[937] The Ongoing Mitigation Of Difficult Quarter Inches

I've avoided writing, at least posting anything I've written, for a few weeks concerned it would come off as entitled bitching for bitching's sake, and with no gained insight. There's a version of my current place in time and space that's as enabled, productive, and forward-moving as I've ever been. There's a version that's reduced to my complaints and anxieties about, still, not moving fast enough. I'm gonna search for the balance.

I read a wonderful article articulating thoughts about “stupid.” I took away that stupid is easier in groups, and those who you might want to call stupid are after a kind of transcendence of their circumstances. Why get religiously intransigent about facts unless they were of a sort that had you so beat up, so sublimated by default, you've got nothing to lose? We might then question your understanding of your position in life, those facts, or the nature of particularly defiant and stubborn creatures. Either way, it's rare someone is just well-rehearsed and methodical in their donning of a persistent “fuck you” with regard to reality and its consequences.

Consider, Trump grew up in a rich and malicious cult before his oligarchical ilk sought to expand its borders. Religious and fascist cults are marching inch by torched inch over decades, if not millennia, in an effort to solidify their rule and desperate dance to avoid feeling as helpless and afraid as they do.

My buddy and I are fixing up and flipping a house. Who doesn't have a family member, friend, or acquaintance that either does this, or has a story of someone who does, or who hasn't considered doing it themselves? Lowes and Menards are like adult playgrounds. There's YouTube videos for nearly everything. Most places, particularly in this inflationary environment, are going to settle up for larger lump sums than you will ever see unless you're a lottery winner or human lab rat. What's not to love or why temper your dreams as you're tapping in vinyl or taping up plastic to protect your accent walls?

Just as quick as you might entertain the idea of flipping a house, you recall the stories of how difficult or frustrating it was to perhaps even find someone nominally capable of fixing something at your own. I'm thankful I have the blogs and statuses where I detail out my futile struggle to find help getting things set up out here, and I've considerably less square footage or aesthetic-concerning aspects to my living environment. To do it yourself, you need time, money, and the patience to navigate the ever-present learning curve. If you're going to get the job done in any appreciable amount of time and considerably less risk to your health, you also need help.

I don't take any variable in the story of my success for granted. I don't want to waste a drop of water in the sea of potential productivity because, rational or not, I feel incredibly thirsty. I've learned to distinguish this thirst from ravenous compulsive working in service to building something my demons are just gonna mock anyway. It's a thirst born of visceral memories of feeling stranded in a proverbial desert. I haven't had the help to the degrees that would have saved me a fuck ton of time, money, and energy. I've absolutely had help, but in spurts, when they had time or were feeling capable. Sometimes it was if and when they could be bothered. Whether I've paid in cash or strands of hair, no one is waiting around my house for me to help them do anything I've got worked up around here.

To that point, I know I'm, when given the right conditions, an aberrant machine with regard to my work ethic. Do I hold people to my standard? Only at my peril, and I sympathize with my business partner who is “worse” than me, currently washing dishes with his Master's degree because it's taken 4 months of games and incomplete information to get this counseling business still not precisely up and running.

Between writing the above and starting again now, it's been six and half hours of me chasing the end of what I might claim has been a “stupid” process of bureaucratic nonsense and silent game-playing. I'm sympathetic to criticisms of “big government” or the general pace and demeanor of people who manage to keep jobs indefinitely not for their competence or vision, but ability to play along. I'm in social work, where I believe it is my responsibility to set a persistent example by which others are to follow and learn from. Would I tell a client to give up on something for which they had one or a dozen ways of asking, calling, or experimenting forward? Of course not, thus my speculation, complaints, or criticisms come right up against my “just do the next thing you dumb fuck.”

Analogies abound. There's 35-odd things to do to get the house sale-ready. Each has its own compounded redundancies, new things to learn, or variables you can't account for until you hit them. It was no different in starting the coffee shop. It's no different in getting my own house in order. You have to claw every miserable inch of progress from the nakedly embarrassing and vitriolic fog of those conducting incidental lives. You have to lay floor accounting for the budding carpel tunnel, vinyl cuts, smashed fingers, and aching knees so the piece fits just right under the trim. Or, you half ass it and put down eye-sore quarter round to try and poorly cover for your mistakes, exhaustion, or lack of care.

