[982] That Was Easy

Something’s missing.

This is probably one of the most consistent thoughts I have even if it never sounds so precise. I’ll eat something, but it won’t quite hit the spot. I’ll discover a new and useful tool, but it just doesn’t meet what I’d ideally like it to do. An endless blur of TV drones on with dialogue that doesn’t get there and plot points playing out an existential crisis one cliché and predictable episode at a time. I write, and am lucky to find maybe half of what I wished to say because I’m trying to capture what’s missing; the empty or wanting feeling more often persists than gets alleviated.

I’ve named consistently what’s been missing from my experience. From getting into this habit, I’ve been able to zero in more on both the nature of my desires, and what does or does not change upon acquiring them. I know how to match my words to the process of altering my feelings. It never has been, nor will ever be, that I “just don’t feel” or “don’t care.” I’m doing work. I recognize the language, tone, body language, and series of spontaneous utterances that tell me when you’re doing the work too.

What is “the work?”

I’ve spoken about “the machine” I put together that tried to colloquially break down for my clients at the methadone clinic a means for processing their thoughts and actions. I took from what helped or inspired me, and walked people through headings that started with “responsibility.” For as increasingly controversial and perhaps pettiness and anger that I have begun to observe from Jordan Peterson, I think he was spot on when he stressed personal responsibility.

I think many get confused when you talk about personal responsibility. They believe they’re supposed to “feel” some kind of way about “everything.” It comes across like an obligation, most often unwanted, and unfair. It is all of those things. Literally no one chooses to exist. By default, you aren’t asked to cope with what you look like, sound like, how much brain power you don’t have, or the series of horrendous circumstances you might find yourself in. To even suggest you have a responsibility is the most unfair thing possible. You caused none of it, and now you have to clean up? Now you have to fight? Now you have to sacrifice and risk whatever otherwise happiness or stability you’ve achieved? Who in their right fucking mind would bother?

So let’s be the rational actor, disappearing into their little world. They work hard, they send their kids to school, they recycle, and hell, they even donate to charity and vote. This plays out with regularity, tinged with righteous indignation, most often unvoiced, for those who can’t be bothered to leave you alone to “do you.” You’ll just move to a “blue state” or you’ll hole up with a gun cache and wait for the threat or until the leadership unleashes you. It’s pretty much chaos at all times, as far as you can tell from the headlines…just keep swimming.

I’ve felt like I’m surrounded by fish with so many missing memories. Whether it was about things we were supposed to have meant to each other, or the reasons we drunkenly blathered for why we were going to create something. When I talk about the superficial nature of my relationships, it has a lot to do with shaking off the responsibility to understand or engage. I know it’s often dangerous and disingenuous to take your personal experience and try to map things writ large, but I’ve been deeply examining the minutia of my experience for so long, I’m hardly, if ever, surprised or confused by “everything” being shit or things breaking down.

I’m not so naïve as to think it’s just not “my friends” who don’t wish to have an ongoing dialogue that tackles difficult subjects. That’s people. I’m fascinated with Sam Jay who seems to have built a brand around having dialogues. Will “the culture” be better for it? Or is it treated like a niche window into how a handful of people discuss their lives in something of a Taxi Cab Confessions manner with a comedic twist?

I don’t know that we’re built for “democracy.” I don’t think people are really thinking. I think they follow scripts, occasionally they get backed into corners or alter their mind chemically, and then what might be considered an actual thought or several start to come out. Because our brains are always doing “something,” we conceive of this as “thinking.” You think you thought about what you wanted to eat. You think you have an opinion on an inflammatory headline. You think you don’t like how something feels, so it’s bad, should be cancelled, or isn’t worth your time and attention.

I don’t respect liars. Part of my ongoing disconnect with people is their willingness to lie. It’s almost always lies of omission, but those omissions add up to a lot of work not being done. It’s lies dictated by fear for real repercussions that preclude even entertaining ways of changing or fixing something.

You know who doesn’t lie like that? Crazy people. They lie loud and proud and with their entire being. They lie for generations and build it into institutions. They lie through things literally understood throughout time as “deadly sins” and are proud, greedy, and grow fat off your silence, fear, or indifference. You know why history is wrought with war and martyrs? It’s not that ancient civilizations didn’t have rational people. They weren’t full of those incapable of empathically understanding their neighbor. The crazy, ever waiting, got louder and louder until they ate themselves alive. We’re just playing out our modern version of the script.

