could blame a most-encapsulating notion of capitalism, but I prefer to not obscure the simple greed at bottom. It's the greed of "convenience fees" and "transfer fees" and "processing fees" and "installment fees" and creeping ever higher interest rates. It's the greed drawn from an infinite well of insecurity that what you've created and how isn't actually good for anyone, fulfilling, or a worthwhile expenditure of time.

We were watching Kitchen Nightmares. The failing kitchens were all filled with greedy people. Their lost loved one needed never be dealt with as "their heart was no longer in" keeping the business alive. Gordon Ramsay comes in, points out the obvious, but then also magically resolves years of trauma and resentments in neatly packaged 40 minute episodes. 21 out of 105 kitchens are still open. That is a 20% success rate. If you're on Suboxone, there's a 90% chance you will still relapse. 10% of 21 million addicts actually seek treatment. I can't tell you how 1-to-1 the parallels in the worst kitchens matched the language of many of my clients. You're only twice as likely to save your kitchen as you are to "beat" your addiction, which is resting comfortably at 10%.

It's the behavior. It's your behavior that's fucked up, that sets the conditions for indefinite failure. Whether you want on-the-nose examples like millions of votes for fascism, or the, somehow, "abstract" fallout of your perpetual silence about things that matter, no one can succeed under these conditions without heavily sacrificing things none of us should think are acceptable. Did I describe such an extravagant and wasteful existence above? It's the first time I've claimed to spend money on anything that wasn't concerts or comedy shows in a while. Would I, could I, should I have the money if I dialed back trips around the Midwest and $50-$200 ticket prices? Sure. I could also die tomorrow. I'm on the road a lot, and that's where a lot of people die.

Specifically, the bad, wrong, always-fucking-me behavior is the lies. It's the pleasantries, the pageantry, the omissions, the red tape, the "good luck," the "I've just," the positive feedback backed by no more money, access, freedom, or power. I'm lied to constantly. It's the thing I hear most often every week. It's every sentiment offered to pretend "things" are "better" than they are. It's hopes and wishes and dreams side-stepping even acknowledging there's a problem, let alone exchanging ways on how to fix it, let even more alone fix it in perpetuity. We don't know what we're aiming at, why, what it could feel like once we got there, or what we're to draw on as we project its impact into the future. We have children we don't want and then somehow don't viciously punish the ones who would rather they go neglected or hungry than aborted. We take jobs we don't want and buy shit we don't need because slavery has been rebranded and taken us out of the sun if we're not a beleaguered minority. We pretend your human rights should pair with your access to capital; yours, or what's been mostly subsidized by everyone else.

We just lie, all the time. We pretend to be mentally stable as we shower the internet in stupid fucking memes. We pretend to be financially stable provided we never get too sick or downplay our cortisol levels that pay for must-have insurance. I am the absolute last person who should ever be in debt for really any reason. I live alone, in a shed, in one of the most affordable states, with a job paying considerably more than you'll find nearly anywhere. Even before I made the decision to go to all of these shows, my year-to-year trending spending was showing getting ever-indebted. All I was doing was driving and eating and working and I was losing. Could I have made more meals for myself? Sure. Could I have invested in a more fuel-efficient vehicle or diligently searched for a job closer to home? Maybe. Should I be expected to, every waking minute of my fucking life contemplate what I could do without so I can tend to basic fucking necessities to feel like a normal fucking person?

We're addicted to these bullshit fucking stories, and the kitchen-owners among us, with some professional celebrity help, have a 1 in 5 shot of keeping the miserably misplaced dream alive. The addicts have a reliable and predictable A- shot of keeping us collectively spiraling down the bowl of our fragile ego. You're depressed. You're anxious. You're angry. You're alone. You've given up your creative and motivated vision of who you imagined you'd be right now. You're tired. You're fat. You're every word is to be taken as fluff. You don't answer the call. You don't listen to the voice that nags you. You don't own anything, especially not even the very fucking fact that you don't own anything! It's all gone as quickly as you, or the people after you, can click submit.

I've wondered if I should go back to school, or learn a trade, or double-down on my debt and approach my business and potential from some creative angles. I've wondered if I should commit to retightening the purse strings and see if I can actually get within a paycheck of being out of debt verses cling to the story of the "few months away" that isn't true-enough to adequately describe the ambivalence and forlorn frustration undergirding my behavior. I'm enjoying my shows, TV, comedy, and music. The drives can be a literal pain in the ass, but..."What else would I be doing?" I'm not a real person in the environments I'm forced to adapt to or die. Nothing about me or my idea or my potential means a goddamn thing. So I'm going to laugh as often as I can, disappear into as many fantasies about family or friendship that will have me, and shake my fucking hair hard enough that my neck is sore for a week. I'm going to eat the food I like, spend obscene amounts of money on band T-shirts, and tinker on professional-level instruments.

I'm just as selfish as the next person, but I don't have to lie about it. In fact, I'm more selfish. I won't just let you have the story of yourself or your behavior. I won't just let you keep the peace. I won't be like an episode of Frasier where I step into the room and immediately continue to run with the lie. An 11 season 264 episode show ran through the 90s into the early 2000s built on insufferable caricatures habitually lying to themselves and others, and yet they're rich! And love finds a way! And the memories serve to remind them. And it can all be diagnosed and addressed as neatly as Gordan can turn around a kitchen. This is the kind of thing our brains have trained on our entire lives. This is why you're looking for a Disney prince or princess instead of a partner to work with. This is why we can get so lost in our own assholes we can turn ideas about being accepting or "woke" into compelling parodies.

You're still confused after reading this. You think I'm under some illusion that I'm more "real" than you or have some special insight into the nature of your pain and reasoning that I don't. You think I'm performing and am looking for sympathy or attention. You don't understand what the work of attempting to cope with a suicidal environment looks like. You don't actually access the depths of how hopeless and lost and fucking angry I am pretty much all the time. You will literally discuss your own issues through a series of fucking pictures and emojis or ensure your mental health struggle PSA has the best pictures of your tits and meta-data-ready hashtags. You don't fucking get it because I'm not lying to you, so none of this translates. It never has. It never will. It doesn't matter to you or the environment we're plugged into. It's for me, so I don't kill you or myself. You would never! you exclaim as your murder porn drones in the background. You can't imagine? You have a "quirky" fascination? Drawn to glamorized depictions of death is as ironically Freudian as it gets. You don't have the time or inclination to learn what I mean by that, so let your brain insert a belabored caricature. Freud is as real to you as he is to Frasier.

You believe your version of events. I don't believe what I'm saying right now, it's just what I feel and think. Show me something more. I have this version of events combined with the 1030 I've written already and the ones still to come. What do you think? Sorry. Can you think? What do you feel? Considerably more hopeful and joyous and connected and appreciative of our environment than me? I'll never know, because you'll never say it. You'll perform it. You'll Snap-it and Insta-it. You won't have a so-so time. You won't recall how you regret not missing someone more you designated as "best." You won't weigh the evidence of your satisfaction or direction of your existence; you'll filter what you're even willing to count as evidence, and reiterate it over and over again for the internal judge already on the take.

What can I control in all of this? I can keep typing until I'm done. I can keep going to work, running up the credit card, limping through my next business goals, filling up the tank, eating what I want, and beating the shit out of the infinitely abstract "you" for all of your silence, indifference, lies, and pain you cause in ignoring any word, let alone line, that might speak as whispered echoes of what was your capacity for honesty. Dumb or smart, you can choose to lie. Rich or poor, the story of either is a magnificent tapestry of bigotry or prejudice, or a holistic accounting and presenting of opportunities to act in service to discrepancies. Tax the rich and pay for literally everything we could ever need, or don't. Differentiate "poor" from "entitled," or rage-watch talking heads debate either abstraction indefinitely. I'm not pointing my finger at anything or anyone, because nothing is there. You're not there. You don't exist. You don't matter. You just won't admit it like me.

