[977] Idle Stands

I wonder what I would be like were I to grow comfortable with idle time.

I’ve gotten my first peaks into the practical obligations of my new job. I can’t pretend I have some genuine “enthusiasm” for it. The same conditions about how or why I am inclined to “help” people are in play. I’m still in this teeter. Will I get the call tomorrow that we’re working for DCS? Will disability accept our rounded and refined application, opening the door to thousands a week with a handful of clients? Do I need to make one more concerted push to “work myself to death” for the next 6 months or so before I’ve allocated or organized in a way that after 18 years I’ll have stumbled into “passive” income?

I had a solid weekend. I played volleyball. I saw a decent comedy show. I drank with a friend, talked to strangers that bought me shots, and was apparently getting hit on by a former client I am in no way interested in complicating my professional standing over. If I could have managed to feel a little less tired and hungover, the next day would have spelled grilled delicious food and more company. I’m trying to remind myself that I’m already living some version of it.

But the time is still idle. It’s 2:15 AM on Tuesday, and I don’t care if I’m drowsy in the morning because so little is being asked of me. If I want to keep paying the bills, this is the task. I didn’t use any portion of the day to continue building, not because I was busy before my 2:00 PM Zoom meeting, but because I am expected to be available and responding to emails as though my salary is justified. I’ve managed to hit TV-watching levels akin to when I was doing drug studies.

I’ve considered reevaluating my goals. My major hang-up remains an inability to respect attempting to do less than I already am. Can I really not just enjoy myself? Or am I allowing ingratiated anxiety dictate? I know it’s easier to conceive of my place when I pull back and see myself on the continuum or journey. I know it’s about the nature of your work more than the award or next purchase. I guess I’d just like to see the dividends more often.

Unless I’m right in the middle of shit, I can’t know the outcome. I don’t know if the words I said or impression I left reverberates like I’d like. I’m not content to tout my title or field and cross my arms that by default I care or am doing something meaningful. I want to feel like there’s some kind of robust and perpetuating fix or creation that’s recognized as worth protecting. I don’t know if I exist around the psychological makeup for that to be possible. That is, money will perpetuate; familiar and connected legacy institutions will too. Are they any good? Do we have the tools to evaluate and hold accountable?

It’s an extremely uncomfortable position to hold that most people seem perfectly happy to not think. I see an immense chasm between doing whatever’s in front of you to survive, and thinking about it. I appreciated the sentiment from a meth-addicted person from one of the Louis Theroux documentaries I just watched. “When you’re deep in your addiction, there is no choice. When you been clean for a little while, then you can choose.”

I choose to go about my capture with little debt gambles, hobby and food indulgences, and increasingly gas and entertainment. These still take precedence over any contribution to charity, and well before your ill-fated political campaign. There’s something about my ego and priorities that wants lawn seats for a band I barely know before I try to “fix” some bigger issue. This is a ridiculous framing of who’s hurting, what exists to help, and whether it does, but the disconnect is there. All of our actions, charitable or indulgent, exist contradictory to the suggestion there’s any collective will or wisdom guiding them. It all boils down to whether or not I feel good or bad about myself. But what’s good and bad in ever-isolated, ambivalent, and arbitrary environments?

It confuses me sometimes when I hear thoughtful people talk about the statistical unlikeliness of getting shot in school. To remain silent or stuck on how we ever arrived at a place where that’s the topic of conversation, let alone the meat chunks those children were blown into, I think is about as large of a cultural sin as you can commit. How many things have to fail for extended periods of time before the “start” of the conversation is, “It’s hopeless, let’s arm Mrs. Gipp.” None of us could be doing, saying, thinking, entreating, showing up, organizing, brainstorming, or investigating in this idle time?