I’ve definitely chilled in my enthusiasm for people the more I…tried. The more I worked. The more I invited. The more I carried the enthusiasm. The more I rooted for and believed in. The more I sacrificed, the less pull people had on me. I’m dispositionally pretty distant, but also, when I tried not to be, I tried not to be like how I do things. I went all-in. I’m not going to truly challenge my worst ideas about who and how to manipulate unless I give myself over to the idea that there are people it’s worth it not to behave like that towards. Did I pick the wrong batch of people? Almost certainly, but I can’t deny what it taught me.

Today we have “ghosting,” because so many of our bonds are so fragile and arbitrary. My “style” or manner of communication set myself up to be “ghosted” by dozens of people in short succession. Whether it be gossipy rumor mills or the facebook chat that doesn’t get responded to for months, the message is clear. I don’t matter, at least to them. How much suffering might it cause a person who locates their “missing” piece in the interactions with people who want nothing to do with them? I wouldn’t wish that on most. At least with someone like me, it’s not a secret that I didn’t generally make you “feel good” nor do any better of a job of that today than I did then.

I’m always struck by the contrast in assessments of my behavior, words, or choice interactions with what I consider actually bad if not considerably worse things. I don’t mean to suggest that because big bad things happen in the world that you should ignore critical feedback or not take responsibility for your actions, but I’ve never found people more thoughtful, more vocal, or more willing to share than when they were angry with me. Not the world, not themselves, but what’s fucked up about me was ever so clear and particularly worth singular condemnation. It’s a point of ongoing fascination, not because I’m regularly eliciting negative feedback, but because the reasons why I see infused all over.

I say the quiet part out loud. I say anything at all, but I most often choose to say the prickly things. Moreover, I disagree the prickly things can be dealt with when we carry ourselves like so many balloons. You can’t “cancel” fascism. You can’t “persuade” me that fat is beautiful, on myself or otherwise. When conservatives bemoan a “woke agenda,” it’s scenes in Star Trek that go on way too long with the awkward non-binary kid staring at her(oops) gay dad in all of his glorious understanding. And I don’t even mean to suggest that these are particularly relevant or strong points and topics to get all fussy about. It’s just what’s on offer today. The march - the practical, detailed, and deliberate crazy is working to erode rights because it’s working. It’s working on the means by which things exist or don’t.

The crazy march voices its lies. It’s proud in its opposition. It’s not been a secret that Roe v Wade was a target. It’s not been a secret the billions of opinions offered as to what Jesus meant. It’s not a secret that the country is failing. It’s not a secret that homemade signs and megaphones mean precisely dick to those with money, influence, and organized decades-long systems for instantiating power.

What’s the work? Did I ever get around to answering the question? First, acknowledge how complicated “everything” is. You don’t get to silence people; I don’t care how hot your topic is or righteous your cause. You don’t have to invite David Duke to speak at your graduation ceremony or entertain him on your platform, but he gets to speak. But that’s easy to understand if you’re remotely thoughtful. Really, what is the work?

You have to stop lying. You have to speak up, but you have to do so in a way that isn’t furious concurrence with the status quo of your social circle. You have to own that the moment you choose to take anything from the shelf of life, you have to follow or establish the rules of the store. Right now we’re letting the crazy lock us inside and poison the food because they “believe” a whole series of incoherent self-gratifying catch-phrases. Like that bitch in “The Mist,” they need to be shot in the head, and preferably before they literally need to be shot in the head.

What is the work? You have to keep asking. The work is to build bravery, coalitions, and organize around deep understandings of the history and context in which decisions get made and power flows. I don’t have half a dozen friends who’ve been on this journey since college on this land with a series of practical responses to the things we worried and complained about graduating high school the year before the financial crash. We heard about climate change back then. We saw Sarah Palin. We fucked off, moved to different corners, got all in our feelings and suffered in adult silence in our jobs and relative first-world poverty. Brilliant set of go-getters we were.

All of this rests on what you think your responsibility is though. Is it to yourself? Certainly, in some important sense. You have to be in a good spot if you want to help others. Is it to “the world?” Now you’re just kind of being naively vague. You certainly don’t feel like you have a responsibility to talk to me lol. We get older and decide it’s just about our sliver of the world. We forget, very actively, that there is no “personal” world. Just the one we’re all plugged into for better or mostly worse. When “our” world is characterized by silence, and pithy rallies in lieu of seized power, “my” sliver gets sharper, cutting away at my dreamiest conception of where I am financially, psychologically, or socially.