[1033] Stormtroopers

Today reached a stressful point. It did so because I didn't see it coming. I couldn't see it coming. There was no "one thing" that was definitely more annoying or catastrophic than normally happens each day. I even went above and beyond what I normally do on Thursdays and ate food between my block of groups that often leave me tense if not with a headache every week. But, it just didn't stop. I couldn't run my decompression pattern. I couldn't find a fucking moment to breathe. I find it incredible and fascinating that so much happens "all at once" like this to...test me? It's bizarre and too coincidental.

My baseline nature to want to attend to things or apply "fixes" was pushed too hard. Idiots at work who refuse to take responsibility for their shitty attendance and communication wait until precisely the moment I close out my last note to open a can of worms we'd been dancing around to get done for two weeks. My friend's car breaks down, can he take my recently gotten home truck again? My favorite tool which I immediately put to good use and started making plans for utilizing for other things as well? The one with 220,000 miles on it and just cost $1500 and 2 months to fix? Can he also get $50 because drug dealers don't take credit cards?

I've got childishly entitled clients on the brink of emotional collapse raring to lose it any given week. Nice enough people, decently hard-working people, selfish, normal childish and entitled people who will come to me about "my dose" as though it's my job to just continuously answer their every panicked thought at any hour of the day. I ignore most of that, to be sure, but it's another phone ring. It's a call for my attention. It's a passive aggressive comment locked and loaded for next week about what it is we aren't doing to help.

I've been told about 9 times over 3 weeks that a "had no reason to believe she was that chaotic" client was going to get signed up. She apparently wasn't receiving texts and emails, has the money and then doesn't, wants individual counseling, but then maybe for her kid who has massively improved from his traumatizing situation, but actually hasn't at all. At the end of the day I get to spend several hours at the least convenient time troubleshooting, quasi-counseling, caseworking, and I've not been paid. Then, I get to dodge panic attack paragraph texts as though I'm an emotional support animal on retainer.

Did you hear? I'm not just in debt, but courting more of it because I just don't care anymore. I want stuff. I want to go to shows. I want to build more on the land. I just don't care. I'm not likely to get fired, getting directly paid through my business, and haven't scratched the surface of where referrals can be generated from. I'm, inch by inch, day by day, on the verge of fundamentally shifting the priorities and nature of my problems in life. But, it's not here, and I'm still debt-ridden first-world poor, and the things I have walk an incredibly precarious line of functional instead of financial burden. What if I then played the imagination game?

You think my truck is insured for another driver? You think I trust my friend's parents to help him replace it because, you know, could he? The parents who fucked me on the house? What happens when the wobbly car-jerking issue with the Scion finds me in a wreck. It's begging for it. If 2 is 1 and 1 is none, I might have a solid half with my 3. I have a coffee van that doesn't reverse, a truck who picks a new thing to break every couple months, and a Scion with an as yet undiagnosed issue I'm genuinely gambling won't go catastrophically wrong on my frequent hours-long trips.

I didn't exactly forget that life is always coming with the next thing to charge you, but I felt it in a deeper way recently. I got home insurance, of course catastrophically expensive because my home isn't "normal" and abnormality, regardless of the actual value, risk, or practicality, means you get fucked for the invitation to play the insurance game. Add the utility bills, interest charge (you know because you got fucked on how much it cost to get your water back because the only person you know who can do it can't fucking figure out how to bill, record, or communicate to save his goddamn life). You don't pay down as large as you planned. You don't pay off like you planned. You can't take enough long showers to feel like they make up for yet another negative spiraling trend built into your financial picture.

Let's not forget though, I don't really care. Most people my age carried tens of thousands in debt, which they paid towards for years, mostly in interest, never paid it off or barely have paid it off, and they have mortgages, car payments, a few have kids, health issues, etc. I might spend $15K on 100 shows, yearly bills, a new computer, guitar, rolfing, building supplies and car repairs? Every 2 weeks I can pay off 10%. If I can get 10 more clients, 20%. I'm certainly impatient, but it's not an irrational perception of that impatience driving my decision making. I'm almost 35. I live in a fort in cousin-fuck Indiana. I live in a proto-fascist country. It's kinda time to live it up, especially if we're the new tornado-alley. (Oh man, that would have been such a cunty thing to nickname my ex when we were fighting.)

My licensed therapist is in some, probably emotionally abusive and awkward power dynamic with her husband, so when I need her to fix something related to login information or to help our insurance wranglers proceed down the lie of the "80-100" day process of getting empanelled, she just won't respond to me. She'll call Hussain and get panicky and ask him all sorts of shit he can't answer, won't even respond to a text of mine. Won't send me a picture and bio to advertise on the site. Talks about spending money she claims to not have to rent a building in town to hold sessions individually, but also confidently asserts how perfectly unable she is to handle the business end of things. I have back ups, but it's all so needlessly convoluted and always in the background nagging.

I want to be reliable. I want to "help" and "fix." I feel like I'm constantly trying to do my best and do more while the people around me are getting by. They're along for my ride. I created and threw the parties, they were happy to drink and fuck and puke on things and carry on right into the resentment for inviting them and locking them inside. I provide the platform, pay for the infrastructure, maintain the fighting and cheerleading spirit. You think anyone ever calls me with news about who they contacted or who might help in getting more referrals? Hussain, to be sure, but that's why he's the business partner. Have any resulted in us getting paid though? Well...

It doesn't matter how much I do, create, risk, build, or invite to join. It will never be enough. It will never be persuasive or indicate that it's worth a kind of investment and sacrifice that I've made so many fucking times for so much shit that hasn't panned out. LIke, I fucking own land that I've offered for people to live on for free lol. I'm fucking ridiculous. I've paid thousands to live on a fucking couch after getting fucked out of my affordable apartment! How am I not the most entitled and shitty fucking cunt on the planet? I never get help moving. I've spent most of my life begging for an extra hand or the recognition that I would put up with emotional abuse for the better part of a year after finding someone who actually cared to work alongside me.

There's a decent chance if I ever get particularly successful I just disappear. I'm sick of talking to your memes. I'm sick of "normal" conversation about the infinite list of things holding us back. I'm sick of politely engaging every iteration of sit-and-spin you can bring to your imagination. I know I'm fucking sick of it because I'm this fucking frustrated in spite of literally every week if not often each work day, someone tells me how much they appreciate what I do for them. The words feel empty. I gave such rousing encouragement to one of my people who I was so proud of, she nearly broke into tears. Professional courtesy, of course, dictates that we're not friends, and neither she nor I should exist in a mutually supportive context where we're getting the help or money we need to feel secure and grow versus being reduced to the cursed encouraging words.

I've been buying expensive black band T-shirts too. I don't want your branded bullshit from the jobs I work. I don't want to be buttoned up. The whole of my feelings in blogs are summarized by the collective works of the artists I enjoy and the creative energy they inspire. Maybe in 30 years they'll get special vintage status and I'll get to be even cooler than I already am, also for no one to care or notice lol. I have so much shit filled with so much potential fun and worthwhile consequences, but it only feels like it when I can cast a convoluted verbal spell that lays out the embedded vitriol and sabotaging forces. I have no reason beyond chaotic chance to believe I won't continue to get everything I want, provided I can keep it specific to things and experiences that merely cost money.

Do I want you to share my spirit? Do I want you to find the energy and the way forward no matter what? Do I want absolutely anything from you, and each time I allow myself to accidentally set some subconscious expectation delight in the inevitable let down?

I will always be fascinated by how many people wish to dress up as stormtroopers. I will always be baffled by how many wish to be a mere crew member on the starship Enterprise. People delight in the uniforms, soldier status, mythological families, and piety. I have always, always, looked at the hero as the thing to emulate. What is the main character doing, and why? Who supports them, and why? What is their obligation? What transcends their flaws? Who are people but nameless trudgers along micro-fascist environments. They're capitulators, persuadable, and predictable. They're not trying to be heroes, they're imbibing the reassuring feeling that someone or something will save them no matter what.

