[786] Yawn Care

I kinda want this to be the last time I talk about work for a while. It shouldn't be long.

I bring a certain kind of philosophy to what I do. One, it's rare that I get called to a house that isn't under a fair amount of duress. That duress looks something like the varying degrees of fallout related to addiction. It's one or more of your family members having spent time in prison. It's the legion of things from cleanliness to attitude that accompany generational abuse or poverty. If it's 1/12 families I might ever substantiate on, it's 1/25 where both mom and dad have working cell phones that they answer immediately, with a clean and nice smelling house, a basic consistent income and habits that match that income, and literally no excuse, it's just a reasonable explanation or miscommunication, for why I'm there. My habits aren't bred from interactions with “normal” people.

I think about this when it comes to other people who routinely deal with this class. Apparently, police have an even easier time with this crowd that we do. They just arrest them, write up a report, and move on. We sit, and coach, and look for services. We remain polite and conversational as someone, very often, tries to unload their 10, 20, or 50 years of trauma over the phone. We try to treat your situation as “normal” as we watch cockroaches crawl over your baby's face. We genuinely have to worry we'll get infected with bed bugs if we sit on the wrong surface. This does something to you.

I don't like to scroll through 15 years of unsubstantiated histories and calls made to your house. I got a kind of passive aggressive jab for saying I walk into a situation trying to first figure out why I'm there today. I think this is most practical. One, not all reports are created equal. I could literally spend an hour trying to summarize the rambling of another assessor. Two, whether someone has a drug history, violent past, or one of a dozen things that set off the “worker safety” concerns, I already take myself into situations assuming the worst. I ask about your history, I feel out to what degree you're willing to bullshit me. Most people know they can lie their way to freedom and drug screens are voluntary. They already look bad, they don't care if they look worse as long as you're walking away without evidence.

I adopt a tone reflective of a strongly-worded email. Things need to happen, and they need to happen now. Sooner than later is preferred, because when I hang up the phone with you, you're never going to pick back up. That's what people in my world do. They have a dozen phones over the course of a year, throw out incorrect numbers, and then disappear. So tomorrow, when I'm hunting down the person who hung up on me today, even if my sternness led to the hang-up, I need the severity of the situation to translate above the niceties I put on to get you to listen for as long as you do. I know you're an addict. I know you'll probably deny and decline. I also know that me being there is part of a larger trap State intervention sets.

We cause trauma. We ratchet up people into going overboard. It's our presence that takes someone walking a fine line and tells them, “I should make this public!” And then an assessment I just closed turns into mom getting arrested the day after. We're at once a light getting shed and the false relief that once I'm gone or you haven't heard anything for a while, you can go crazy. I, to the best of my ability, try to get ahead of that. I try to appeal to your capacity to be honest or work with me. I assume you won't. I politely ask you to do the things I need. I assume you won't. When you don't have a job, don't have the kids with you, and I can come to anywhere you are in a moment's notice, there aren't enough errands on the planet to justify you playing games with me about “tomorrow” that never comes without a court order.

There's something to be said about not kicking people when they're down. It's the same thing in this job as I do in the rest of my life. My language describing these people is horrible. I never bring that to their face. I get off the phone with, “This crazy bitch fucking lying to me,” and it's “I'll sit with you and explain everything I possibly can to make the process suck less!” an hour later. Their depravity doesn't feel personal, and I get paid to try, not to win. I understand what being helpless feels like. I also understand that as a function of my youth an ignorance and work obsessively to try and mitigate. No, most people aren't born like me, so of them I ask that they put on the same face to society required of us all, and at least go through the motions for getting caught.