I try to conduct myself in a manner I think serves “the” world, subjectively processed, but not persuaded by. I’m comfortable asserting how much I don’t know. I’m able to label when and why and how I have patience to entertain difficult subjects or judgments. I try incredibly hard to give as honest an appraisal as I can of what I see, hear, and experience in those pre-verbal parts of my brain that tell me time and again how much I’m missing. The thing about what’s missing is that it’s not just lost to time or impossible to find. It’s just what people refuse to do until they’re forced. Be honest. Fight. Talk about what “no one” wants to talk about.

I’m weirdly ambivalent about Roe getting overturned. I wish I could believe that maybe we’ll get some real anger this time. But what has history taught me? Do Black lives still matter? I could have swore with George Floyd’s blessing we’d be seeing some real change in society this time. Can you remember the last person to get #metoo-ed? Weren’t there so many feelings and testimonies and major revelations associated? Like the Panama Papers or those Occupy Wall Street guys! It’s almost like there’s this pattern of “outrage” that begets increasingly horrible circumstances as all of the ignorantly incensed retreat after failing to identify and address which mechanisms and holders of power don’t give a fuck about them.

It's going to be really hard to abandon the land. I’ve put in a lot of work. It’s a huge indication of what I “believe” in. It testifies to what I think the proper response to the chaos around us is. Salvage, conserve, diversify, learn new shit, give yourself more time, money, and space to create, reconceive of your space and how it can be used, and build into your bones how long it takes to achieve something meaningful. I’d bet $1000 that the videogame junkies are still videogaming and the middle-management jobs are just barely paying the bills, and the reality of so many lives hastily pursued in service of placating “discomfort” is crystalizing in joints, arteries, and daily happy-pills. But what do I know? No one’s going to talk about that unless it’s on-brand or a trending meme or can be summarized by a change in profile picture.

If I wanted to pretend I wasn’t living in a fascist country, I could continue to laud my efforts and chop, grind, and stack away without a care in the world. If I wanted to pretend like I didn’t expect myself to have a “house house” and a considerably higher bank account by 34, I could ride this train into oblivion. My country failed me. My peers failed themselves. I won’t let myself get sucked into my own narrative. I will keep talking about what’s missing. I will continue to feel bad because I allow myself the obligation and dignity of a responsibility to change my circumstances. I can plan and invest and demonstrate that I believe in more than either my most fanciful or damming conceptions.

It's always going to suck. I’m always going to feel alone. And I get to die either way, I’m just trying to avoid it happening via stray bullet or my neighbor making me a bogey-man. It’d be illegal to abort me at least.

I’m missing my match. It’s not that there aren’t plenty of educated people saying considerably more articulate and cited versions of my sentiments. It’s not that I don’t have people in my life who work as hard as I do, especially when it’s work none of us care to be doing for the money offered. It’s certainly not that there aren’t people who are angry and exhausted and trying in some manner or another. But if I met me? If I had another person who could do what I do like I do it, be loud about it, encourage and be open to exploring and trying and investing. Who did things “now” because time is precious, showed up because to be invited is an honor, and could pair incisive yet hilarious observation with the spirit of inherent knowledge that there’s a way through provided we do the work ourselves? Jesus wouldn’t have a prayer. I’ve been lucky enough to have 4 people who flicker on and off in riding with me at that level. But I’m a junkie. I want it all the time. And if we weren’t running out of time when I started, we sure as fuck don’t have any now.

I just have my back, the integrity of my tools, the patience extended for jobs and tasks that don’t recognize me, my debt, and my will or motivation to turn any nice day into something “more productive” than my mere enjoyment of it. That humbles you and chills you out. I learned how to watch “all TV,” and how to allow myself to read nonfiction, or enjoy a beer or hobby. I can do all that alone or surrounded by people. I can speak to when I’m not feeling like I’m fighting the good fight as well as I’d like. I may only be able to take so much responsibility for the mismatch between what I feel is my responsibility and how I’m able to respond to it, but at least I fucking claim the responsibility, talk about its nature, and try to own what is or isn’t working. Here’s another 4 and a half pages none of us have the time or energy for sorting out. I’ll be sure to reread it several times so I can still allow myself to sleep.

[969] Insecurity Blanket

I’ve just had a thought about a “binding force” as it pertains to my work environments, and what I attempt to not fall prey to when I’m alone.

It would be too simple to call it a kind of “mediocrity.” It functions that way, to be sure. It’s a consequence of a lack of accountability. It provides a sense of security. Let’s just talk about what it sounds and looks like.

