[1016] After Ours

Don’t bother.

There’s the thought keeping me from writing. Don’t bother reiterating. Don’t bother wasting more hours of your life pretending you’ll arrive at some “conclusion.” It doesn’t matter. It’s not worth it. You don’t feel enough of anything to justify more empty words in service to your ingratitude and impatience. Fuck you, sit down, watch another one of your little TV shows. Clog your gut with more pink Starbursts.

I don’t want to be useless and mediocre. I think they go hand in hand. A thing that’s not useful for whatever it is you’re doing with it is, by definition “of only moderate quality; not very good.” “Moderate quality” seems like a contradiction. Are you having a quality time, or not? Or is “quality” one of those disguised useless terms that infuses the real description with nothing information? Is it a “quality” piece of clothing? Is it expensive? Is it keeping you warm, comfortable, or dry feel like the relevant pieces of information.

What is the “quality” of my experience? I just got home from a Straight No Chaser show. I’ve never been to an acapella show before. My first instinct on most acts I’ve seen online, confirmed ever more in person, is awkward Christian summer camp energy. Do you understand what I said? Did I have a “good’ time? Did I like the songs? I only knew a couple and I had no specific complaints. Would I see them again and again? Was it “worth the money?”

The whole of where my experience lies seems outside the realm of this line of questioning. I went for a small book’s worth of reasons, all of those and more will inform if and when I go again to them or any other band. I wanted to experience “something” remotely novel, affordable, and that would occupy my time I’m not otherwise in front of the TV, fast food window, or work environment.

Why am I parsing through an abstraction on awareness and time expenditure? I was asked by my boss if I’m “happy” working at Groups. This has caused me several days of ongoing mild panic. I genuinely want to “snap” at questions like that. I feel at once so many things. It’s, “Does baby have to boo boo?” from a doctor meant to be investigating a twisted bowel. It’s, “Live, Love, Laugh!” on the wall of the suicide hotline office. It’s limp. It’s pathetic. It’s shallow and shitty and fuck her for asking such a bold and fucking ridiculous question.

I got asked because I’ve been increasingly introduced into the drama between my office managers. I, again, drive an hour and a half at least once a week to sit in an office to do a remote job. I come face to face with overworked and underpaid secretaries who get regularly screamed at and threatened by our drug-addled population. As they get more burnt, it translates into how/whether they handle our people in professional ways. This spills over into whether anyone takes the program on the whole seriously, which they already have enough reason and ways to not do so anyway.

Am I happy about that? Do I like that my office managers’ leadership has deliberately and consistently removed herself from solving anything they’ve brought to her? Am I happy I waste gas and time driving to the office to plug into the failures and drama? Do I like working for a company paying me a fraction of what they’re billing my service for? Am I happy I have a schedule so scattered that I literally can’t be more efficient? Am I happy that I’m not challenged or driven to do anything but the bare minimum? I NEED MONEY! That is the only reason I have ever occupied any role ever. Money. Always. Whatever other perk or privilege is a thousand years removed from “money, please.” Happiness has NEVER factored into it. Am I stuck or placated? I’m probably still at the job. Am I out of debt? I find myself showing up, waking up, and shutting up. Fucking happy? You fucking cunt!

I’M NEVER FUCKING HAPPY. It’s probably a good summation as to why I don’t have friends. I’ll stick with the over-statement because it depicts a larger truth. I don’t want to be friends, colleagues, or concert-going with someone fucking miserable and oblivious enough to think any of this is about “happiness.”

I’m not happy bowling because I wish for more instruction and consistent practice. I’m not happy building on the land because I need more money, more time, and better weather. It’d be great if every time I took out the trailer a tire wasn’t flat. I’m not happy reading because I’m either learning more about what I can’t use or fix or feel like I’m mocking myself in trying to desperately “escape” whatever circumstance I’m in. I have so many books I’m genuinely interested in reading, and I can’t. They’re like my instruments. I don’t have the freedom. My mind is not available to “just play” or “just read.” I have to keep furiously scratching a compulsive itch to worry or reflect or mindlessly vibe through TV shows and Candy Crush levels.

I’m not happy and I’m not free. I’m play-acting all the fucking time. I pretend to be professional. I pretend to care. I pretend to be polite. I pretend I have anything figured out in terms of indulgence and ownership and the perks of being “hood rich.” When I do my budget I constantly, and I mean constantly, remind myself “only 5 paychecks and I’m even” or “Only until February…if I can just sit and do nothing.” Then you know what happens when you tell yourself that long enough? Insurance needs to be renewed. Property taxes are due. Contacts run out. My air conditioner will break. A tire needs replaced. My cats get fleas. I get sick. Someone needs a loan. I get bored and indulgent and spend too much on another ticket, drive, and pair of cocktails.