You fucking idiots. No, they won't.

[1030] A Short Walk To Work

You know, I’ve been perfectly fine all day. I’ve been a bit tired, but had decent groups, am fed, the weather improved, my water is mostly back and I can use my shower and toilet again, and I did a mini construction thing to protect some water lines. Then, I checked my email.

I’ve emailed the probation departments of the state. I sent the first one Friday, the next one today. The second I treated as though I had received a number of responses and wished to answer questions in bulk. I got one response so far. It’s from the director of Rush County asking to be removed from my distribution list.

Rush County is small, rural, and exactly the type of place that a place like Groups tries to account for. Perhaps, in a world I’ve never encountered, everyone on probation is having their needs met in Rush County. Perhaps, relative to any other county in Indiana with the methamphetamine and fentanyl problems, Rush manages to escape the worst. Perhaps, and my suspicion, the attitude of a person in charge of probation in a rural Indiana county is not the kind of person to entertain anything beyond their version of “help,” “service,” or “accountability.”

There’s a certain kind of brazen crazy you need to adopt to maintain yourself in the social work world. There’s another kind you need to be an entrepreneur. There’s another to empathize and emulate the insecure backward “conservative” fear and power games of Hilljackistan. Mind you, it manifests in different ways no matter where you’re from, but your hurdle is never a question of whether you have the credentials, capacity, or good intentions. Your hurdle is an innate suspicion and pretention that anything they’re not familiar with is going to threaten their power, control, or what they can anticipate.

This is why you have to call “everyone,” meet in person, and let things develop in a way that doesn’t suggest you are too thirsty. For whatever reason, say the abject depravity and disregard of your average person, the go-getter or do-gooder or highly capable is default treated with derision until the direct benefit of their presence is felt. After all, until then, I’m just in it for the money, right?

I know, personally, over years, this state is wildly underserved. That any director of anything, ever, would ask to be removed from an email list before they would bother to ask a question reminds me of the “leadership” of DCS. Put that aside, your pithy contention or moral or perspective, and do things like I say. At some level, it’s an impossible barrier. But, the more people you connect with, and the more you’re able to let the work speak for itself, those people rot in their self-righteous holes as you grow around them.

You don’t want to believe the world is as shit as it is. Most people aren’t people. Most are pathological egomaniacs in suicidal races to the bottom barely refraining from turning feral at the full moon. It’s why so many who’ve been resigned to their fate “wish me luck” with everything I’m trying to do. We know it intuitively takes luck or an insane capitalistic resolve because nothing is designed to enable and genuinely help or fix something for more than a moment if the wrong people aren’t watching.

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I hadn’t written in a while because things are “good.” I’m busy with shows. I’m not thinking too hard about my job. Consciously making the decision to stop pitting my desire to quit against the debt I’m amassing to have fun and own cool things helped. Investing in a means of getting people to pay us directly went decently far. Of course, there’s always something lingering. My friend asked me if I would really feel free enough once I was making a certain amount of money. I enthusiastically said yes. I know when I’ve felt more or less free and why. The less things I “have to” think about verses “want to” think about speaks to that immensely. When I’ve got the bills paid 100 years in advance, every insurance possible, and get to play all day, that will be better than the regal debt and choppy car and niceties of maintaining a professional demeanor for never-enough money at a time.

I’m still watching. I’ve still got things to complain about. I still mourn the loss of opportunity in every unanswered call or invitation. My business partner is still perpetually on the verge of a heart attack. Our client base is as reliable across frustrating metrics as they are any other. I still have a dozen “little things” like shows not starting on time, getting charged more than I’m due, unfixed potholes, ill-temperatured buildings, ashyness and itchiness, and technology gripes. But the overall path feels as accessible as it possibly can without an aggressive advertising campaign and visits to various offices.

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I’ve bought the parts to my new computer and have yet to put it together. It’s going to take focus, prep, and several hours for me to not feel like I’m about to break something. My best guess is I’ll make my attempt next Saturday. I’m already psychologically comfortable with spending 2-3K on an acoustic/electric guitar if it plays like I want it to. It really does feel like fate that the giant guitar store is located 7 minutes away from the comedy spot I’m heading to in Fort Wayne. I’m also likely going to get the wood to complete at least the basic shell of my wood shop. I’ll do both of those things before I pay for more rolfing, which is far and away the cheapest option with a high positive emotion payout and impact on overall health, but still so fancy for a basic budget boy like myself.

At 20 clients, I make as much as I do at Groups. That could be 20 hours of individual, or 2 groups a week. At 40 clients, I’m paying off my maxed-out credit card every month and a half. There are 92 counties in Indiana, 1 wholly opposed to even being contacted so far, and 5 people circling us from the surrounding area. We’ve had 1 person pay, 1 say they could tomorrow, 1 on Thursday, and I’ve 2 transferring to our company from the Groups I already hold. This feels doable. In spite of my wretched state, fascist country, and overall painfully violent and tortured perspective regarding the people in my field who profess to care, this feels doable. The math makes sense, because fuck my feelings. Me and Hussain alone could meet the lowest practical bar. Entertaining some state-wide critical mass or legitimacy isn’t the goal. Developing 20 relationships is.

[1029] What If

I haven’t felt the need to write. I’m not entirely sure what’s prompting me to try now. I opened this word document in the middle of the day. It’s 1:08 AM now after I’ve returned from seeing William Shatner and a screening of The Wrath of Khan. There are certainly a few things happening in my life worth discussing. Time continues to race, and where precisely I’m at in space is ever imprecise.
No matter how much time passes, my brother will remind me just how unwise he is. I don’t see him very often, so when he manages to not be an out-and-out douche, I start to trick myself into thinking maybe he’s gotten a little older and measured about things. I need to cut that out. If I’m 34, he just turned 32. He’s got his good job, wife, and series of hobbies. He certainly believes he has “figured some things out” and can “tell it like it is.” It’s cringey and dispiriting to watch too closely.

My persistently reasonable, mellow, steadfastly supportive father has been peeved for days over how my brother spoke to him recently. My brother has created a catastrophized scenario regarding my dad’s health and eyesight. Like most who might profess to be acting out of “just how much they care,” he got elevated and insistent that my dad rectify the problem with his eye, on my brother’s terms, as quickly as possible, and through a series of condescending comments and know-it-all-isms effectively chased my dad away from having dinner with him and his wife on his birthday.

I believe my brother cares, but he is an absolute dipshit. I feel like I got a preview into the kind of social-worker/counselor mode I’m going to have to go into as he overplays his perception of our dad as he gets older or does little to cope and deal with his fears and ignorance. That inability to cope will manifest as more insistence and judgement regarding the step-kids, my step-mom, and invariably me which I’m certain he launched into a self-satisfied series of empty truisms about me after our last phone conversation.

When a situation like this arises, it’s fascinating to me how quickly people get into their camps. The shared goal of something akin to “love and take care of each other” becomes a series of memories used to rehash arguments or prove weak points. Was the swerve because of bad eye-sight, or being tired, or because someone was walking where they shouldn’t? Doesn’t matter, once you adopt a story that your dad is basically blind and ambivalent about whether he hurts himself or others while driving, you’ll say fucking anything with your head held high and hands on your hips. I’m not exactly looking forward to the prospect of putting my brother in his place again, but if anyone’s going to do it…

My brother has the wrong kind of “matter-of-factism” nature. He can’t see the forest for the trees as he espouses the virtue of chop chop chopping and building his own little house and world that *would never* morally or practically be contributing to catastrophic deforestation. This is what people do once they give themselves over to a fundamentally selfish and self-righteous feeling. You can stay mad forever. You can call indefinite abuse the height of love. You can deftly dance around what action and practice you must engage in to be accountable to your emotions. I feel like I’m navigating this constantly, and not just because it’s my job.

