Today feels like a day that could be described as "crazy-making."
Am I sick, hurt, or otherwise dramatically impaired? No. There's been a theme and a confluence of forces though. Let's go.
This week, literally everyone has canceled on me. For work, for fun, for things I was anticipating to use to feel useful and good. I spend pretty much all of my time alone, talking to no one, blazing through TV, playing my instruments, reading, or getting myself into some trouble playing with something I shouldn't because I can't stand feeling idle and useless anymore.
I lay this at no one's feet. I could, theoretically more than practically, invest a considerable amount of time attempting to connect to other people, organizations, or things to do so I don't feel as reliant upon others and their consistency or capacity to manage. And, in fact, that's what I've done in getting started with CASA, and hopefully seeing that spin-off into more first-hand interactions with clients, other volunteers, and the inevitable messes that will bring.
First, one of my attempted hires to fundraise ignores my outreach. I thought she was on the verge of stealing $1,200, tracked her down, got a brief invitation to her life's blow-up, and she's since refunded $500, on what she's proposed is a schedule to refund the whole on her paydays. In the meantime, I patiently idle and refrain from catastrophizing her silence, and now 6th missed scheduled discussion, and who knows how many ignored texts.
Ok. I got an early text that client 1's phone is broken and needs to be rescheduled. I attempt to call client 2 around our meeting time, no response. I text if they are okay. I get a "Not at all, can we talk later today?" I text later in the day, no response. That whole day was designed around another person supposed to come out and talk about plans to upgrade my space. They had other life complications with family illness to deal with, so the project lingers.
I'm left with more idle time. We need to be incredibly clear that whatever I feel about that time, it's not being laid at the feet of "everyone" or anyone I refer to. I do not blame a single person ever for focusing on their sick loved ones or deprioritizing whatever we had planned.
I proceed to go about my days. I go to the symphony for the live music playing of Star Wars as the movie runs. An entire section of kids talked, crinkled pop cans, and just generally made it about them for the entire film. No usher told them to shut up. No seething patron closer to them said anything. They just took what could have been a pretty straightforward enjoyable experience, and my inability to mute them turns them into a few aggrieved lines in another bitching blog.
Before the show, I walked around the continues-to-be-miserable city a bit. There's "cowboy" bars with country music that mostly surround the symphony. There's healthy servings of homeless people ranging from decently aggressively shouting to sleeping in places it's hard to tell if they've closed early or closed permanently. At one point, I'm almost certain a dude was following me. I'm in a "major" city, wandering, feeling isolated and arbitrary, and oh, look, there was also a pro-Palestine protest on the circle where they're screaming an anti-semitic chant and parroting empty party lines.
On the ride to the city, I was listening to some of Peter Boghossian's videos. He's known for setting up hot-button questions and agree/disagree lines he asks people to stand on and defend their position. He's, in a world that made sense, simply trying to remind people that we're here to engage ideas and should have a remote sense of what we're talking about or what might change our minds. Overwhelmingly, the people who brave his exercises are not that articulate, nor claim they can be moved, at least in the moment.
I'm now back home, where a comment I wrote on, arguably one of the worst places on the internet, reddit, was removed because I described getting into a "pissing match" in a comment to another person who was asking for feedback on what people might want in a new TV-related website. The term, in and of itself, I was told is the #1 rule that's not allowed and the person wrote "p - - - ing" like that as though it's particularly aggressive language or like I said, "I'll piss in your face, cunt!"
It just echoes that ideological capture and perverse power dynamics that I feel plague pretty much every level of my experience.
I know, as much as I know anything, that no one holding a sign on that boring and sad circle is persuadable. I know that no elderly usher at the symphony feels they are obligated and empowered to insist and correct inappropriate behavior. I know those who are eager to belong, be it through their status as a victim or the oppressed, are going to die on a hill that transcends parody when mocked up against real life. I know that my clients who cancel have a vastly different concept of "get better" than I do. I know the "innocent enough" obligations and life circumstances that relegate time someone might spend with me to be practically incidental.
I also know that I feel that I need to escape this overwhelming belief that I can't trust or look forward to things. It's a feeling that stifles my capacity to invest both in myself and in what I can only speculate others get to feel for what's captured them. I don't believe it's worth it, whatever "it" might be, that I'm going to plan, try, or work on for more than a day or so. It's a hollowness that haunts whatever I might do to prepare, or when I stifle one thing and rearrange another, trying to be there and be present and not suck you into this ever-hollowing sense. I can't fill it with the manufactured drama and concern that appears to fuel so much of other people's experience.