At DCS, no matter how bad a job you are doing, the person “in charge” will do one of two things. They’ll intervene in your behavior, take up the conversation that needed to be had, and attempt to fix the problem. Or, they’ll defer to their boss, their obligations, talk about how many counties there are, and basically ignore you. They will speak to how there is functionally no real oversight without a companion Avengers-level threat to kick people into motion.

The security comes from the size of the organization. Even if someone tried to watch, they can’t, unless the problem gets too large and provokes a death or lawsuit.

At the methadone clinic or in prison counseling, it’s much the same, but the problems are less variable and if anyone dies it’s only a junkie, right? You can remain poorly organized, fail your audits, and bleed employees, provided you’re just another operation that was bought by a national conglomerate. People are watching, rather closely, but only the bottom line. They’re not concerned with your performance across anything human or factoring in anything practical.

The security comes from the size of the bank account, addict population, and number of clinics under one umbrella. A few dozen or hundred can burnout or die, and it’s an overall rounding error on the books.

Maybe you want to sell books! What does becoming an author at a small publishing company have in common with big bureaucratic structures? There’s deference to all of your other obligations and priorities. There’s trading on the goodwill of the highly conscientious to obscure the lack of organization. Provided the ownership tows self-soothing party lines about the vision and purpose that you can recite in harmony, no need to scrutinize, be on time, or connect with the language underneath the business book buzz words.

The security comes from following the templates laid out by larger organizations and infusing them with elevated interpersonal baggage to help gin up the fog about who is responsible.

It’s a lot easier to identify failure points with smaller structures. There were 5 employees when I drove a taxi. If you didn’t make your shift, that was you. There weren’t offices for the schedule to get lost in or a lack of clarity on who to contact about where you were supposed to be. The number of times I’ve been maliciously classified as “independent contractor” tries to lay this “I don’t want the responsibility” backdrop bare. The smaller you are, the more personal it feels, and the less you can avoid the difficult conversations around what you did or didn’t do or don’t know.

Whittling down further, in a partnership or relationship you see similar dynamics. You can usually tell if a relationship is healthy or not based on how people respond to each other’s concerns or perspectives. Are you “too busy” to find the mental space for your partner? Is it wholly beyond your control to inform how they might feel about your living arrangements or social dynamic? Do you think God will step in and provide where you can’t?

When you’re just alone, and perhaps this is why I gravitate towards sentiments about being an individual and finding a personally honest thread, you can witness how this (in)security force works in you. You too tired to practice? You deserve some indulgence? You ashamed to speak to how you actually feel or think and wish to blame whatever happened to you or maybe belabor a traumatic past? The excuse, just like the responsibility, is open to you in every moment. Whether or not I play my guitar and the reasons I give myself for doing so are on me. I can’t stop the rain in my desire to complete my wood shop, but I can decide if I want to bare the humidity and set up a tent for when it stops.

It’s a singular thread and conversation with yourself from which all catastrophe or great things spring forth. Do you even acknowledge how much you can take responsibility for in any given moment? Do you respect the power you’ve been given? How many people do you reflexively find fault in before you get to you? Do you ever get to you? As someone who appears to be in the business of courting blame, I can’t say I hear nearly ever how it’s your fault.

This is why I own when I’m a dick. That’s me being accountable. I meant it. I knew when I turned up the snark. I didn’t “just react.” I probably spent months trying to play nice (or dumb in my language), and you didn’t get something fixed or even really try to make it better. At DCS, this meant sometimes destroying families. At the methadone clinic, people died. When you overwork yourself, you don’t just take years off your life, but the world closes in on you, and it does not appear like there are other opportunities or outlets for recognition or dollar amounts you deserve.

We seek security in the story we tell ourselves about what we can or can’t do, say, or see altogether. This is how I can immediately see when people are almost complete failures when it comes to a personally honest account of their life. It’s all the little things. When my stomach drops at the thought of going into work, I write about it. When my relationship with a new friend or coworker creates competing impulses, I explore. When the work I set out for myself needs to account for new details like increased financial or physical costs, I do the math and modify as needed. I’m not just feeling my way through the dark and yelling at you when we bump into each other.

When I look around my house and I see the sheer amount of shit I own, it’s hard to deny how many of my “problems” are part of a narrative fantasy to help keep me oriented around my preferences. The only real debt I truly have is a lack of a meaningful collaborative project. I’m not financially burdened as much as I’m boxing myself into a quasi-stable mode of living that comes with getting “real” jobs and eating time with toys and distractions. I like being able to go to the comedy clubs and concerts. I’d like considerably more a team of 5 people making a credible attack on various levels of power or speaking in organized and deliberate ways on how to achieve practically sustainable living and working arrangements.