I feel like a crazy person. I know facebook isn’t the hot platform, but I think out of 56 people, 3? Maybe had anything to say about Uvalde? It’s old news. It’s not really anything to do with today’s problems in my life and my state. I can’t help, fix, or say what hasn’t already been said. It is what it is. Let’s laugh off the continued march towards fascism, so 15 minutes after the midterms when AR-15s become standard issue at the beginning of the school year (to threaten raped classmates thinking they were about to abort) we can exclaim about the absurdity, injustice, and horror we never saw coming.

Maybe I haven’t talked about it for a while, but you know what I really want a lot of money for? I want to build teams to utilize data and organize around the principles I’m trying to bring to the land. I want to know every single office up for election, how it operates, and who’s trying to fuck with it. I want to know the most efficient door-knocking routes and send people along them 15 times until everyone’s been reached. I want to have the busses that get people to polls. I want to have small oasis that are off-grid and working on power dynamics that can grow independent of the chaos. I don’t want to wait idly at some institution indefinitely until I rise to a level of incidental power. I want to actively beat the fuck out of what exists and see it change NOW.

I can’t do it hovering over my email. I can’t do it with whiny naïve and entitled faux-Left activists pretending their version of screaming at the machine works like the Tea Party and Nazis. I can’t do it with some personal cache of information dumps and spreadsheets. I can’t do it when my air dies and truck needs work. I can’t do it alone. It can’t be done just because I think it would work or I draw on lessons and history. It can’t be done because we don’t treat ourselves as though we’re worth the fight. We won’t do the work to account. You literally won’t even talk to me.

On and on I’ll opine about my TV shows, not ours, not that they’re making us think or share anything. I’ll work my half-dozen projects. I’ll collect my bricks. I’ll encourage addicts and the poor to refrain from killing themselves too quickly. And we’ll all hold our collective breath as the water rises. I mean, we’ll probably get by. We’ve got networks and money. We’re educated. Things can get so much worse before we really have to do or say anything.

[975] Mo Mo Mo

I need to spend some time thinking about my motivation. In no way will I be able to synthesize the thoughts before now because I’ve passed up at least 3 times I probably should have started writing.

I do things, often enough, after being backed into a corner. I create debt for myself so I can get a “real job” and provide the justification to submit myself to the pain that entails. I might physically exhaust myself on some task so I can shake off the “I’m not doing enough” feeling. I create these kind of high-stakes social dynamics that pit your sense of cordial duty against my righteous indignation, so by the time we’ve disassociated, I don’t have to pretend there’s a bridge worth repairing.

I had a lot of energy when I was in high school, college, and right after college, to push an incredibly strong notion of “excelling.” It could be attached to anything. I could take pride in the sheer amount of TV I was able to watch, or the efficiency with which I made money doing drug studies. Academically, the designation of “A” had lost its muster, so I tested how A/B-ish I could be with the least amount of effort possible, and I decided to get really good at partying. I was pumping a certain kind of psychologically gratifying, albeit arbitrary, stats. Who cares if I can go from zero to coffee shop in 4 months? Just me.

I seem to do things in a disproportionate way, just not precisely the things I’d really rather be doing. When I get the chance to do what I’d rather be doing, the rules of life are still at play. This speaks to an underlying motivation at play at all times. I want to exist in a way that renders those life circumstances mute. I want to always have the money, the time, or the help. I can’t change the weather, but I can build a considerable amount indoors. If there’s a rule that would stop me, I want to have the means to undermine or circumvent it. This could also be a complicated way of describing the drive towards creative self-expression.

The desire to accomplish “small” things plays by more viscerally practical rules. I almost never leave trash laying around. Shit’s in the way. I don’t have a lot of space, and I don’t want shit in the way. I may dawdle on doing dishes because until they’re in the way of me eating or making food, they’re where dirty dishes belong. When you own a house, something’s always broken or missing, but it gets ridiculous to think that you’ll account for it all in every moment you notice that the milk is low or bugs’ nest isn’t easily accessible. There’s less “do it now” with those things, and they get grouped for weekends or those days where you’re just really into getting things done.