Whatever I do or think I can create, I can't erase the context I'm working within. The world's best talker in a country where they don't speak the language is flirting with homelessness and starvation. The shared values and understanding that comes with an ongoing relationship or dynamic of cultural expressions and sets of experiences I just don't really have. It's not "never," but is 6-10 times a year I might get to spend time with my dad or a friend doing something fun count as the kind of fabric I'm trying to weave?
I'm like a ghost. I feel like I just kind of haunt things or memories. You have to think, I'm drawing on my experience of the last decade. It's not just been a particularly lonely or disappointing week or something. This week was just the same record blasted about as loud as I can take. But also, I clearly don't know how to "fix" it. I don't really believe it's a thing I can fix because my efforts to do so only seem to teach me ever-nuanced ways in which the problem compounds and reinforces itself.
You can't afford it? I'll pay. That doesn't matter, it wasn't about being able to afford it. You don't have the time? I'll come to you, work around your schedule. That doesn't matter, it wasn't about not having time. It doesn't interest you? I'll do whatever you want to do, I'm open and amenable like that. That doesn't matter, it wasn't about their lack of interest. When you're feeling good and fun and free, I'm not the one on your mind to call or invite. You were desperately waiting for that window so you could "catch up" on the "fun" you're otherwise indefinitely denied. Every moment where you can feel remotely human or "free" is not one you're trying to interject a bunch of Nick P.-ness into.
There is no striking-up conversations with strangers and informal friends anymore. Maybe that's just a problem with me? Feels bigger, but I don't know. My "best friend" I gave my terms to and they still haven't been met, so I'm not lending myself to get back into his spin. My business partner, who I also see maybe once every 3 or so months, has been barreling towards a crash for probably over a year at this point, refuses to slow down or establish better boundaries or utilize me in any way but to - very maybe - decompress an inch when he bitches about something? I have to tell clients all the time there's a difference between indefinitely complaining and still being a ball of stress and actually coping and incorporating whatever it is that's getting at you and changing your behavior.
I have another friend I see maybe once every 2 or 3 months whose dad might be dying, and she has her own health issues, so it's like where would I get off thinking we should bowl more often? lol I don't know, it's this weird thing where you're invited to pit your desire to feel like you belong or have a friendship against their given tragedy or circumstances. It feels like it would be infinitely unwise and unfair to "blame" as though they're any less stuck within their contexts than you are, but you happen to be the loudest example of anyone you know on how to defy circumstances and work towards what you might actually want and need.
Blame language is overwhelmingly a move to adopt nonsense framing, but emotionally, you're like, am I just supposed to kinda glide through the air until I happen to crash into you? To be extra clear, this feels like an existential thing with everyone to some degree or another. I do not get the sense there's any remotely deliberate care and focus to cultivate and protect a mutually beneficial dynamic. It's like every hangout is getting away with murder or their mind is physically unable to be present because it's been captured by the superficially "chosen" drama.
I mean it in a more damming way than that, which implicates this litany of sick family members. I think we're also gluttonous. When you're not choosing the drama, you're feeding on the familiar sensibilities of your relationship to it. Aren't you needed? Doesn't that maybe scratch the itch that I'm taking 9,000 words to articulate? I'd like to feel useful and needed and like a "good boy" for doing what I'm supposed to by way of expressed care. I don't. No matter how much people tell me I help or what I say makes sense, it does nothing for me, and I don't think a single person has even tried to articulate to me they understand why.
It's pretty easy to disregard everything you're not doing to gain control or a sense of personal responsibility and agency by attending to everyone else. There's also the unyielding irony where I'm witness to what appears to be people who will go to the ends of the earth for especially the ones who don't deserve or can't truly receive what's being offered. Almost like each party knows what's on offer isn't made of what either of them needs, but this perverse Munchausien bargain is struck. What kind of massive deserves-to-be-alienated cunt would try to turn your lovingly devoted heart into the problem!? You're right, I see it now why no one wants to hang out lol.
Showing posts with label Star Wars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Star Wars. Show all posts
Friday, April 19, 2024
Thursday, January 4, 2024
[1091] To Infinity And Beyond
I don't know if my head is feeling particularly random or if I've just got too much time on my hands again.
I watch so much TV. I get my stats sent to me at the end of the year through Trakt. They look more insane given most of it is sped up, but even if they weren't, I can easily sit with it on for hours. 6.7 hours a day on average, according to Trakt, so 3.35. It feels like considerably more than that, but what does that mean? I spend huge portions of time in metaphoric realities.
My brain doesn't care. It needs stimulation. I can only play an instrument for so long before my hand cramps. I can only "grind" in a videogame for so long before all of the years that built up behind me quitting playing for over a decade start to bubble. I don't have the social group that's doing something every day or calling regularly. I'm not obligating my time towards family. It's cold and I'm not inclined to work outdoors in it.