I can get a job, buy toys, keep the bills paid, build my little castle, and play my music. I can’t talk you into joining me. You’ll help me here and there, but our mission isn’t the same. I discover time and again how many missions do not comport with my own, because mine attempts an outsized recognition of what I’m capable of and truly desire. I can continue to reiterate that I don’t just want money, or what’s in my Amazon cart, or even time. After all, I have time now. I’ve had considerably more time in the past. But time without the money, or the friends, or an actionable plan just leaves me to spend too much time finding things to get angry about online. I’ve been home for the last 3 days or so and it feels like an eternity. I look at what I’ve built and think, “That’s all?” I have a fucking problem lol, and it’s not much to do with “me” than it is “us.” There is no us in my world, or it comes in spurts, or resents how I conduct me.

And I don’t mean to overstate this, because I have irons in the fire, and collaborators, and friends good for the things they’re good for, but it doesn’t scale. The connection breaks when you try to attach it to a long-term investment or vision. It gets routinely undermined by how incensed you feel about what you probably are fucking up and can’t cope with owning. I like to remind you when I don’t miss a day of work, cancel class, or show up late because I’m celebrating my attentiveness. I like to show you how many hours and dollars it takes to run a proper experiment in salvaging or sustainability because you need to feel the work before you comfort yourself with the narrative.

I cannot persuade myself only to sit and play my guitar, or my videogames, or disappear indefinitely into shows and YouTube. I don’t have kids. My bills aren’t incredibly high. I’m not the head of any organization. But who I am, or the tools I’ve been given, don’t exist, can’t exist, unless they exist relative to my experience, work, and recognition of the world around me. I live in nation teetering on fascism. I live in an environment poised to make us all extinct. My brain doesn’t shut off just because I travel somewhere or find some new preoccupation. It’s all happening all at once and in every moment.

I can bare the weight of that perpetual existential crisis. I’m not going to kill myself or drink myself stupid. I’m not going to get depressed and retreat. I’m not going to stay silent. I’m going to keep calling out “you” for not bothering me for anything but the placation or indulgence of your feeble feelings. I’m going to keep questioning what you’re really working on and point out the elaborate excuse-ridden nature of the children’s game you’re calling “adulting.”

Don’t get the impression that any of this matters, either. It only matters to ME. It matters that I write the blogs, build the wood shop, get the pallets, be on time, or achieve a level of technical sophistication in how quickly I can move my fingers along an instrument. I don’t need you to come on board. I don’t need you to invite me into your thing or entreat the baggage I would bring. I know that the things I need have nothing to do with me at all, they just exist at the ends of my patience or willingness to manipulate. I have gained considerably more patience over the years and my heart isn’t in manipulating.

I am going to ask that you pay attention though. I can’t make you read the blog, but I can make sure it says you should recognize how bad you are at being honest with yourself. Are you happy, full, or fulfilled? Are your days filled with meaningful interactions or mildly gratifying indulgences? Does something call to you when it gets too quiet? Did you reach out, speak out, or take a punch in a worthwhile fight? Did you sacrifice something that matters in service to something that matters more? Whose fault is it, me for pointing it out, or you for running away?

[964] Not Long Now

 

There’s more on my mind about switching jobs. I guess you can call it an improvement that I’m not in physical pain nor willing to have the same argument for months before I leave the prison.­ I don’t know if it’s a touch sadder that I’m leaving a population in which they truly do need all the help they can get, or if that’s more of an annoying detail that, if I had things my way, I’d still be able to work with in a proactive and consistent way I try to afford to everyone. I’m thankful I have the memory of all the people who seemed dismayed I was leaving the methadone clinic who never had the inclination to reach out. I’m not saying anything you don’t already know.

People are often attracted to my “spirit” for lack of a better word. They aren’t “convinced” of things by my words or logic. It’s always “the way” I say something, or my mannerisms, or tone of voice or body language. I’m confident, and people feel it. I’m smart and people pretend to immediately understand everything I say. I work hard and can quickly bring to mind how my values translate into my concept of living a meaningful life. ­This is what I think about when I’m offered so many opinions, forlorn or otherwise about my decisions regarding employment or worthwhile pursuits of time.