I've also managed to get offered “permanency” with my job. It took about 6 months. Whether it's some odd timing with some vacation I want to take in the summer, or I just show a basic apt and work-ethic, I'm unsure. But, this kind of thing keeps happening to me. My baseline suggests I do things well even when I have no desire to do them. I went from 14 assessments on my screen down to 7 in 2 days because I just stopped pretending I couldn't fill in a couple forms. If they would pay me double for the more assessments I'll get assigned for having “less to do,” I'd really kick it into high gear and bother to bring my laptop home. It's just kind of annoying to watch myself, yet again, take my capacity and watch it reduced to achievements I don't want and clout I plan to do nothing with. I'm attending extra training hours and looking for new windows into DCS as well...yay.

I think about this class of people when considering a universal basic income. They get tax checks and spend it on heroin. That's a real and consistent thing. There are people who handcuff themselves to their status in life because they know they can't handle existing beyond a certain kind of mean. Would an extra $1000 a month actually help you and me? Of course, the word “budget” exists in our vocabulary, and the edge we walk is from the stress of managing bills in under-paying jobs. Will it address “poverty” as a philosophy and mental condition? Will it erase the felony convictions, the credit history, or influence of trailer-trash friends and family? Will it stop people from lying about their addictions and abuses, or help them exacerbate them?

The more you see it, the familiar patterns and nonsense, the less, as if I had much, sympathy there is. They need to love each other, there's nothing else. They need their sugary drinks and snacks. They need to cultivate some kind of emotional boost of a lie to build their lives around. So, what's my job really? Kick in the door and tell you how it “ought” to be? To the extent you're hurting the fuck out of your kid, sure. That's society's obligation because they're blameless. But everything else? The world you brought them into that I can't fix? The history you saddled them with which motivates poor decision after poor decision? I'm supposed to “assess” it as anything other than what it is? A deeply inured human condition no amount of money or “resources” can fix.

The best I can do is relay the process as honestly as I can and make it as smooth as possible. I'm learning that for as impatient as I am in observing my own life, I have all the time in the world to drone on about what I know about the process. And it is a process. It's a necessary not-so-evil. It will never cease to amaze me that the people who get the worst aspects of that process literally have to beg for it. They have to take every suggested behavior and piss on it. They have to take every court order and tear it up. They have to scream, cry, and fight for years over every detail of the shit they took in the middle of the process. That's personal to them. Not everyone, not most, are like that. That's a you thing, not a poverty thing.

---the drift away---

Barring getting fired, I see myself in this job at least through my birthday. With the house flirting with functional, I need to pay off credit cards, the back taxes, and the vacation I'm taking, and then I don't know if I get gung-ho about entrepreneurship stuff, or more rooms, or just kinda sit and try to save up a ton to breathe a little easier and go at a slower pace. There's 9 checks between now and my birthday, $6000 of the low-end $9000 I'll make from them already gone if I pay off everything besides my car, electricity, and internet. $3000 in the bank isn't freedom with car debt and utilities. God knows I'll keep eating like shit too because I don't have a kitchen and still don't like to cook. At the very least, once back taxes paid off, I'll be able to pay 2.5 months labor for a year of security? That'll put me just over a year at this job. Then if I get the car paid off or sold, It's 1-1.5 months labor for year of security, assuming over-paying electricity. Can I keep it together till then? I mean, I have daily reminders of the kind of person I don't want to be by picking anything else, not that I ever needed them.

[529] 6 Deadly Sins

I saw a model for social mobility in a sociology class once. It explained that, relative to where you were born in life, maybe 10-15% of people were predicted to move up in their class. If my memory is lacking, I know it wasn’t 5% and I know it wasn’t 20%. It referred to the U.S. specifically, and I’m fairly certain it was speaking to how that number goes down depending on race and how those numbers have been affected as we moved into the future. (This was 6 years ago I was in this class.)

A word employed, I think too often today, is “privilege.” One must check their privilege. They must apologize and kowtow to the unconscious hurt it causes everyone around them. There is no hard and fast rules for believing someone has acted with enough contrition. The standard for what constitutes privilege is constantly shifting. It’s less a cautionary vehicle for awareness as it is an opportunity for someone to pounce on what they perceive is any edge they were not provided.