It’s stopped feeling like a climb or “requisite sacrifice” to get anywhere. It feels like a miserable slog through layers of shit, deliberately laid or otherwise. I was driven to create the coffee shop and throw the house parties. I was driven as a kid to do well in school. I was motivated to connect and share and try to build and celebrate. Now I just wait. I just wait and bitch and share pictures of musicians and comics living their dreams. I wait till you’re free or maybe return a text. I wait on insurance companies and for the next opportunity to piss away another 25 minutes inputting redundant information. I wait for the meeting to be over, the month to be over, and the payment to hit.

I don’t want to be present in most of my moments. I want to be with my TV shows. I struggle sometimes to watch them while I’m otherwise waiting, sitting at a bar until the show starts or at the restaurant eating alone. Until the comic is starting or the band starts playing, I’m just around disease vectors and people who seem mostly together because they match heights and looks. Do I want to feel my feet and back ache in the standing-room only venue? Do I want to huff your vape runoff or farts? Do I want to watch a band I enjoy through your hair? Does it make me happy to freeze outside for an hour or more in order to get an appreciable spot to witness what’s happening and costing too much due to monopolies and greed?

I fuck up and listen to smart plugged-in people talk about their accomplishments. I hear people talk like how my brain works about their areas of expertise. They get hyper-detailed. They know the subject has a dozen layers and it’s not going to make sense unless they find a way to speak to them all and tie them all together. “When I was writing my first book…,” “When I owned a pharmacy and was doing what Mark Cuban was doing 8 years before him…” So many bands remind us how grateful they are that they “get to do this for a living, and it’s because of you!” Whether they’re selling out the venue or not, there’s a culture, direction, and presumably sense of purpose that I lack. They don’t need 2000 words per song or joke. They don’t need $1400 every two weeks. They need to load up the van, move to the next gig, and play.

Why can’t I just play?

I don’t want to be useless and mediocre. When I think of playing, I think of children. If you drop obvious sentiments, they epitomize uselessness and mediocrity. I don’t really remember the last time I felt like a child. I have memories of going to the park and playing in playgrounds. Playing implies that you’ve nothing else to obligate yourself towards but that free self-expression. You have energy, so you run. There are other kids, so now it’s a chase or a thing to throw rocks at. I feel obligated. I feel responsible for living a certain kind of way that conforms with my best approximations or what might be derived from what I write.

I’m trying so fucking hard. I’m trying to be the constant cheerleader. I’m trying to understand the “reasons” verses miserable excuses I can or can’t move in some direction. I’m trying to derive layers of meaning from the shows I seek and artists I invest in. I’m trying to not lose sight of the veritable miracles I’ve been able to pull off so far. But there’s a healthy dose of suffering in each moment. The stakes and pressure are real. I’m running contingency plans. I’m mourning previous conceptions of dreams and myself. I’m tired and anxious not because I don’t have energy or anything to worry about, but because the fight feels less and less worth fighting and I’m exactly the kind of person who can carry out dramatic reflexive course shifts in spite of the consequences. I’m daring “the universe,” embodied by my supervisor, to keep asking me if I’m “happy.”

I’m embarrassed, ashamed, annoyed and restless. I’m fucking angry as fuck that I’m so angry it’s the same deadness-as-self-preservation I felt growing up. I’m lost. I’m first-world-poor. I’m distracted. I’m alone. I’m bored. I’m unfulfilled and meandering and eating like shit and spending money on so many wet bandages ill-suited for open wounds. I’m as full of hate and despair as I can imagine anyone with less impulse control and perspective can be before they hurt themselves or others. I don’t want another superficial interaction. I don’t want to dance around. (But fuck do I miss dancing!)

I need to disappear into a hole. I have from the 22^nd until the new year off. I dream of either reading a dozen books, or getting a lot of yard work done. If it rains, I need to stop myself from just wasting away, waiting around my dad’s house until dinner or thinking to myself I can get through several layers of each channel’s first episodes! Did you catch that perk? I get all that time to contemplate how much my job cares about me and makes me comfortable. That’s so nice of them. Way better than more money, a stake, vote, or sense of ownership and belonging to a mutually instantiated and protected culture of health care and accountability. Aren’t I “happy” to have the time off? Don’t you wish you had that time off?

I feel like I’m somehow lost or the only one acknowledging the broader context. Byron has increasingly said “Black people are the canary in the coal mine,” with regard to the slow-moving coup and creeping fascism. It’s beyond fucked Hershel Walker even came close. If that’s not scaring you to death in an ongoing way, you seem absolutely insane to me. If you can’t imagine striking, unionizing, or ever remotely speaking to your “authority” or “representative” about the detailed shit of your circumstances, we’re not on the same planet. What do you think is in store for your kids? What do you presume insulates this ignorant country from collapsing like any other? Are you “happy” to just not think about such depressing things? Are you all just making wildly more money, enjoying your time, and figuring out this life thing better than me?