Hussain is high anxiety as well. He messaged me tonight saying he wanted the contact information of the Putnam County probation department so that he could tell them to send us more clients. I met with them on Friday, got one of their people signed up and paid for, sent that person to him, and experienced the first glance at what I hope is not a problem I will have to speak to very often. He didn’t reach out to the client immediately. He waited until his priority, picking up a new old car to fix up, was hooked to my truck and he was driving back from Indianapolis. The client, because it’s the weekend, was with her family and couldn’t really talk, and now what was easy-going gung-ho reliable communication is rubbing against his desire to be too busy and chaotically organized. He begs to be overwhelmed.

It's good news that we got a client. I need 10 more, personally, consistently, and then I’m making as much as I do in my current role. I have zero qualms about Hussain as a counselor or his people skills. I have watched him get way behind on paperwork in every role we’ve worked together. I don’t want him begging referral sources, threatening rapport, or courting a chaos of paperwork that I might have to filter through our, also seemingly fairly-often-enough unreliable therapist. I’m going to see if a guided shroom trip will mellow him out.

It was a couple weeks ago I assured Hussain and Byron that I could do what needed to be done to kickstart this whole counseling thing. I get very enthusiastic and energetic when I’m drinking, so when I say 5 days, it might be 2 weeks, but the spirit is there. Practically, it’s meant spending nearly $1000 to get the website set up, pay system in place, video conferencing situated, etc. Could or should I have spent the $1000 before then? It’s a dumb question. I’m taking things day by day. I’m trying not to invite the default overwhelmed state that happens when you plug into the various chaos universes of our clientele. I spent way more than $1000 on concerts and comedy shows over the same period of time, and twice that on a new computer waiting for me to put it together.

At some level, the isolating perspective of what I’ll deem as a certain kind of “wisdom” is antagonizing me. I see the problems very far in advance. It doesn’t paralyze me, but the invitation to be savvy, cold, bold, or otherwise highly manipulative I don’t like. I don’t want to massage my business partner or my family. I want them to see the same shit I do and just give me a day off to worry about anything else. My job is less to counsel clients than it is the people I expect to work with who will then counsel clients. That’s what a manager does, to be sure, but also, it builds an extra barrier. There’s a faint part of me that would “just” like to get along or be friends or be family, but it feels naïve and potentially deadly.

When the flood happens, I want the foundation in place. Whether it’s the flood of my brother’s stupid emotions, flood of clients, or flood of confusion about potential futures insisted upon by the people I work with. What do those fundamentals consist of? Are we communicating respectfully? Are we fairly exercising balance with our time? Are the bills getting paid? Are there reasonable expectations for what to do next and how? So much of this I didn’t have to say out loud when it was the coffee shop because I was just in charge of it all. I guess in a major way I still am with the counseling business, but Hussain is partner, at least officially on paper.

I plan to reach out to other probation departments. I’m going to make my rounds at places where addicts meet. I told them I knew what to do next, and in 3 weeks I made us $150 and impressed a room full of probation officers. My “matter-of-fact” sensibility is bolstered by work and numbers. I know what we have to do next. I know how to make people confident in our ability. I need him, and anyone I bring on board, to back that up with how I engage people and organize time. Exactly like me? Of course not. But if I send you someone to get scheduled, in service to our joint operation and rapport building with different locations, you make the fucking call NOW, not tomorrow. I don’t want to have to build my own calendar of people filling in my ever-fleeting free time on top of doing all the management stuff and mood-tending while still doing my regular day job. Again, I have every reason to believe in someone’s person-to-person or counseling capacity, but they’re often miserable at the crucial details related to time-management.

I think about that when it comes to getting to all of these shows. I’m almost never late to anything. If I am, it’s usually some other obligation like work and someone’s having a too-coincidental meltdown. I’ve been irritatingly surprised at the $35 parking fee I refused to pay for one concert and spent time driving around a neighborhood, missing the opener. Any other time I’m late it’s because I’m waiting on someone else. I might be late to work a handful of times in a year if I oversleep or something. I’m hyper-conscious of how I’m using my time, and constantly estimating different scenarios to provide buffers or in thinking about how to occupy all of the time in between. I legitimately try to pay attention and be mindful in as persistent a manner as I can.

I want right now to not suck and make sense. If there’s something I can control, like calling and coordinating with you, I feel obligated to do it. Why wait? So I can have one more thing to think about? So I can forget? I’m not saying you’re always perfectly situated or in the mood to do any and every thing you “should” in this precise moment, but if you respect what it takes to maintain a kind of balance and perspective regarding your work, you don’t wait for the anxiety to dictate how you go about your obligations. I made us serious money. Take what I’m telling you about how to protect and secure it more seriously.

That just makes me think about the house flipping. Fuck does that still cut deep and the whole bait-n-switch fuckery feel like a reminder to stay cold and calculating. I tried so fucking hard to work fast, believe, demonstrate, and get a little engine of making enough doing something fun and potentially hugely profitable work. The time pissed away. The investment squandered. The example wholly unrecognized. For as much as people go on about how little they trust others, I can’t think of anything bigger in recent memory that threatened my capacity to trust. What is it all for if you can pour your blood, sweat, and tears into something only to be told the largest benefactors are actually the real victims and I should be lucky to get what I did?

I work. I work really fucking hard. Whether I’m breaking my back sweating to death or wear the weathered resolve of navigating dozens of your problems every week, I’m feeling myself demand more from the systems I don’t feel the right kind of support from. What do I need from them? Take 5% of the fucking time I do trying to keep my shit together to remind yourself what matters, what you can or can’t do, and what’s worth valuing in a dynamic. You think anyone’s going to work as hard for what I want as I did on the house? You think Hussain won’t throw himself off an anxiety cliff if I don’t constantly redirect? You think my family with its incredibly shit track record of emotional accountability and honest discussion is going to just resolve itself?

No, my probably-autistic ass has to cut through the noise and keep the peace and wax poetic in blogs because…I want more? I can check the impulse to expect the wrong things from the forces that will antagonize and test me indefinitely?

William Shatner ends his performance recalling his thoughts upon going into space. He reiterates that we’re specks and going to die and asks several times, “What are we going to do?” to alleviate ourselves of the consequences of climate change. We? We’re not going to do anything. It’s going to have to be assholes like me that have to do it. My task isn’t necessarily climate change at this resolution, but his point is much broader. You’re either stirring up and tending to the familiar drama of your irascible ego and insecurities, or you’re focused on building a broader conception of yourself and your place in the world. Who’s team are you on? Each one I try to join usually only has room for one person who doesn’t even know what fucking game they’re playing.

[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.

[1021] Tribe

I did absolutely nothing to prepare myself for getting back into “work mode” after my trip to Phoenix, so now I’m finding it a bit of a struggle to pull it together to knock out my handful of tasks. I had many times I wished to write in the last few days. The last several times I’ve written it registered as annoying and wasting time and effort repeating myself. A few major themes arose this time though I wish to explore. A general recounting of the trip I also want recorded.

Again, I found myself on a plane. It felt a little less “enlightening” or “liberating” and more “routine” than the one earlier. Flying is fascinating every time, but like all things, you can habituate and take for granted what’s happening. I needed to get to several somewheres for this trip, driving wasn’t going to cut it, so quick trip across the country, and now I’m back home.

“Tribes” came to mind. Bill Maher talks a lot about the tribal nature of the country and our politics, but I don’t know that I let it sink in as deeply as it felt on this trip. We want to belong so deeply. I was listening to some of the people’s conversations around me, and it’s always striking when they talk about the band members like they’re friends. They just use their first names like they’re talking about a brother. They talk about their lives as though they aren’t experiencing them through Instagram updates. There’s this deep connection, seemingly less about whatever band, than just the desire to feel like these people are representing something much more than themselves through their music.

When we talk about “politics” and whether or not our message is “inclusive” enough, I think we somehow completely miss the notion of the tribal identity. Who feels like they belong in the narrative around speech policing and identity games? It’s eggshells and resentment. You know what resonates with tribe members? I, me, mine. “Protecting” whatever abstract notion of things like “freedom” or “the unborn” that you can slap the designator on. Anger and hatred are felt across all tribe members no matter what their political compass might tilt towards. Who do you really feel is on your team? Who’s angry at the same things you are?