Here we can find ourselves in another conversation about “raising consciousness” or claim some capacity to be “woke.” In my view, to do either is as much a sham as it is to foist someone’s life circumstances on their unconscious biases alone. Let’s elaborate with some stories.

I recently took a trip to the ghetto. A friend of mine organizes his uncle’s pills, runs him to the store, and just generally checks in to make sure the aging former Gangster Disciple diabetic is still kicking. The man’s grass was a jungle, he smelled like unwiped ass. He told, more like barely coherently mumbled, stories about how crackheads (or, rock stars as he hilariously called them) sneak into his house to do crack while he’s asleep. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he has a few mental health issues as well.

We can draw a contrast from that man’s experience of life to that of his nephew’s and mine. Me and my friend live within 5 minutes of each other and both grew up solidly middle class. The quiet, quasi-dead, banality of the neighborhood in which I’m writing this was something we were both born into. We’re both “woke” to the realities of poverty, him in his own family, and if only me because I’ve known him for so long, or watched what’s happened to my area as ghetto-like conditions started creeping in.

The dialogue about his uncle goes a few ways. Screaming accusations and appeals to personal responsibility happens often enough. “He should mow his lawn!” “Lock the door!” “Seek help!” Because the man “shopping,” at a store that doesn’t mop its floors, for pop to accompany the bread and leftover cake on his table, probably has a world-class health clinic up the street, right? You remember it was us that drove him to the store as well as sort out the 8 different pills he needed a day.

You can also go completely oblivious the other way. “He should be totally taken care of!” “We should create all the resources possible to make sure he’s living like a human being!” “If we only had access to better healthcare!” While my sympathies certainly lie more in this camp, it’s wholly oblivious to the realities of an impoverished culture. There is no plug and play fix to an institutional disposition. There is no amount of “education.” There’s not enough health clinics you can open. There’s not enough empathy bombs you can set off in someone’s mind to provoke a march and overhaul. In an extremely important wording and sense, “he” cannot be fixed because “he” is not really the problem. Many things went wrong before he got here.

It’s this reality that makes me, not want to blame and berate people of my or higher standing about their lives, but encourage them to talk. It’s why I wish they’d get over themselves. Without even realizing it, we’re quick to cry, kick, and scream about things that happen to us. (My future was tied to the girl!) More importantly to me, we’re quick to brag and boast about how picturesque our lives are, when of course they’re not, while we spend everyday pretending the realities of the ghetto don’t matter or impact us. We act like the institutions we middle-manage or wage-slave at don’t create conditions of a chronic illness. We think working hard, or more insidiously, “harder,” means we’re being smart or justified. We’re not.

This is what kills me whenever I’m told, “well we already know this!” about something I’m writing. I don’t believe you. I don’t believe the vast majority of people who grew up like me know the feeling, look, and smell of poverty. I don’t think they’re regaled with stories from their Uncle Tom grandpa getting soooo excited to be treated like white people. I think this because I’ve had people tell me, “I’ve had many racial interactions throughout my life!” trying to defend their not-racist street cred, as they doubted the legitimacy of Black Lives Matter or that the amount of people getting shot was accurate.

Do you know? Do you feel things in your bones and change your voice and actions?

Recently, I was watching a former NFL star talk on Chelsea about what a major payday looks like to you, as opposed to Uncle Sam, as opposed to your agent or your family. Managing that money and having those difficult conversations about why you’re not going to let someone invest in a barber shop in Tokyo are skills you don’t often acquire on your road through the sports world. It’s a kind of clash of civilizations in your own mind, as you often come up from less than ideal circumstances. For many of these guys, it takes losing millions before a stabilizing and wiser perspective sets in.