I was listening to a Sam Harris podcast, and he brought up how we’re always looking for the next thing, living in this illusion that obtaining it will make us happy. I was watching a Louis Theroux documentary as a compulsive millionaire gambler blew through hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a few days. I’ve noticed the eyes of the bewitched with their hollow desperate and craving emptiness for recognition of their suffering when their persona wears thin. I suppose I’m lucky to have maintained a kind of motivation to not end up perpetually in that state.

I don’t like to feel bad. This may seem like a weird thing to have to state so plainly. I think it’s important to do so though. It’s more than obvious. I don’t like to feel bad so much, that I will write for years until I feel a little bit better. I don’t like to feel bad to such a degree, that I will work myself to death to ensure the thoughts in my head align with a decent-to-exceptional conception of myself. I might habitually bite off more than I can chew, but I took the bite, and I’m still chewing. The moment I felt what rolfing could do for my physical well-being, that money was gone. My food budget is so high because the shittiest I tend to feel is when I haven’t eaten enough. Again, we could describe this as being up against a kind of pain-threshold wall.

When I think about how we evolve, it’s selection pressure. What is the environment selecting for? What genes are being activated under the current constraints? If we talk about different “classes” and the cultures they entail, is it down to the biology that iterating obnoxious selfishness plays out in superficially different ways? You can complain about black-on-black violence as a loud example, but how many people suffer and die as a result of greed? Why is greed good in rich culture? The environment dictates the conditions for remaining in said environment. You might not consider yourself rich, certainly not Bezos-rich, so the nature of your greed, familiar, common, is hardly noticed. You’ve got an HOA to answer to, and you earned your privacy fence.

I’ve removed a lot of the walls in my journey through this shed-life thing. It’s sweltering outside, and cool in here. I’m still inconvenienced in my bathroom and kitchen setups, but I’m not flinging shit out the window nor going hungry. All of my effort to build more is in service to creating new corners to get backed into. I have the tools, now they need a home. If they’re not running, why did I buy the tools? Indefinite hobby and selective guilt await. If I think someone is special or unique, well, surely, they deserve my effort to create something cool! I get to take it a step further. If I don’t dictate, complicate, or imbue my work into a larger context, I just sit and wait for things to happen. I refresh facebook and reddit. I marathon TV and don’t think too hard about the gross juxtaposition of “marathon” and “TV.”

It’s been insufferably hot lately. You think I’m building my workshop in that? I already barely drink enough water or eat right, let alone wear sunscreen or generally go about things that would suggest to you I don’t like to feel bad. If I feel faint upon opening the door, game over for that idea. Are there things that need to be done indoors? Kinda, but no, not really. If I choose to rearrange the furniture again, it’s hard to say what’s been accomplished beyond it feeling good to pretend exercise and experience the different room flow.

This is a restatement that the vast majority of my “problems” are, not. I’m not a jaded and broken millionaire feeding machines hundred-dollar bills, but I’m also not a millionaire. I’m not cripplingly sick or in mental turmoil, but I don’t have health insurance. I know how to swim, I’m not drowning, but the only race I’m in is against death, which serious as it might sound, I can’t win.

I really do feel like I have made a concerted effort over time to be okay with whatever “this” moment is. I affirm my health, wealth, comfort, kitties, conveniences, computers, and capacity for compartmentalizing my competing conceptions. It doesn’t take away from my desire to proverbially “take over the world,” but it does mean I don’t suffer the anxiousness or depressive guilt by not “excelling” via being busy or “above” in my concerns for how I’m spending my time. If I had millions of dollars right now, you know what I’d probably still be? Alone. It might be with someone(s) happy to spend my money with me in the next room of fancier architecture in a distant locale, but people I consign to my larger goals would be just that, paid for.