Do you know your enemy? When we’re trying to explore what or whether it’s worth getting angry about, things get complicated because we’re not taught to look for a soup of causation. There are many ingredients in the mix that speak to the overall taste and expression. If you want to be indefinitely incensed by abstract “isms” and “ists” you’ll never get to the heart of your issues. If you want to bemoan “poverty” or “injustice” or “inequality” you’re not giving people the specific tools to address how it’s manifesting, not just in their lives, but as a measure of their perception of their lives.

A poor person who grows up poor doesn’t think they’re poor. A rich person who grew up rich doesn’t think they’re selfish and entitled. Dumb people don’t think they’re dumb. Hippies don’t think they smell. It’s never enough to offer soap, “educate,” bemoan what’s “fair,” or talk in terms of a “minimum wage” when it’s all an infinitely abstract and individualized series of perceptional markers. “Hate?” “Hope?” Those win elections. You personally hate or hope for things. You get on the ground and validate, you win.

I don’t care how similar your experience sounds to someone else’s you experience it in the confines of your individual mind. You can get help in how to identify similar trail markers or environmental stimuli, but you have to recognize and choose to walk the path yourself. If you have a strong notion or set of experiences and evidence to suggest how people find that path, your wisdom and insight means nothing if you can’t recognize the nature of the road they’re currently on.

I saw Mest, Zebrahead, and Unwritten Law. The venue was excellent if only because the doors were opened between sets to cool down the room. The crowd was energetic and respectful. There were mosh pits, crowd surfing, free things thrown and collected. I had good tacos at the restaurant portion of the venue. I was first in line, front and center at the stage, and I got there, to the AirBnb, and the airport in timely and safe ways. I had breakfast at an award-winning nationally recognized spot. I got to familiarize myself with a bit of downtown Phoenix and Tempe. It’s about as good of a trip as you could ask for.

I then came up against the ambivalence and disregard of Frontier Airlines. I’m still embroiled in what will almost certainly be a civil suit for the return of $200 they’ve effectively stolen from me. I come off a great trip with a 10+ hour delay keeping me stuck in the Phoenix airport, overpaying to eat, and searching for a way to stay comfortable and plugged in until my flight that was supposed to arrive at 12:30 in the afternoon now ensures I’ll get home at 11:30 PM. I had a decent amount I planned to get done that day, all still pending and contributing to the mental backlog that is preventing me from moving on to my work obligations. The stress of the situation was 5% being made to wait, and 95% the attitude and posture of Frontier.

My tribal principals regarding what’s fair and who should be accountable have been violated. I’m not driven through a persistent uncontrollable rage to try and get my money back, and were I to “let it go,” when I don’t need or want to would functionally enable the continued taking advantage. I didn’t eat enough yesterday, given my wonky schedule and headspace, so combined with the stress of arguing with Frontier, I started getting light-headed and feeling generally “off.” I forgot my keyboard at work, and even drove to work in the first place intending to use the many hours before my first group to do everything I’m hoping to achieve when I get done writing today.

I have the practice and self-awareness to know when, and over what, it’s worth calling it quits. I sent $150 to a guy whose shitty car I was going to buy. He’s poor, excuse-making, and full of shit. I tried, nominally, for a month or so to politely explore how he might return the money for the car that was sent to the junk yard and never received. It’s extremely unlikely I’m getting that money back, and weeks ago I deleted the chat bubble on facebook that was our only means of communicating. That’s a different kind of stupid and impoverished situation. He doesn’t know how poor and dumb he is, nor how badly he smells. I knew I was gambling. I’ve heard the song he was singing from hundreds of similarly situated clients over the years.

The second we stopped bothering to police ourselves in service to the wrong kind of entitled and selfish claims or ownership and self-expression is when we forgot how to dutifully and justifiably punish the obviously objectionable. It’s most frequently a story of “they did” verses “I can.” It’s reflexive and fluid. “He manipulated me! They control the narrative! They’re the ones with the most power!” As though you don’t have a brain or agency. Well, you don’t. You’ve donated it to the dialogue that keeps you disenfranchised and at the lack of mercy from whatever’s not really thinking about you in the first place.

Wherever you go, you can overhear a conversation about a person’s sports team. Mest is from Chicago, and their lead singer spoke of the Bears’ first draft pick for doing so terribly. He’s as much in his punk-rock tribe as he is his sports team’s tribe. The bouncers were discussing the fate of, I forget what teams were competing in the playoffs, but I think they were close enough to Phoenix. The trivia nerds playing on the patio outside of the venue overwhelmingly answered that Larry Bird played for The Lakers. We’re constantly indicating what tribes we do and don’t belong to. Even when we’re wholly not part of it, we know which one is closest or what we’d default to if cornered. We’re disinclined to access that which unites independent of our familiarity or preferences.

I wish I had a bigger tribe. I wish I had more in common with people than where we were from or that we saw the same TV show. I wish I had people who I could dedicate my effort to enabling and they were inclined to reciprocate. Instead, we all generally get walled off into our own worlds. I’m not downplaying or denying the impact the friends and connections I have in my life, but I see it in our dynamics as well. I’m very lucky to ever get someone on board to come to a show. I’m almost never called to come join whatever someone else is doing. They’re either not doing anything, or we’re just not in that kind of tribe, if we’re really in one altogether. I’m not suggesting they aren’t “maintaining their family” or “defending their stability and status quo,” but I talk to enough people in a regular way who make literally no time for themselves to enjoy, indulge, decompress, or even acknowledge there’s a world beyond the bounds of their stress and obligations. I would literally invite everyone I remotely liked to everything I ever do, just as I did with the party house. I’d be right back here whining about how they’re all too tired, busy, poor, or more into “their tribe’s music” to enjoy anything about the show we might head to.

People in my tribe might be kind of bored if invited to a football game, but would recognize an opportunity to drink more or make funny comments, people watch, and spend time with their friend. People in my tribe are looking to build and experience. That’s the prevailing character trait of Hussain, Byron, and Hatsam. They’ve contributed to growth and building things up or creating something new. Where others talk, they do, or did. You make the best of the ongoing shit sandwich of life or your options. You acknowledge the absurdity, dig that much deeper, and come out mangled but self-assured about what you’re capable of. I can walk to the top of mountains. My former tribe apparently plagued by the idea of how I must not be enjoying myself.

What are you using your tribes for? To self-validate like a basic politician getting you to agree to what you already agree with and stay blind to the consequences of their votes? Does your desire to belong lead you down paths that I tripped all over in trying to befriend the wrong characters? Do you pretend your favorite team or band feels connected to you and your details like you might in hoarding and reciting information about them? You’re just a person first, and they’re just a player. Are you capable of recognizing what they’re playing? Are you willing to see what you’re playing at?

[1019] No Accounting For Taste

Oh boy, I’m back home. I wasn’t gone for terribly long, but long enough to register the contrast between feeling perpetually “stuck” and “waiting” otherwise engaged in responsibilities and less-than-fulfilling thoughts and exercising the illusion of freedom with a friend over drinks, mini golf, and delicious food.

I come home to a stained bathroom. I broke the handle on my sink faucet when it was frozen before I left. When it got warm, eruptive chaos ensued. It appeared to Byron who came upon the mess that the flow of water was dangerously close to the space heater I had running in an attempt to ensure the cats’ water stayed unfrozen. I get to imagine whether it would have simply shorted out and blown a breaker, or burned everything down.

 

The GFCI outlet that popped, wisely insisted upon by Jim, housed the series of extensions that power my refrigerator. It was off long enough to have many sticky things melt, leaving a mess that I haven’t even entertained the thought of when to bother addressing. The spewing water drenched the cat food and isn’t suitable to drink, so today I’ve been finding puke and shit leaks on various parts of the floor. It’s all feeling a little Final Destination-y.