I have no more practiced a habit than sitting around. Of course I'm fidgeting and ADHD-ing, and rearranging furniture or books. But I'm an isolated, sedentary indulger more than anything. The TV show is paused while I write this, but whether it starts up immediately after, or while I'm driving, or while I'm waiting around before a concert or comedy show, something is on.
I almost use it to mark time. I've always been suspicious that we've got an incredible amount of time, and yet most of us will claim how much of it is lost, never to be found. I feel in some ways I've practiced slowing down so much, that it makes sense to not only watch things sped up, but fit as much as I can into all of this space that's in the here and now. It makes me happy to think if it takes you a month to watch a season, I can get it done in a few hours.
I've always been that way though. I was perfectly comfortable cheating on old video games if it would help me get to the end. I took pride in speed reading. I would get my homework done as quickly as you told me what was required for that day, then become a pain in the ass the rest of the day with nothing to do. If it's a physical task, like moving hundreds of bricks or pallets, I'm going until I start shutting down and hurting myself because I can't focus anymore. I used to speed constantly. Even if it doesn't sound particularly musical or show up in any song you care about, I like seeing and hearing speed picking and El Estepario tapping drum sticks like hummingbird flaps.
Almost married to this preference and propensity is a desire to be "comprehensive." To this day, I feel a sense of injustice, I even think I've written about this before, on a 3rd grade report I was assigned to write about a U.S. State. I was told, explicitly, not to provide every town and city. That just didn't make sense or sit right with me, so I printed one anyway for the state of Texas. I had all the other stuff she asked for too, but you and I both know you're not reporting on a state if you don't even know what towns and cities are in it. Duh. I got a C, and note in red that said "I told you not to give me a list of cities."
I watched a video recently explaining the difference in the sizes of infinities. Not all are equal or "as infinite" as the next. I don't know what sense can be made of the sentiment, but I feel like I hop between different infinities. It can simply be a matter of descriptive word choice categorizing what I'm engaging. The broadest concept might be "media." If I can watch or listen to it, I could plug in to that infinity and keep a rather opaque resolution on what all that noise is doing for me. Distill it down into movies, shows, books, podcasts, news, music, lessons, lectures, clips. Break all of those into genres. Each one provides a lifetime. An infinite sea from which to draw inspiration or distraction.
I think I seek both simultaneously. I notice the duality across a lot of these infinite spaces. I'm both full, comfortable, safe, and warm, yet my muscles are tight; my head and eyes are begging to start hurting. I'm full of salt, fat, the wrong carbs, and I'm protected only to the extent of my proximity to dangers I can't see coming. I'm mostly warm provided a given part of my body is against a heated blanket. No one state is in the extreme, and no one shift to a little bit more or less in either direction suggests something "meaningfully better."
That is, I'm "comfortable enough" to continue to sit here and type. I'm lucid enough. I'm TV-satiated enough to keep it paused. I'm satisfied enough with my body to not think more closely about what I'm feeding it. I've got enough of an ambivalence towards my debt to work just enough to keep its minimums paid on time. In turn, that's enough for the credit card companies and capitalist machines that want nothing less than me to never feel satisfied enough with the amount of things I own.
I think we employ the language of "enough" miserably. "Why can't I be enough!" we might scream at our romantically idealized notion of the person we claim to love. They cheat. They grow distant. Instinctively you might feel like it's about you and everything missing. It seems like it's only when we've had enough misery, and not just enough misery, but enough misery with the right prerequisites and under specific conditions, that we move to change something. Could we change sooner? It's a question of what resolution your infinity is dialed into. If you're a big corporate monstrosity who deals in "data" or "information," which can be indefinitely mined, tweaked, and reinterpreted, it doesn't interest you to curb greenhouse emissions until a more specific descriptive number threshold from outside your preferred genre makes a compelling impact.
The presence of so many infinities suggests to me that they are the rule and so by definition, nothing, ever, will be "classically" enough. Enough doesn't exist that way. All the self-esteem genres telling you you're beautiful enough or smart enough or worthy of love just as you are are lies. Not malicious lies, mind you, just lies that don't understand the nature of the game we're stuck playing. No one idea is meant to account for the whole of anything. Innocently, you might just consider it a mathematical impossibility that you'll ever be complete. You will instead be enough to suffice across a different set of infinite domains.
You might be fuckable to a lot of people, including your designated "soulmate." You might find yourself entertained by Star Wars AND Star Trek, or all of science fiction AND sports, or find the requisite levels of continued enjoyment in studying quantum mechanics and vibing with Bluey. It's never either/or. There's not conflict or contradiction. There's different levels of your experience you can access an infinite amount of ways.