Part of me feels like that’s an incredibly real scenario because of how hard it’s been to get people to join, with weeks or months-notice or otherwise, what I’ve been up to. I do have friends and my dad who are down, it’s not a desert in spite of what the weather suggests. But I’ve had people kind of flirt with the idea of spending time together or doing stuff. I’m not their priority, which is perfectly fine, it just naturally translates that will continue to hold whether I’m inviting you to Fiji or a comedy show. You’ll have a life and obligations that I’m supposed to what? Pay you to put aside like any good capitalist?

It feels like I’m talking about that sneaking suspicion we all might have that there really is no “our” page, goal, or reality. That doesn’t mean reality won’t kill us all the same or that we don’t rhyme, but it does heartily explain the appeal of religion. You don’t want to go through a series of thoughtful, accountable, and painful evolutions in thought or behavior? Check out this brand-new forgiveness for sale! Just give it up to God! You can be as free as Sam Harris in his disposing of free will! Good is good, evil is evil, and we’re all just along for the circularly-reasoned ride! Yee-haw! I still believe “consciousness” is the “what” that makes the indeterminate determinate, so I struggle, or futilely refuse, to be a happy cog. I didn’t will myself into existence, but if I maintain my faculties and shoot myself in the head anyway, you’re gonna get an attestation of the nature of my will, messily depicted and ironically incomplete in its finality.

The last time I used “motivation” in the title of a blog was in January 2013. A few lines from that blog stick out to me, but as I started to mine them, it seems inadequate to the task. You should read it after this one. What’s clear, is that at least 9 years ago, I still hated the idea of getting a normal job, knew no one would respect me or my time like I might, and I acknowledge the conditional nature of my being. I was aware of the clarity that having a goal provides. I was suspicious of the form my potential impact on the world could take. I lamented people who couldn’t pair their best ideas with any practical actions.

Do I even remember what I was doing in 2013? 2 years after college I was probably failing at the mobile coffee van and circling the pillow of the loner-in-the-basement status I was about to adopt. A month later I was speaking to the comfort I felt thinking Kristen and I were in the same kind of relationship and I was understood lol. Maybe we were at that point, who knows, I only have one-sided small and garbled snapshots.

It’s easy to get lost. I repeat myself a lot. In going through and scanning some old blogs I’ve like reignited the memory of the “stuck” and anxious place that I fairly-well grounded into the center of my being. 9 years ago? I was in a long-term relationship. I was just starting to do drug studies. I had a lot of ideas and energy to put behind my informal “retire by 30” plan. Was my motivation fundamentally different than it is today? In the greatest sense, no. I still want the same non-physical things. I don’t feel like I have any less “energy” than I did then, it’s just not sporadically involving itself with more than I can reasonably address in any given moment.

I think I feared that if I calmed down, I would start to “settle” and look and sound like all of the people I grew a severe distaste for. The ones who have every excuse not to move to the middle of nowhere and try to get out ahead of our modern fall of civilization. The ones who blow superficial smoke up every ass of interaction because that’s what polite society expects. The ones who just stay silent and suffer indefinitely and live vicariously through comedian commentary or the pleasant pictures whirring by. It was harder to recognize or accept my “alone” status because I was with someone. I wasn’t so far removed from college and there was still a fair amount of people left to drift away. My environment dictated, for as much as I was talking about it.

That I’m where I am in life now, I think speaks to how much I’ve maintained a sense of self and orientation in spite. My capacity, happiness, or direction isn’t fundamentally dictated nor rooted in “you.” I choose friends. I chose to suffer the discrepancies and loss. All these new babies hitting the scene are going to die. You knew that when you got into baby-making mode. They may even die before you, and isn’t that colloquially understood as the worst kind of tragedy? Surely it wasn’t thoughts like those that fed your motivation to have a child. I thought, probably incorrectly, that I envied people who found their deepest sense of purpose and drive to ensure their children grew up and passed those genes on. What a burden to carry if you don’t know why you’re doing it.