 

My friend Brandy in Orlando is perhaps the easiest person I can talk to about an array of topics that have nothing to do with social work. I had to pause several times and point out how much I appreciated that we were able to talk about shows we’ve seen or when music and musicians have found us at different periods in our lives. She’s a doctor and teacher, so I got insight into college students from freshman through grad school, as well as university politics. We fluidly made reference to dozens of authors, speakers, thinkers, and creatives and didn’t miss a beat with those awkward dead/polite faces you catch from people who don’t independently seek out new information or interesting things to learn about.

 

She’s one of those people who are so smart it’s easy to feel crazy and ask yourself too many “how” and “why” questions because you can’t quite wrap your head around the general ignorance and depravity of the world you’re made to navigate. We’re able to speak freely regarding our relationships and perspectives and how to pragmatically achieve greater happiness and stability. She’s as powerful an example as I could have asked for as far as reminders that we’re never really stuck, and when you’re willing to assess and move on your situation, you can do an immense amount of work, emotional or otherwise, in short order.

 

It’s New Years Eve. We’re prompted to think about the past year and what we want going forward. I want more structure. I am in less debt than I was last year. I am in an easier job. I’ve got more things already bought and on the menu book wise and by way of entertainment. I’ve got more things to fix and pay for regarding my home environment, and a more concerted effort to tackle them. The things I’m doing by way of indulgence still register with a degree of superficiality. That is, it’s great that I can afford the concert, but I’m still in regular need of Byron’s or Planet Fitness’s shower. I bought a car off Hussain that added another 2 weeks to my “have to work” narrative. My health insurance is about avoiding fines, not insuring health.

 

I put together a list of people to cold-call regarding looking for clients. It’s 800+ numbers long. Flying from Indianapolis to Orlando, it was another nice visceral reminder of just how many people there are. Thousands you can see at once along highways. City-centers lit up. Every single person is a world unto themselves and they are connected to everyone else in big and small ways in an infinitely changing and dynamic landscape. I thought to myself about the power and impact of music and celebrity when I looked over the landscape. How many of those little dots have never heard of Adam Sandler or Tom Hanks? If I blasted “We Are the Champions” from the plane, I bet everyone could sing along. There’s a universality that you can bolster your behavior with to access that which connects everything. It’s why fascism will always be an option. “Hate” transcends every little point of light. The work you can do with the ambiguity towards the unknown remains the same.

 

In the span of a few hours I went from a beautiful day with great company and an excellent meal to the rain and gray and psychological trappings of Florida’s insecure twin, Indiana. Florida has all of the same stores, but also higher-end and better ones. It has the same people, but the crazy is more diverse. You need distance from what you’re used to as often as you can get it. The things that need to remain true and what you’re really after need to shine brightly and be just as obvious to you as it should be to clean up where the cat took a shit outside the box.

 

I know who and what I want to trust and why. I know that if I’ve been led to hell through someone else’s negligence, ambivalence, or malice, it wasn’t because I lead with a judgmental or spiteful attitude in my attempt to connect or build. The friends who I can continue to engage in the mutually assuring and uplifting exchange massively outweigh the baggage of the ones who can’t be bothered. It’s a state of perpetual mourning when you think about how vital that is to your well-being and how callously it’s been rendered mute or worthy of resentment.

 

I’ve never wanted to be the person who’s like, “I’ve got A-level friends, B-level friends….” Etc. I’ve discussed being “on the level,” to be sure, but that’s about an awareness and capacity more than how much or whether I want to bother with you as an individual. I clearly don’t need friends where we have much in common besides work or a shared disposition even if I’ve been starving for years to talk to another encyclopedia. I’m going to keep doing things. I’m going to try to return to a kind of deliberate enthusiasm for more grindy type of things that will hopefully make me feel more stable.

 

It occurred to me that I had the energy, and probably still do, to give and receive from considerably more than most are prepared to. This analysis prompted some by the various pathologies associated with those in the poly community. I don’t “need” anything I’m unwilling to work in order to achieve for myself. I’ll fly or drive to the friends that are worth it. I have an incredibly robust understanding of the character traits I respect and need to see reciprocated in order to thrive. I draw a deep and resounding enthusiasm from the opportunity to spend time with them. That’s not something to be squandered and begged for. That’s not something to be afraid and ashamed of as though some petty slight or pithy detail, floating above so many ant-like figures from a plane, should be the governing rule.

 

What I can’t fix, at least yet, is people recognizing for themselves the same potential freedom and what the work looks like to orient as though you’re not at the mercy of your circumstances. You’re too busy? You’re too tired? You don’t have the money? If you’re reading this, you have at least one friend who has the proclivity to create worlds where the opposite is true. But what’s that really mean if you’re not friend enough to yourself to even recognize what’s being offered?

[1012] Swing Life Away

I’m so confused. The other day, I envisioned myself hanging from one of my ceiling 2x4s and writing a facebook status, “Bye, can someone please grab the cats?” I’m not suicidal, but I let my curiosity and taboo orientation ride the thought waves to see if I’ll be “moved” or “jarred” one way or another. The takeaway is that thinking about that made me feel nothing. It was just a thought. It didn’t instruct. It didn’t cause fear. I don’t feel guilty. There I am, just dangling, and then a smirk slowly starts to appear at the idea that, you know, this is really about the cats and making sure they’re okay.

I’m more confused by what, if anything, my “purpose” is. I know I have to make my own decisions and own each moment I’m alive. I know there’s a certain gratification and sense of being/belonging in helping others. I don’t mean to echo too loudly the sentiment of a forlorn teen. I just mean that I’m built a certain way. My truck hauls things a regular car can’t. It’s built to. I’m built in a way that can contemplate tragedy and crisis in detached and pragmatic ways. I’m built in a way that voraciously consumes and aggregates information. I’m quick. I’m well-rehearsed.

My grandparents, if nothing else, worked. They worked to survive. My aunts and uncles all had/have jobs, made it through school. If we reduce the concept of “work” to “made money,” you can better account for their pathological and selfish behavior. Money keeps the bills paid, work keeps the house clean, discipline keeps you in line with the disciplinarian right up until they die or their power is usurped. “Work” is the common refrain for dictating orientation and purpose. You work to provide for your family. You work to distinguish yourself…at work. You work because no one is going to work for you, particularly in your faux representative democracy.

I discuss work often in how I do counseling. You don’t just show up, take your medicine, and blithely check in each week. You have to practice learning how to identify your feelings. You have to practice patience. You have to train your sense of responsibility and ownership. This takes existential-level work that your clients aren’t just bad at, but have literally been using substances to a degree that it perhaps cripples their ability to ever discover how. What, then, are we to say about the nature, purpose, or impact of their work?

I’m 34. In that time, I’ve worked hard enough on at least one instrument to have proven myself capable of performing techniques at one point in my life I would have described as “godlike.” I’ve worked to learn about the world to the point where I was spending thousands of dollars trying to build a website to organize and sort it all to become something useful for connecting and finding patterns. I’ve worked 3 jobs at once and 20-hour days for several years. I’ve worked 4 times longer in a role that burns people out routinely and would have stayed were it not for shit management. I’ve scrubbed the fuck out of a bathroom caked in grime of a mentally unwell client. I’ve created and ran a coffee shop, party house, done well in school, and been a person who has averaged reading more than a book a day. I’ve transported thousands of bricks and built out my house. I’ve hauled scrap, tires, pallets and torn down barns. I’ve been management and general labor. I’ve remodeled a house. I’ve been a part of a winning sports team and a jazz band. I’m working in counseling while trying to get my own business running.

I’ve scratched the surface. In that time I’ve also watched thousands of TV episodes, hundreds of movies, and dicked around, literally, or in days spent in the fog of “I’m not doing enough” or “Where to now?” or “Wanna spend hours driving around until we land somewhere to eat?” I’ve had 3 serious-enough relationships, entire weeks spent by the pool, and thousands wasted or gambled on less than meaningful pursuits. I’ve been to well over 100 concerts, dozens of comedy shows and several theme parks. I’ve beaten as completely possible that it is to beat 50 or so video games and spent as many or more hours playing them socially.