No matter what job I get, the fundamental truth is that I don’t want a job. This isn’t lost on me. If I’m going to have a job, it at least needs to maintain a kind of sense that doesn’t leave me tense and angry for, albeit predictable, bad values-destroying reasons. There’s plenty of growing pains and a messiness to many work environments. I’ve never had a problem with that as such. I can’t abide gross negligent ignorance of the mess. The consequences are tucked in every wasted minute a coworker needs to decompress and every mockery of your time spent on something useless and wasteful.

It seems ridiculous when I think about it, but there was more coherence in working for Showplace than anywhere I’ve worked since. You could count on about when you were going to leave. You knew what your role was. You knew the theater had to be clean, the popper not greasy, and the tickets torn. Plenty of people sucked at their job, but the job was clear. I advanced through to become management. It felt like a team. There was a palpable difference when our head manager was molesty dickhead and many people quit. Had I the perspective about jobs that I do now, I might have at the time as well.

It seems like a thing that shouldn’t be so regularly violated. Where’s the leadership? It took how many years to find people on a genuine Left political axis that weren’t Bernie Sanders? How, in social work, are there so few fucking people with the grasp of what it means to be human and what we need to thrive? I can’t really wrap my head around it. When I relayed my complaints to my buddy’s mom, she said, “It’s the same thing at the post office,” where her leadership sucks, and the people on the ground who do well or know the work get fucked by shitty decisions and a total lack of awareness or care.

I don’t mind taking direction or orders. I think a lot of my complaints in work environments suggest that I have some broad problem with authority or anyone else’s opinion. That’s really missing what I’m speaking to if it’s where you’re coming from. Juggling chaos is not the same thing as steering a ship through the storm of life or business decisions. And you have to think, in a social work context, you’re dealing with people who at some level are psychologically situated to give as much of themselves as they can. Workers bleed themselves dry constantly.

I don’t feel good about leaving. I’m not looking forward to readjusting to a new work environment and work personalities. I’m upset that I have to do so at all. Why can’t I just find a decent job that pays me what I’m worth and cares to put people in charge who are capable? What kind of insane unfair ask is that? Do I rail against capitalism? The irrational and insane human spirit? What I’m not going to do is pretend it’s “mature” or acceptable to merely adopt stupid fucking catchphrases of complacency and excuses because everyone’s too dainty and a bitch to hear how they’re fucking up.

If I don’t get the counseling business going, I need to heavily consider just getting into a trade. There’s a kind of liberation in moving shit around or building shit. It doesn’t talk back. Now, I’m not so naïve as to think there aren’t idiots and shitty bosses and whatever else, but perhaps I could make something more of myself on my own when my preoccupation becomes about things instead of people. I know it’s always, somehow, about people, but still, maybe I can just fix your toilet and move on with my day.

[958] Itsy Bitsy Spider

Hello darkness, my old friend.

Starting is the easy part. Keeping it going is an entirely different beast.

I saw, live, an embodiment of greatness, not for the first time, but definitely on a level that one should process several times over. Combine the magic of music, the talent or intelligence, and extravagant settings and history, and you can connote the sacredness of a moment in space. Is a world-class violinist Christ-like in his excellence? Or in his modesty? Can the music be so perfect as to lull you to sleep?

The word on my mind for months as been “goal.” I’m constantly asking my guys about their goals. I’m not feeling anxious, precisely, about my ability to pursue or achieve mine, but they feel…waffly. Oddly enough, one of my standing goals, to watch ALL TV, has struggled to serve its space-filler goal posture, and I’ve been approximately 20 hours behind for weeks. It’s almost like the stories are heavier in their predictability or cliché when they’ve certainly been just as predictable and cliché as they’ve always been.

I’ve been talking so much about the weeks or months I need to keep my job. It’s practice to not let burnout creep in. It’s constantly trying to remind myself I’m doing easy work, more efficiently than I could be otherwise, getting paid more than I ever have, and I’m aggressively building in points of joy to occupy my mind so the prison walls don’t close in. Now, after a major “indulgence,” which I genuinely conceive as a form of healthcare, I need to work my job for another 3 months. That statement doesn’t fill me with dread, which is a start, but my real goals have nothing to do with maintaining normal employment.

We’re begging the question of what strides I have or haven’t made in service to the out-patient clinic. Well, dear reader, I feel like I’m doing nothing. I run right up against the problem of not wanting to work after work. I fill my long-weekends with activities. A lot of the out-of-my-control practical realities still exist when it comes to business hours and response times. I’m not convinced I won’t still be going door-to-door soon, but I can’t shake the sketchy baggage I feel that would carry. I probably need to just take a few hours, join some online advertising/counseling practices, and engage in text/telehealth, but for some damn reason, it does not feel like a drive to get it done.