[970] Sticking Points

I think I want to talk about getting educated. I’m not sure, but that’s all I can come up with as an opener. I’ve had the last few days to kind of sit and do nothing. The rain has made it so I couldn’t work on building. I read or listened to dozens of my old blogs. Yesterday, the weather improved and I got a decent amount of work done outside. Today, the weather is also nice, and I’m hesitating to get back at it. There are a few things that have been informing how I feel the last week.

I cramp pretty easily. I suspect as a result of my less-than nutritious diet. When I’m out working, even if I’m not physically exhausted, the tension on certain muscles starts to make me woozy. I don’t think extended time in the sun contributed positively to that feeling either. While I greatly enjoy the cardio and feeling stronger in my capacity to move big and heavy objects around, it’s not without pain. How much I wish to continue pursuing the flow of working and accompanying pain is more informed by each day before that felt it.

That I want to pursue activities and investments like this is informed by things more intellectual than physical. I’ve liked building things since I was a child. My dad is an iron-worker, and there’s a certain appeal to be like your parent. I’m budget conscious, and after the $3000 it will likely take me to get my new shop in order, that’s $15,000 I didn’t spend on the same amount of prefabricated and delivered space. I want to be flexible in my capacity to create and be useful in tangibly physical ways.

My experience of engaging in things, my thoughts collected and impressed upon me over time, and then how I speak about and record the journey are in a constant dance. One of the things that strikes me about reading old blogs is how little I’ve moved away from what they’re saying. I’ve improved word choices or tempered some degree of fatalism or pessimism, but the fundamental point often remains the same. The desires remain the same. The things that are missing are often still missing.

It's a little depressing, but more informative, that I’ve been looking for “help” for almost as long as I’ve been writing. It obviously comes in spurts, but at the base of my being, I wish to be plugged into “something” or “someone” in which we’re headed in a similar direction. It might be understood as unconscious fixation. My first instinct in answering, “What’s your motivation?” might illicit, “I want to be independent, I want my time, money, etc.” But, under that, it seems like I want a kind of indefinite connection or reciprocity that I don’t feel as viscerally as cramps.

For as many times as I’ve felt “stuck,” you can skip a few blogs, then suddenly a new opportunity or show or project arrives. I’m not catching as many hiccups to my flow for any given activity. I spent the money, and just reach in and grab the tool. Or I fire up the resolve to drive into debt because, well, I’m always in debt, so what am I getting for it?­

I could borrow from the language and study of trauma and say that I have attachment issues. I could speculate on the opaque problems of “humanity” and its inability to organize behind anything that isn’t ironically self-destructive. I could make pains to convince myself any momentary preoccupation is as meaningful and purposeful as I need it to be. I could take it a step further and extract a self-righteous proclamation about the one person who I might reach to make it all worth it.

I’m also constantly on the attack. I’m always going after “you.” It’s rare that I name drop in a blog or have some explicit fight I want to parse out line by line. They happen enough, but I don’t really seek out drama for its own sake, and I definitely bore of the patterns insecure people play out at my feet. If I had to personify “you,” the two most defining characteristics would be dishonesty and silence. I might have to look up a fun way to combine the words or the roots of their origins so I can move the conversation forward in my head. My draw to Jordan Peterson was how often he said the exact same things I was feeling instinctively, or arriving at by writing, but tying them to his experience as a clinician and study of literature. Now, his brand is meme summations like, “If your life doesn’t look like you think it should, try honesty.”

Is he talking to me? Well, no, he’s talking to “you,” who has remained silent or dishonest in your silence. The featured comedian I saw yesterday spoke to getting to her 40s and realizing the secret to happiness was to stop pretending to like things. This, a point I feel I’ve diverged on since birth, as I can’t pretend to like things if I try, which I don’t.

The wild swings in my perspective find a mean regardless. I can’t stay feeling desperate and alone. I can’t work myself to death. I can’t spend all my time in someone’s presence I enjoy. I can’t find the drive or enthusiasm for any hobby to keep it up indefinitely. I can describe myself as a “whore” psychologically and not be prowling the bars or joining the sex websites in free moments or to assuage boredom. The harder you push, at all, in any direction, the insistence of balance makes itself known. When you overstep there’s a cue to pull back. Maybe this is why I’m not a regretful person in paying attention before I have to jog backwards as opposed to creep a few inches.