In other words, you can’t just throw money at it. If you’re going to my friend’s uncle’s house, you shouldn’t even bother keeping ten bucks in your pocket, or you’re gonna be compelled to lie to him when he asks if you have any extra cash. The kinds of changes that I would argue for aren’t simple shifts in monetary policy. They’re shifts in what we’re willing to put up with conversationally. They’re shifts in what constitutes “work” or a well-written or reported perspective on some area of life. I want humility and struggle against the system, not braggadocio and tired confessionals mirroring every other complacent or self-indulgent soul.

But how do you know I mean it? What makes me “special?” Why listen to my voice, sounding eerily like those bleeding hearts with pie-in-the-sky ideas that could never work!?

Well, I’m the one writing about my brush with actual poverty, you’re not. I’m currently looking for a spot to build an eco-friendly straw-bale house, because I didn’t get the “middle-class” lifestyle promised to me either. That’s currently, not “one day” after I’ve exhausted myself at some bullshit job, I very-well know is bullshit, but refuse to say so out loud because it’s so drab and depressing, blaaaahhh. “Not everyone can do drug studies, asshole!” No, but you can pull resources. You can shack up next or near each other and put away resentful naiveties about the capacity of your bootstraps. My living room and extra bedroom have opened up for at least 4 friends to help find their footing. You can try figuring out something new together instead of playing out the well-worn excuses and traversing the poorly-paved roads before you.

A sonder is the realization that everyone has a life as rich and complex as your own. I often think about this as I’m passing what feels like a hundred thousand cars on my way to take pills for more than most will make this month. Rich and complex? We’re all on the same road. In my area, we’re all wandering the same mall and eating the same food. We went to, about, the same schools. If we truly had any capacity for appreciating complexities, you’d think we’d introduce “simple” ethics regarding shared experience into the compounding equation before anything else.

Still, I’m provoked by the language of sin. We’re greedy. I want my toys and house and cash as much as the next person, but I won’t do it hiding behind my small donations here and there or even pretending blogs like this count for more than they do. We’re sloths. We’ll struggle to the ends of the earth to defend our “love” and our “rights” as long as we don’t really have to tackle what that means for our neighbor. We take undue pride in what I AND I ALONE, or at least, what my family nodded in support of, have accomplished. We envy those who can pull off the best Instagram picture or magazine depiction of a modern living room. We gorge ourselves on unsustainable food. We get insanely defensive and angry at people like me who perpetually point out the emperor is naked. When it comes to lust, I think people should be fucking considerably more often, so let’s say I think religion gets that one pretty wrong at least.

Everything in my life is a first-world problem and complaint. I barely discussed what happens in the ghettos of America. Tell that story to the perpetually bombed teenage Palestinians. You mean their house ISN’T reduced to rubble? Bling Bling! I don’t want to live like the poor and I don’t think I need to flog myself for aspiring to more. I do think I have an obligation to encourage, as often as the mood strikes me, a conversation that I think begets real change. I want the kind of conversations that drove me to drug studies and straw-bale houses, and investing in software that hopefully helps me respect the time I’ve spent reading about the details.

The conversation doesn’t get better when it doesn’t happen. Our “consciousness” remains stunted at whatever snippets we can remember from the half-read article before or after work. Our jovial polite impressions of one another, or stark raving lunatic screaming professions about one another, remain different extremes to the same end. Maybe not your end, in your little world, concerned with your little self. But an end that might terrify, or dejectedly relieve you, were the circumstances switched. The “government,” our “educations,” the “fix,” whatever you’re mad at or supports you are all what you’re choosing to do right now. Or, they’re all subjected to the unconscious whimsy of business as usual.

Am I trying to guilt trip you? Is asking for informed empathic conversation too much? Is working together not just unreasonable given proximity, but who has the time? I won’t pretend I know what your path or method consists of, but it shouldn’t be silence. It shouldn’t be judgment or anger. You should do like me. Be weird. Insist. Encourage. Try to do it differently and experiment. Talk for as long as it takes. Dive into what makes you afraid and uncomfortable. That’s where my friends lie and what I want to see the future consist of. Anything less seems pointless.