Almost never does it feel like “enough.” There’s work, forever, on whatever you choose, but the times I felt like anything I was doing mattered, whether it was drinking to oblivion or doing something around the house, was when I thought it was shared.

I’m confused because I don’t know what’s been shared. I don’t appear in pictures with most of the people I knew in college, let alone high school outside of a yearbook. My relationships appear to have been overwhelmingly built on a combination of naivety and “romantic” notions of who I am or what it means to be together. No matter what I watch, read, or play I’m not in some active conversation or exploration of the topic. I’m still the kid at dinner trying to tell his exhausted and disinterested mom about his day and getting shut down. Were we sharing a meal back then, or was she obligated to feed us?

I’m thankful for Hussain in sharing the struggle of getting the business started. I’m thankful I get to add “home renovator” via Byron to my list of accomplishments for every infuriating and baffling piece of crazy that has fucked that project. I will always boast about my partnership with Hatsam and the support our parents gave us. Friends certainly contributed back then. What was it to? Whether it was the shop or the parties, who was really there?

I’ve all-but stopped writing goofy paragraphs on old friends timelines for their birthdays. We’re not going to call each other. It doesn’t mean anything more or less to them than the unwashed uncapitalized mass “happy birthday” messages from the other veritable strangers. Anymore there’s several I’m convinced would be confused and offended I even bothered. What do I make of the time together? What do I allow myself to be convinced of about the nature of the friendship or words exchanged? Is it a measure of “wisdom” to maintain a kind of military-detachment that expects you or them to ship out or die at any moment?

I don’t seem to understand what I’m built for. If I bring everyone together to party and celebrate, I’m actually the target for scorn and resentment. If I reach out first, second, or a seventh and fifteenth time, now I’m a borderline creep or disingenuous puppy who can’t register it’s been abandoned. If I focus on learning and nerd shit, who cares? I’m not figuring out a way to get paid for what I know and the slurry of Patreon professionals are barely skirting by producing content every day and appearing on TV. I can’t persuade myself to take music seriously enough to sacrifice anything in service to again reaching my heights. Even if I’ve created for myself an adult playground with tools and space, I come up against some hard limits in the weather, time, budget, and tolerance for risk and pain while occupying the middle of nowhere.

I’m told, pretty regularly, about my capacity for building rapport and trust. I’ve watched people light up that they get to keep me as a counselor when they change group times. I’ve been told I can be talked to and seem like I really care in a way others don’t. I’ve watched the disappointment and anger as I’ve switched roles or the fear that I’m more abandoning you than saving myself. I’m not high on my own supply of self-serving narrative bullshit. I have a particular, high-powered, and special or different use. I can only seem to find it working in service to things that take advantage of me or treat me like a threat to what’s understood as a “normal” or “decent” way of existing. I can be really good at building trust and being encouraging, and line the pockets of a company that won’t provide insurance that covers the contacts in both of my eyes. I can give away the space to pursue dreams and create and be yelled at and looked at with ongoing suspicion about what I really want.

Even if I figured out what I was built for, who am I working for? An abstract notion of “the youth” and “their future?” I’m well past the point of believing I can “help” any fucking moron who has made a career of avoiding responsibility or bothering to define words. I can’t “save” you from yourself nor single-handedly fix my environment or problems of communication any better than an entitled billionaire.

Is this what I’m here for? Am I to keep reporting on the relative futility of it all? Am I just meant to watch and record as I confirm under different conditions how useless my hands and brain really are upon subjection to the infinite spin of errant interpretation and superficial relationships? What am I fucking doing? My best guess is “trying to amass money.” After that? Eat. Travel around and look for a remote sense of security. Build something, maybe better, maybe just more headaches, and keep people from…hurting themselves? Feeling victimized once more? News flash, I could have the best business in the world and you know what it can’t do? Make people pick up the phone, show up, or recognize anything about what it took to create.

You can’t help others if you can’t help yourself. I have no idea how to “help myself” be less suspicious about how or whether I’m capable of finding and maintaining meaningful relationships. Useful ones, sure. If your investment in me is on your terms, it’s not an investment in me. It’s not a recognition of me. I don’t exist beyond a narrative fixture in a fantasy. I wasn’t looking for a “wife” or “girlfriend,” and still aren’t. I cared about the people and what they wanted to do. I wanted to help and give and invest, and I can’t really explain how persistently that was denied and thrown back in my face. At the moment I might start to suspect that I could be a positive or consistent good in someone’s life, they pull out, and I’m a laundry list of problems and gaps and not-enoughs.

The “healthiest” relationships I could point to do a fucking circus extravaganza of not seriously discussing or fixing areas of contention. The overall sense of companionship or stability trumps the work and devastating consequences of battling things out. That’s the rule. Keep the image alive. Don’t race to the bottom where neither of you will find peace or solidarity in sharing a truth more precious than the most accessible and translatable narrative. Keep the sunglasses on your black eye teeth beaming pictures. Stay busy and distracted so you can better forget there was ever a smell coming from the basement at all.

We build families of this stuff. We’ve built entire nations on empty notions codified in anecdotes and lore. What do you win for speaking to that? Exile from the nation. Even if you play along, you don’t feel safe. Your soul no longer belongs to them. Any tenuous truce between your perspective and their power over you can get shattered in an instant. My uncles stole my grandmother’s house when she died and cut me out of the will. Do I isolate from them, be rude at Thanksgiving, and watch the proceeds of its sale when they die get sent to the church? Do I hurt and disappoint my dad who loves his brothers and his sons and just wants peace and prosperity for us all? Do I mock and practice ingratitude for the intangible things my grandparents have given me, their examples still being talked about now?

So I can mediate a crisis between you and the State, or between you and a problem you don’t have the time or notion on how, but perhaps intention to figure out, or with myself when it comes to a physical activity, socializing foray, or hobby preoccupation, but not within my thieving or leaching family. Got it, universe. I can invite a conversation about any given line from a digression like this, and I’m only going to catch those perfectly unwilling to quote, focus, or bother to do really any work to understand what was actually said or grasp the sentiment offered more than incoherently shit their feelings and demand I see and trust they know more than me. I can spend hundreds of hours on a given preoccupation or thinker and in seconds they, and I, will be caricatured.

Is that friendly? Am I just being impatient and “too serious” in wanting to get as far away from that crazy-making behavior as possible? If I’m feeling isolated or antsy, and I join the sports team where everyone smokes, drinks, and is overweight, am I in the wrong for feeling like I still don’t fit in? If I discuss the lengths I go to approach the myriad problems I might identify, can you begin to understand how isolating it is when you’re met with that look like a dog who’s waiting for you to drop something for them to eat? Like you’re speaking Chinese or talking about moving grains of sand one at a time across a vast distance.

There I dangle. My environment kills me. It’s often by design, but mostly through negligence. It’s a silence that crushes my head and restricts my heart and punctures ears. It’s a look, so infused, by the layers of dream-work laid over the necessary shoveling I’m discussing. It’s the void behind your eyes betrayed by the fear, anger, and sadness. The people I “counsel” are overwhelmingly terrified of me. They shrink if we meet in person. They say “hey” and grab what they need and leave. It’s not “me,” of course, they’re reacting to. It’s how they feel. It’s why they became addicted. It’s why they’re tuning in, to the extent they are, to what I have to say and not the other way around. That’s the ongoing tragedy. I’ll be read as some smug or proud braggart by someone who feels just like them who’ll gleefully skip past the invitation to own and explore how they’ve weaponized their weakness and victimhood.