I don’t know where I would be without writing. I’m the opposite of silence, and if all I did was take to the page to spew bullshit, I couldn’t take anything useful away even reading 10 or pushing 20 years later. The only way I could envision my life being any better is by incorporating more people into forms of security and indulgence. I don’t know how to do this. Or, I don’t know if I’ve only been able to go about doing it in ways that are selfish and make sense to me. I think a major reason I don’t know is that people are dead silent about their perspective, at least to me.

I don’t find it confusing why. When you start speaking, you beget that underlying responsibility to do something about it. You can get challenged. You might discover you’re very wrong and dumb. You might unlock a lot of drama you’re not prepared to deal with. I talked myself into ticks and garden shed over years. It wasn’t manic epiphany. I’ve consciously plunged into debt for an envisioned future, not because I feel great “right now” with fleetingly low bills. I mean, that feels great, but my goal isn’t to pay bills lol, it’s to have a little enclave, then dozens, and then the world.

If you don’t keep that conversation going with yourself, you don’t have a reason. You don’t have a direction. You don’t know what’s missing, how to get it, or whether it’s worth it. It’s part of the reason I get very frustrated when some project stalls, especially if it does so for reasons, in theory, I can control. What more in life could we ask for than to follow the path laid out before us? Especially if we got to choose the path!? It’s like turning your life into a vacation. You picked the destination, wandered into whatever shops seemed intriguing, ate and drank to your satisfaction, then on day 5 of 7 just slept in the hotel all fucking day? Did you forget you were on vacation, have a shitty reason for going to begin with, or are you lying about the purpose it’s serving and whether you know how to enjoy yourself?

I enjoy building shit. I enjoy learning new things, reading and watching everything, playing music, discovering new artists and shows, and maintaining a preparedness to play at a moment’s notice. That’s my center, acknowledging, sanctifying, and protecting the “go” and “do” and “right now” capacity of any moment. That’s how writing allows me to get “unstuck.” That’s how I can keep enjoying the pain, obligation, and debt while I bowl or bemoan the weather. That’s why no business venture is “failed” when it’s done in that spirit of adventure and exploring the boundaries of what you know.

In a way, my collection of un-utilized dodgeballs exists as the standing analogy for my life in general. I bought the balls shortly after college. I had played with a group of guys on the dorm, and then some kids for a few weeks. I thought if I had my own, I’d be able to get my friends together and be able to play more often. Maybe even construct a mobile netted enclosure. In my naivete, my friends weren’t about that play life. I created events, brought it up in conversation over and over, and most often got something akin to, “I’ve always hated dodgeball” or, “I’m not very good.” So, they have sat, in a dodgeball bag, all-but deflated in and amongst my things for maybe 10 years. I tell the people I counsel if they can’t get the little things right, they don’t have a prayer for the big things.

I can’t get people to play. Before that, I couldn’t get people to speak up and be honest with me. I could get them to party, and then have that converted into resentment and accusations. I can seek out sports leagues and meet-up groups, but you quickly discover the nature of the game you’re playing and the one on the field isn’t the same. That is, at every adult softball game I’ve attended this year, I don’t know that I’ve witnessed someone not smoking or drinking during it save one or two people. There are large men trying to recapture younger glory years, out-of-shape and been warned by their doctor to make lifestyle changes types, former generally athletic and social ones, or loners who pick softball instead of the bar.

I don’t begrudge their reasons for coming, but “play” doesn’t capture it. Fear of dying young, insecurity about getting old, justifying an unhealthy puff with a healthy jog, or mitigating loneliness sounds like a more honest and complete picture to me. Surely playing happens, and it can be fun, and you can gain rewards for doing something beyond wallowing in whatever drove you there. I wish everyone was out playing sports in service to their demons before doing anything else. At what point does the play get to trump or incorporate the demons though? When are you ready to build the playing field?

Does it make sense why I would glom on to an Allie who has a whole fucking garden out there? I’ll subject myself to a year of mental turmoil under the impression I’ve found someone to play with! Lol. I will put in a floor and paint and pat myself on the back right through Christmas convincing myself the effort will mean I can play in the next house just around the corner and not have to keep taking jobs that mean nothing to me.

Why it’s so vital to know what something means to you is clear. You can’t really be happy, have fun, or play otherwise. The idea that you’re running from something becomes a too obvious and compelling story. The nature of how you’re being exploited stays felt and rarely spoken to. The lack of connection or empathy or drive for an actionable belief in changing your circumstances turns into fate. I knew what my friendships meant to me. I know what my work on my house tells me. I know why I show up to hang out or send the invitation in spite of the endless canceling, silence, or lack of enthusiasm. I know what I mean to me or what I can mean to those who play along. It’ll never be meaningful to you, because you don’t exist. You’re an abstract ironically disembodied construct representing dishonesty and silence. You’re busy, tired, sick, and broke. You’re bad at dodgeball. I’m ready to go right now.