You can linguistically reduce all efforts to procreate or proliferate literature to the same nihilistic absurdity. You can ignore that it might just feel good. It doesn’t have to be deep. You may just exist to be personally gratified, at least the conscious part of you, for as long as you can. A kid gets wrapped up in that? All the more collateral damage. I mean, child brides are still a thing, and I don’t know if you know how many kids are molested growing up, but you’re not gonna find a statistic that won’t remind you how woefully under-reported the 25-30% of the known cases are speaking to.

Have you noticed the drift in this blog? How did I get to child molesting? Isn’t this about motivation? As I continue to describe my spite engine as moving me right along, it’s no wonder the sheer amount of atrocity that’s pressed right up against how I conceive of my effort and best conception of the world. To talk of “my motivation” or “spite engine” is just a personal understanding of the marriage and dance at the conflicted ever-changing heart of existence. I think about death constantly, and it makes me want to live a certain way. I still don’t know that the reasoning I apply for my own existence I would use in service to a new child, but I also don’t think early-abortion cells, or any persons, are going to an afterlife.

Motivation feels like a calculation. I want many things at once. I want them in perpetuity. I’ve both experienced intellectually and emotionally the reality and diminishing returns of the mere acquisition. You can’t just make a friend. You have to celebrate, and work with, and evolve together. You can’t just buy things or amass wealth; you have to put them to work. Things like Amazon and SpaceX are incidental giants who need to create giant corners to get backed into like I need to pile up a few dishes and turn 2x4s into adult building blocks.

We’re shaped by these unconscious desires to belong to something “more” and beyond ourselves. The endless irony being, we perpetuate circumstances that keep us isolated, angry, and feeling almost perfectly misunderstood. We keep up the façade that we can’t learn or connect, share in our goals and motivation, by staying silent unless it’s to say something disparaging or superficial. My motivation is inextricably tied to my awareness and the demonstration and repeatability of that awareness. I know I’m going to die not feeling really any more or less happy than I have for the last 9 if not 18 years since I started writing.

I don’t make it a secret that I want you to speak, or that I’m going to. I won’t be surprised if things turn out as bad as those who’ve been paying attention say they will. I won’t lose my motivation to fight or create or move the hell out of the way. There is no illusion about life I need to paint over how I actually feel and think, even if I didn’t “will” every impression I could extract. I will the words. I will the movement. I’m not at the mercy of my chaotic and contradictory heart. I dance with the chaos, and in so doing, create an order that suggests balanced direction. Who could get tired doing that?

[972] Just Watch

I can’t help but feel as though something is still missing.

I say “still,” because over the last few weeks, I’ve found a high degree of comprehensive flow and achievement of my goals in relatively quick succession.

I’ve played my guitar long enough to hint at my peak capacity.
I’ve started building an area that is larger than my main house and bathroom combined.
I’ve hung out with friends at the Moose Lodge, bowling, and for food.
I’ve bowled almost every weekend reaching scores that suggest improvement.
I’ve salvaged about half of the pallets.
I’ve been super caught up on shows.
I’ve started using more of my woodworking equipment.
I’ve read a book from a manga series I’ve been wishing to for quite some time.
We’ve got the application submitted to potentially be a disability provider.
I’ve spoken with someone who is reaching out about ways in which we might be able to partner with an existing counseling operation, and had some networking conversations with a few local people.
I’ve seen a couple good movies, comedians, and have concerts almost every week through October.
I’ve had absolutely amazing and painful rolfing sessions that have dramatically improved my posture, circulation, and flexibility.
I’m still full, still healthy, and still 3 to 4 months of perpetually away from being out of debt.

So much of it is to do with me though, doesn’t it? That’s not like “bad,” but there’s nothing new or exciting about how I stay preoccupied. I don’t have to learn anything, help anyone, or feel anything but whether or not it’s time to screw in another beam or switch on another show. None of the above, save the potential in the networking conversations, speaks to the largest goals and direction, and that hasn’t happened because of my effort or ability, but because my friends reached out to both me and their friends.