Why? At the end, what do I get? More money sounds nice, but at the rate I’m making negotiations with my billables, there’s little reason to believe it’ll be more than I’m making now for quite some time without referrals or dedicated cases. Freedom? I kind of have a fair amount of freedom as it is, and if I get more, it’ll take considerably more money than I have now to optimize it. I would likely be investing a lot of time in the effort to make an income stream “passive.” As well the people and places I’ve reached out to for help kind of showed a test-run for how involved and otherwise busy their lives are as well. Are we prepared to go it alone quasi-indefinitely? It’s not getting us very far in this moment.

I have achieved so much of what I’ve wanted. I’m now drifting into spaces like expensive cologne buying and making a, relatively, small investment in my overall health. I’m so comfortable save my manufactured debt crisis and pithy externalities of bureaucracy and weather. I’m warm. I’m full. I have so much stuff. I have dozens of plans and projects. I have friends. Is that all well and good enough?

I miss thinking of myself as a partner or like I was helping and supporting someone else. It’s not “I want a girlfriend.” It’s that I know the difference between what it feels like to do things for myself and do them for others, especially if I care about them. It’s not that I don’t like helping my guys, but they’re not really my guys, are they? They’re my responsibility, my obligation, but just like every single person who blew smoke up my ass about my efficacy at the methadone clinic, ain’t no one reaching out.

This friend who I only ever very sporadically speak to, and it’s not always clear to me what we’re talking about, said it seemed like it would be a “chore” for me to download shows for her. Like, no, I’m hungry for something like that. I want to help. It’s literally one of my largest preoccupations. You’d be doing me a favor if you needed to see a movie or show. Let me spend a few hours showing you ways to torrent that won’t get your internet cutoff or you catching fines. On my dating profile it says I’m perpetually wanting to please and working on that.

It’s not that my goals are too easy. I don’t have a version of what I need to accomplish that amounts to, “brush teeth, show up, don’t punch supervisor.” So much of my orientation, even projects on the land, were situated around trying to make Allie more comfortable. I’ll shit in a bag and compost or burn it. You want a whole septic system and water upgrades? Okay, let’s hunt for IBC tanks, budget for pumps, spend hours researching, and then…break up shortly after. One more in-progress thing for the board.

Maybe I mean something different now when I talk of “taking over the world” than I have in the past. There was more of a Billions character in my initial utterances. Rich guy doing whatever a rich guy does. Now, I’d like to conceive of myself as a constitutive part to many movements. What if there really is some direct correlation to the amount of good I can squeeze out of a prison environment and my long-term stability or happiness? I do, genuinely, think everything is connected. I don’t dare say I have an appreciation or knowledge of precisely how. If my guys, on average, don’t come back to prison at the same rate under other counselors, we’re still going to be a species of flirty fascists and hate crimes.

There seems to be this disconnect between my power and what it gives me. I want, I’m pretty sure, all the time in the world to fuck off and do my own thing. I want to take a dozen music lessons a week. I want to marathon a show, and then all the shows. I want to travel because I can afford it or more likely because you like to and I want to enable you. I want to have a business that takes the values I’m teaching in class and counseling, and puts them into firehose mode. And yet, still, now 33, all I can do is kind of limp along at either job, new business endeavor that never quite catches, or sketchy-adjacent land project that the wind literally blows over?

A goal is to find better questions. I don’t even know that I expect anything of myself beyond continuing to show up to work. In a different era, in a different person, that would be fair-enough, no? Keep the bills paid, drink a beer, shut up. Find you one of them low self-esteem women who won’t leave you, and cherish your TV time.

I’m just gonna bide my time, keep being a good counselor, get these guitars donated, and keep tracking whether or not I’m on some kind of brink that pretends I have really any fucks for whether or not I keep this or any job for longer than I can stand. I figure shit out, tend to get what I want, and maybe I just don’t want much beyond this level of indulgence, narrative, and effort. I’m just looking for a problem to push against and not finding it. I’d kill to be a fleeing Ukrainian right now.

[904] False Profits

It's been almost a month since I've thought to write anything for my adoring public. In that time, I've been banned from commenting on facebook for 30 days, gotten settled into being a counselor at a methadone clinic, and done feeble amounts of yard work, scrapping, or other chores in the intermittently nice days and inclinations that strike at random. It's nothing new that I don't know where to start.