I’ve said too much. Who was this for? It’s 4:04 AM and I’ve got to get a nap in before gearing up to head north for Thanksgiving. I’m just kidding, I know who it’s for. All of the blogs, always, are for me. Because I’m the only one who can give me what I need. I have to find the words or reason to keep playing along while I otherwise swing in the breeze. I’m thankful I don’t want to die, but I’m still incredibly confused about what I’m supposed to live for when I feel like you’d prefer it if I were dead. Not everyone, just almost everyone who’s gotten to know me. I’m also thankful I thrive on spite.

[1008] Big Gulp

I feel like a tea time chat. It happened again, as it often does. I’m “technically” on the clock and at work. I’ve had one group today, and my next is at 5. This “in between time,” is often an anxiety-inducing affair. What, exactly, am I doing? Today, as the first rumbles of stomach-dropping started, I had the thought that I was “experiencing the reality of my full potential.” It immediately calmed my gut. Wait, what? I felt all of my possible choices and like I could perfectly well engage in any of them. It was excitement at the prospect of experiencing the reality of any number of consequences, and knowing it wouldn’t matter.

Say, for example, I up and quit my job. I know exactly what I’d be doing with my time. I know how full I would feel diving into the layers of what it takes to get this counseling operation running. I can go eat, or watch TV, or pretend I have enough tasks to eat up my time with spreadsheets and outreach. All of it, ultimately, doesn’t matter, at least it won’t impede me moving forward in the ways I would argue I prefer. I can’t move any faster or slower than I’ve been. Each time I’ve been presented with an opportunity to make a meaningful step forward, I’ve taken it. I have no reason to worry outside of the general random tragedy of life and how it may impact me at all times.

I can’t get that insight or phrasing unless I experience the anxiety first. An incorrect goal would be to say something like “I never want to feel like this again.” I think we haphazardly set ourselves up for failure with ill-conceived sentiments like that. If only, it was imagined, I wasn’t depressed or anxious. If only all of these variables weren’t. When you do that, you can’t weaponize your feeling into a viscerally felt and actionable stability. My so-named “anxiety” is the consequence of my training myself not to just be excruciatingly angry all the time. That mild “tickle” about competing courses of action is power. I’m aware first, then it can be a blog or cold call, or follow-up.

I really do want to quit. It’s for all the reasons I state often. It’s not mine, it’s not on my timeline, it’s not the kind of challenge that will beget growth or a sense of pride and dignity. It doesn’t pay enough for my ambition. It’s building more immoral behavior into its base of operations regularly. If I quit today I’ll owe my hostage-taking company two grand. I haven’t actually received any money from submitted claims yet. The practical reality of a paycheck continues to overtake many disgruntled lists. But I could quit, and that power is anxiety-inducing. When I get moments where I entertain how to navigate the consequences of doing so, I’m anxious about the credible confidence I have in my capacity to pull it off.

I feel like that sentiment harks all the way back to when and why I first started writing. In turning over how people engaged in shitty relationships, I inevitably shined upon how I could manipulate and under what circumstances it would feel more or less appropriate to do so. My awareness and ability to do so lends itself to being aberrantly good at things like DCS assessment and counseling. I know what makes me tick, so I know what makes you tick, even if you never quite land on language you would espouse as confidently. I also continue to learn that the moment I lay too far off a manipulation, you tend to use that room to hang both myself and you.

We could look at my business partnership. I don’t have to talk Hussain into working himself to death. He had that complex before I ever met him. I do have to be a cheerleader. I have a certain confidence that in his world might feel more like a desperate need. No matter how good a job he does or how hard he works, he has a gaping hole that needs to be filled with his effort and definitely not his father’s money. I trust his capacity to work even harder than me. I have to persistently counsel that he take time for himself and feel good about each tangible step we move in the positive direction. He knows we’ll get there because he’ll cut it out of your chest if necessary (or, his own, he’s a nice guy.) I know we’ll get there because we both weaponize our different types of pathological working behavior into tangible results.

Is it malicious or bad to recognize how he works? No. Were I to task him with “doing everything” because I know he would drive himself insane in order to do so would be. Is it manipulative to lean into my strengths when it comes to logistics or paperwork or contract formation? The moment I use that power to cheat him out of money or engage in some kind of hostile takeover it would be. We have our lanes, and they are both necessary for a successful operation. It doesn’t help either of us for me to be naïve about what I am or am not good at, nor downplay what power I do or don’t have. That’s why the design and distribution of power needs to be an exchange, not a grab, or a lust, or a desperate stumbling into.

I have the power to keep the peace, redirect the conversation, and hijack your brain. It’s literally my job. I prove to myself how much I can throw you into a place of self-reflection regularly. I can walk you down the road of questions you haven’t asked yourself in a specific order to draw a specific conclusion. I’m asking myself the same things, and humanity has been asking them since the beginning of the capacity to do so. If and when you experience the same kind of anxiety, accurately described or not, what happens? You use? You deny? You cut? You get distracted? You otherwise engage in some automatic addictive behavior to suppress?

I remember some moments of my life for their outsized capacity to speak so loudly. I remember when I literally, bodily, couldn’t be persuaded to be as “down” or “depressed” as I had been in high school. In the middle of The Will to Power, I just stopped reading, like Forrest stopped running, and stopped conceiving of myself in the way that was driving my desire to wind up reading things like The Will to Power. I remember consciously deciding that problems did not need to include yelling. I remember when that started feeling like a choice. I remember when it stopped feeling like “someone” or “something” “out there” was going to “fix” literally anything and my trust eroded. A sense of agency and intention are trained skills, not divinely bestowed nor an entitlement of any vague semblance of consciousness.

Almost every day I hear a story from someone describing “what happened to them.” It’s incredibly rare that the story identifies more than one place where the person might have intervened beyond at the end, and rarer that the intervention is necessarily healthy. We’re always picking up the pieces. We’re describing after-the-fact our later impression of what happened, instead of waking up to the moment and choosing a path. “My mom yelled at me for an hour!” What? Why not in second 5 did you not say “I won’t be yelled at,” and leave? Why did you “fix” that situation by cutting yourself, inducing a calm, so you could sit back down to be yelled at for another hour? This, and more, are the literal realities people share about their experience of time and decision making. What’s your personal analogue?

I’m not blind to the fact that I don’t just “want” to find more people to hang out with, it’s a necessary mitigation of my awareness. I don’t want to be corrupted by my power or singular window. I see it happen in bits and spurts whether it’s in some indulgent spending or conversational liberties towards the pliable. I need exchange. I need shaping as much as I can shape. I know people “adjust” themselves around me, just like I tailor my engagement professionally. But that’s what I hoped to avoid in donning the “friend” moniker to people and letting them run wild. That’s my persistent appeals to hang out with my otherwise preoccupied crowd that doesn’t so much conduct themselves like the college people. That’s my striving to create big and powerful entities that can operate by principles that no individual can tend to be trusted with indefinitely.

It's voting season. I can’t trust everyone I know to do so. I can’t trust my neighbors, the people I counsel, or those currently at any level of power, to not be literal fascists. My “power” in the context of any given crazed and irrational individual is immediately humbled and reduced if not for a shared exchange of an awareness of the problem and institutionalized accountable ongoing mitigation of the consequences. Whether that “institution” is the company I try to create or the relationships we build, it’s not a mere discardable artifact of an otherwise meaningful and purpose-driven existence. It’s a necessary component that needs nourishment and defended. It’s an awareness of what matters and why so we’re not driven by marketing, trauma, and blind fearful ignorance.

Each stomach drop is conceiving of “the whole world,” mine, yours, and the one we can occupy tomorrow, depending on my next keystroke, phone call, or deliberate pause. It’s not a power you should ever get too comfortable using, and it’s not a power I want kept to myself. I also can’t pretend that everyone is entitled to it or can use it responsibly. Most lottery winners blow through the funds in a few years. We’ve hit the historical lottery, country of origin lottery, monetary lottery, and often genetic lottery, and we’re teetering on indefinite self-destruction. What’s missing from our awareness? What’s your move when you feel that anxiety-inducing sense of power and obligation?