I haven’t noticed that before, but it might speak to this unease. This thing about “connection” and “ongoing conversations” and just showing up and being present is the only track that has me visualizing a kind of light at the end of the endless tunnel. It’s not hard. That’s the constantly striking thing. It’s not hard if you talk, share, connect, and then show up and do.

I’ve also been watching Louis Theroux documentaries throughout the day. He talks to everyone, but mostly those in worlds with particular controversy or stigma. I didn’t need to watch the ones on poverty or drug use. Those were my clients. I could hear the bullshit miles away. I registered the catchphrases and felt the naivety in his questioning. Sometimes, though, someone would state things plainly like, “The pain of the lifestyle isn’t as bad as the pain of whatever drove them there.” For all of the drama or culturally degrading lore about addiction, it’s just a heightened story of whether or not you choose to engage with the requisite level of pain.

It hurts to learn things, but it’s nothing like a pain of not knowing and being at the whims of things you don’t understand. I was willing to change how I understood myself, and my perspective on the power of words, when the pain of thinking things were up to some deity or fate drove me mad. It hurts to be out in the sun building things, but paying 5 times the amount for the same amount of space hurts too. Getting my muscles worked to death has hurt in new and exciting ways, but cramps and chronic headaches are worse. It really sucks to feel a certain kind of perpetual isolation, but staying silent and pretending I’m not witness to so much bullshit is a kind of self-destruction I can’t stomach.

I’m missing a culture that vibes and speaks like me. I’m told “the majority” has the vast majority of my values. Apparently, this stops at the moment I suggest we literally kill the literal fascists. What do we make of those other values? My instinct is to blurt out “feckless,” for what is a value you can’t celebrate nor defend?

If nothing else, I believe in trying. That’s something that can operate as a “belief,” because you still have to do something with your trust, faith, or confidence in someone or something, if we take the Google definition. Another goes, “An acceptance that something is true or that something exists.” Perfect. I accept there is trying and that it can be truly demonstrated.

I don’t give a lot of people credit that they’re trying, not because they don’t feel like they’re trying, but because they don’t admit what they’re trying to do. They’re often trying to gaslight and lie about me lol. But that’s a little too easy to recognize because, well, the words are often written down and can be reviewed when the volume of feelings have been turned down. They’re trying to convince themselves that playing guitar, and building rooms, and taking trips, and being fed and entertained, and looking socially acceptable and relevant, and finding a happy place in hobbies is the point. It’s not. The more I merely indulge in said activities, the more the hole opens up.

The point is to push, challenge, own, incorporate, and protect. The point is to raise the fucking child. Whether it’s the one in you, or the ones you’ve started spitting out. You know the areas you can work more on. You know the injustices in your field. You recognize when you’re not being accountable to the responsibilities on offer, or if they don’t live up to what you can and should be responsible for. Can you genuinely tell me you wouldn’t be ashamed of me if I chose to return to Kroger and stock shelves for a living? It’s not about the job or denigrating the work, but what kind of bullshit would I be on to shirk what I’m capable of?

I’ve never needed more indulgence, I’ve needed a few righteous stabs at the dragon plaguing our culture. More than the recognition that this is the immutable overarching goal, I’d like to hear how you sort and work the details of killing our mutual problem. In the meantime, the school shootings and lack of healthcare and general exhaustion and disillusionment are literally killing us. Are you talking about your breakfast? Your magic spells and convoluted impractical theories? Or do you have a goddamn idea how to sharpen a blade?

If you don’t, can you recognize you don’t? Can you talk about it? Can you explain why you’ve never felt the need to learn how? Can all you do is listen to others sharpening theirs and point out the sound of the “screeeeeeeed” they are indulging in like so many public masturbaters?