I seem to find ways to make more and more money doing less. That was the thought I had finding a job where I can sit in an office all day, using “motivational interviewing” and “solution focused” conversational techniques to signify I have a basic respect and understanding of “where they are” when it comes to my “patients.” Depending on your “professional” distinction, you might have “clients,” but because you actually come to our center to get dosed, “pt” is the preferred descriptor. Suspiciously, “therapist” shows up on our internal sign-in sheet for staffing, and “counseling” and “therapy” are used almost inter-changeably by everyone but me.

The pragmatist in me gets it and even agrees, to some extent. I genuinely can't distinguish what any given psychologist is doing more than a person who is basically respectful and employing non-judgmental and curious language to get people to arrive at their own conclusions. I don't mean to be flip or deliberately blind to the exacting understanding or rehearsal of tools that advanced degrees require. I think there is enough room left for improvement in our understanding of the human mind and social environment to be suspicious that your problems rise to the level of hyper discipline-specific knowledge or medication most often.

I think that we even allow for institutions like the one I work for to exist in the first place is the realized truth of my pragmatism. Therapist shortage? Let's get into the tough conversation about what people really need. If you've managed to hold on for 4 years in service to a social-adjacent degree, you're it! Whether it's culturally imposed narratives or not, the feedback I get most often from patients is the insistence that “routine” or “structure” of having somewhere to be each day helps. I had a patient tell me she wanted someone to “call me out on my shit.” Culturally, we know we're all over the place. We prefer even the semblance of order over our internalized chaos.

Like many ill-equipped and poorly managed greedy dress-up games, they suffice to drop you in the middle and cross their fingers you'll make them more money than feel entitled to be paid. I was given ZERO training in how to conduct a group counseling session. I was given ZERO information on the nature of addiction, risks, or health implications of methadone. I was given ZERO reason to believe my “leadership” had anything more than a few letters after their name you can acquire after several day “training” workshops and taking a test for which you could be googling the answers to in real time.

What remains true at all times about this situation is the same across all situations. There are sincere people taking at least something seriously, even if it's not the kind of comprehensive long-term accountability that someone like me prefers. Everyone needs to be there, either to feel a certain kind of way, or be paid. The veneer of respectability is less something to bemoan and more to be understood as the playing field. Can you operate within the confines of what you've been given more than you destroy by virtue of what's missing? So far, it seems like I can, which feels obvious, but is no less generally disconcerting and sad.

It feels like one a job that I could never screw up as long as I was there. I turn on when I have to deal with people. If I'm tired or disoriented, I still have the capacity to direct or redirect the attention or language. I can set aside an hour here or there to type up any number of notes. I can nod along silently as someone who does not want to get better weaves webs of bitter bullshit and performs the story that precludes their ownership. I can do this dance until late July when I've hopefully paid off my debts and not found anything worth staying $1-3k in the hole for another month or two more.

In the meantime, I'm asking myself what I can do or speak to each day that will interrupt my tendency to...point out how wholly unfulfilling what I'm doing with my time is, deeply in spite, of any good I may do in service to any one person's life. A small proportion of people appear to take the process seriously. They communicate. They show up on time. They want their 6^th counselor in 2 years to perhaps give or teach them something useful. I'm not a “go through the motions” person. I will get bored, create something, try to do it in a new way, or take on more random shit to do that never made it into the job description. I need to find a way to actually stay awake after I get home and utilize the nice days before they are miserably hot. I need to bring food with me to eat throughout the day.

I'm, especially now, trying not to fall into a psychological black hole where I just kind of exist for the next few months, feel the clenching and weight lift little by little in two-week intervals, and remark 3 months from now just how “easy” or “obvious” my relative comfort or budgeting has manifested. A hidden opportunity, for example, was a patient who said her brother had 200 pallets he never knows how to get rid of each month or so. I can spend a few weeks transporting pallets in the bed of my truck, just like I've been making pilgrimages to Menards for cardboard to help fight needing to weed the garden. I'm also looking for some kind of preferred systematization that's both consistent yet spontaneous. If I owned my job and could take off or show up at will, like anything, I could see myself engaging with it indefinitely.

I intend to get as many letters after my name as they can bilk me for, with one conference/test in June on the calendar. I'll also be looking into gong into private counseling with a friend so we can court the hourly rate insurance actually pays verses what the middle men say we're worth. When I've got a blog on one screen, and a telehealth patient on the next banking me $150 an hour, we're going to have to start having some serious discussions about how that money should manifest in the world. By “we” I mean the 5 or so people who've actually bought into my designs for world domination.