I feel like people pretend like we don't share considerably more than we differ, for every individual soul nonetheless. TV shows, movies, and music tie the entire world together. Our biology can only do so many, though seemingly infinite, things. Our brains have about the same meat. Like recognizes like, and whether you're drawn into the blended seam of a perfectly mitered edge or submitting a meticulously documented and accountable measure of your effort in service to a family, what drives the pursuit of either remains the same. You're trying to practice the appreciation for what you've been given. You're trying to be comprehensive in your accounting of where you're at, but also what you're capable of. The story of your impact, the decisions you make in service to who you want to be and where you want to go, is not over until you die.

I may have an infinite well of hatred that fuels my ability to write endless redundant emails in professional-doublespeak, but it doesn't cloud my ability to recognize what the work I've done is worth. I'm not driven by hatred, it's still spite, but I know who and what the enemy actually is. I fight the complacency, disorganization, absent-mindedness, and ambivalence that lend themselves so freely to any given moment. Life is begging you to kill yourself and a chorus of do-nothings are ceaselessly harmonizing.

I will get “my way” regardless. I may not recognize it as mine, at first. But all I have to know about me is that I'm as consistent and persistent in my exercise of the traits and perspectives that have served me the most in life. A presumption of decency or tactful demeanor about me can be denied, but you're gonna see and feel the work I do.

[907] Worn

 Bloody hell, I've made it home. This is one where the title came first.

I have many goals. They run all at once, they are more or less affordable, and they require things of me that speak to different aspects of my being that I care about. I like to build and create things. A specific tool I might be able to afford. The set of tools to really build what I wish to rarely are. I want to be basically in shape, and yet mostly use my gym membership for the shower. Well, better look for the free bricks, pallets, posts, or some other dirty job that gets me lifting, walking, and otherwise developing muscles that mostly make an appearance in the warmer months. I want to practice some degree of sustainability or “green” building, so it behooves me to ensure the money I'm spending works in concert with that kind of ideal.

Today was a “hit multiple levels of your goals” day. Pallets, for “free,” from a place not too far, but just far enough, and who is going to have them in perpetuity each week. I make the pitch to be the go-to so that I'm not playing Cannonball Run trying to rush in to first position. The guy takes me up on it. Great! Right? What are all the goals and layers to begin with?

I have the tools; the truck, the trailer, ratchets, gloves, my redirecting sweat band, and glasses. Each tool a micro-goal spanning many years and the waiting games of paychecks.

I have the time; I consider my time the most important thing, and now I get to be using it in service to my highest ideals. I don't have to rush because I asked for my time to be respected, and it was granted.

I have momentum; it's been a busy set of weekends, and doing labor gets considerably easier when you're physically and mentally prepared to continue to do labor. This will more than count for a workout.

This is about as sustainable as you can get, turning “trash” into cool creative things, utilizing all your home tools.

I like to demonstrate that I mean what I say. I don't take selfies for the sake of selfies. I show you pallets and fence and hopefully translate the enthusiasm I have for this whole thing into, if nothing else, demonstrable proof that it is possible, fun, worth it, and what you should have been doing when you lied to me about what you wished to be doing back in college.

There's a hiccup. I'm not actually rich enough for all of my goals. I'm hood-rich. I'm first-world poor. Everything I do, at all times, comes with a hope and a prayer that no one gets severely injured or too many things break at once. You have to be a little cavalier in your estimation of the danger or investment of what it's going to take to get the job done.

Take my trailer. It was “affordable” in that, given I did not immediately rush out to replace at least two tires nor needed to bother with re-welding or fixing a loose board, I could pay the guy $200 up front, and he was willing to let me pay the remaining $600 when I got paid on Friday. I'm not the guy who can just show up to the trailer store, buy a car trailer for 3K or more, and drive away ready to get to work, no no. The trailer serves me well in hauling the tires, having a heavy jointer loaded onto it, and I certainly noticed one tire appeared to be oddly wearing down, but I had a spare at the ready.

Consider my ratchets. Some are pretty old and one snapped. I just got a set of new mid-level ones in which one decides to scrape against a rough edge and render itself basically useless overnight. These suckers weren't cheap either, but my last pallet run needed reinforcements. They're not terribly long either, at least, not pallet wrangling long.

Gander at my gloves. I've got several sets of gloves, most “reinforced” with layers of gorilla tape where all the holes started to open up. Not these gloves though, just holes. Holes which made their presence known as I go to move my scalding hot truck box into a position more conducive to hauling pallets. Mind you, a truck box I only have to move because it's *just not quite* long enough to rest on the side walls of the truck.

I made a trip to Menards to get commercial ratchets...for $200.

In my fervor to keep making “progress” or “demonstrations” that I'm all of that which I say I am, there's often very little planning. I didn't have enough to drink. I didn't pause to ask the guy how many pallets there would be, and stupidly trusted a misleading picture. I said “the spare is there,” and didn't take too hard a look at the other tires.

Increasingly sun-burnt, thirsty, and approaching undue mental confusion, I get all of the pallets loaded up. I go on my merry way. I buy two over-priced smoothies on the way. I stop to add a strap. I drive the kind of slow that's reserved for a cheeky 80's comedy where I'm supposed to be waving at all of the confused and angry people speeding by. A pallet comes loose. Two semi-trucks let me know through frantic beeping. I play the world's least interesting game of Frogger in picking my moments to step into what's assuredly going to be my doom and wrestle with the pallet. Another car motions in a whirl telling me to look at my tires, bits of rubber dancing away with each bump over an unpaved section of road.

I'm home. I'm safe. I have a shit ton of pallets, or, work to do on them to make them a fence and other things. The trailer did it. The truck, shaking like the palsy, I suspect burned its last ounce of oil, and easily $50 in gas. By the numbers, I used my time in the most productive way I consider possible. Spent less than $300 to get what will be a lot of future fence. This is time saved in running to different locations for considerably less pallets. I get the harrowing story. I get one more notch in my “you're taking the wrong lesson from this” belt.

I still find it in me to envy the people with the bigger truck with the new equipment attached to it, doing their thing with considerably less cab shaking and muscle tension as they laser-focus on the rear-view mirrors (I assume). It's not that they take away my motivation or pride in what I'm doing. It's that I don't think they appreciate what they have. It's probably an unfair thought, but I picked these pallets up in one of, if not the, richest cities in Indiana. I drove them back to one of the poorest. So poor, it's on our goal sheet to figure out how to give them sanitary ways to shit.

I can't help but think that I stretch myself incredibly thin, and never had to. At least, by the numbers, all of the people I imagined I'd be doing things like this with all came from the same kind of backgrounds as me. We aren't poor poor. We have supportive families. We imbibed the apocalyptic narratives around climate change and are certainly now the exact age we should be actively batting to death the literal fascists...but that's a whole thing unto itself. What happens instead? I throw little parties for myself and garner the likes from the handful of people who consistently have given a fuck about what I'm about. It's good. It's gratifying. It ain't gonna save the world. We're all certainly smart enough to find ourselves preoccupied in whatever upper-middle class city we choose.

I wear a certain kind of badge in service to an authority I wish to maintain indefinitely. It gets the job done, in spite of everything. It' not a discussion about would've or could've. What if the pallet fell? Pallets don't fall off things that are better equipped? I made it not fall, and got it home. What if the tire blew? New tires don't pop? I gambled and won. I wish I never had to gamble. Nothing about the environments I'm stuck in suggests I'm ever doing anything less.

I'm already home. Before I go looking for the next “free” things, before I roll the dice, and before I need to unpack some situation seemingly so indicative of my state of being, I know why I went, stayed cool-enough, and got back. I know where those pallets are going. I know how to improve my next run. I know how and why I can afford it. I'm good with every good and bad thing you think the situation says about me. I wish I had a better handle on why I can't believe any of this effort is taking me anywhere but “away.”

[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.