From the outside, you can't necessarily tell if anyone is actually doing that or just adopting the infinite linguistic disguises that claim to. We peacock values we don't know how to practice. We're a beleaguered and confused "middle" who lazily votes for fascism, or downplays how fascism happens, because we literally don't know any better. We can't see our infinite capacity for destruction anymore than we regularly entertain ideas of our infinite potential.
As I was cleaning up old emails I came across old fights. There's math breakdowns I've sent former supervisors of how much money and time I'm wasting working for them. There's back and forths with me and one of my exes. There's exchanges I've had in pissing-match format with people online. I save this stuff for the same reason I keep almost all of my writing from back when I started at 15. I have new eyes at 35. Infinite gaps in my perspective are sometimes traversed by a more infinite truth. Was I arguing like an entitled immature cunt? Or had I figured something out, and now it was time to die nobly on the hills of my choosing instead of at the mercy of my combatant? As time goes on, I'm thankful to discover far more of the latter.
I think there's something of an inevitability towards people seeking "spiritual" or "religious" scape-goatery with its embodied allegory for the infinite. This especially so when paired with the sense of never feeling like you're enough. Fancy that, here's a thing that calls it "sin," and conveniently lasts forever to match the infinite sea of whatever you need it to in any given moment. Infinitely insecure? No worries, these paring rituals are blessed and divine. Infinitely attracted to children? Check out these power dynamics and forgiveness concepts. Righteously indignant and protective of your ignorance? Brother, we'll point you in the direction of where to blow yourself up straight into the arms of the infinite reward that matches your commitment.
My only excuse, at least when I've slowed down, written, picked a direction, and decided something is worth fighting and biting about, is an ongoing infinite conversation that ends the moment the decision is made, and starts up again the moment the decision is being evaluated for change. I don't get to pawn my failings off on Jesus and claim forgiveness. I have to weigh the evidence. I have to describe what I can make of the context. I can count the amount of people who seemingly never want to talk to me again or the extreme limits of my network. I have to see who keeps coming back and wrestle with why. I have to make sure it's not because I'm taking advantage of their infinite capacity to feed something I might disingenuously or greedily eat indefinitely.
There's peace in attending to this duality. But the peace doesn't feel like anything more than potential. I don't feel "good" or "bad." It's still hard to use the word "hope" without sarcasm dripping off my tongue. If I "hate" something, it's really just the same thing over and over, the seeming lack of sense, awareness, or accountability, playing out across genres of situations. Will I be "happy" if every one of my dreams comes true? Hundreds of my dreams have come true, and continue to remain true every day. I would not describe myself as "happy" lol.
I'm happy when I can share something. I'm happy when I feel like there's a real connected intention brought to the same space. That's why I don't get along with people who are "just doing their job" in realms like counseling or DCS that require far more personal responsibility and integrity for them to meaningfully represent their impact. It doesn't mean they'll be conducted that way, but it does mean when you fuck about, we all get to experience the infinite cascade of finding out. That's how a 5-10% minority eats 80% of the time and space we pretend can't exist in service to anything else.
We can ground that specifically. It's every abusive family member one of my clients "can't help" but wrap themselves around. That's the frequent flyers of our prison and healthcare systems. It's any monopoly of power and wealth. It's the job, family, or hobby you know someone is abusing to eschew a conversation about balance or the real extent of their responsibilities. It's the jaded cynicism of pundits and influential personalities beating fear and hate drums. It's virtue-signaling language you try to stuff every conceivable, especially its opposite, idea into. You know, because pumping gas can be "green" too and words are "violence."
Whatever scale or frame we choose to adopt has to start with the acknowledgement, acceptance, and voluntarily adopted responsibility for the choice altogether. You choose to respect and weigh evidence, or you bolster the strength of errant faith claims. You choose to "stare into the void" or touch the infinite capacity of your potential, and you can allow yourself to feel diminished and helpless, or emboldened to carry on more deliberately in a manner you can increasingly see fits. Fits what? Fits your given moment. If you see the same things I do, maybe we start manifesting things we both wish to see verses a random array of noise we struggle to cope with.
I care very little, if at all, about what I'm watching if I have someone to watch it with. We can share in how bad it was or jokes we make about it or references years later. The parties I threw weren't about collecting hangovers. The business I want to run isn't about being catastrophically rich or irrational defiance to conformity and oversight. The access to the freedom and headspace to enjoy my time isn't so I am always available to tend to another cat. Insofar as the vast majority of the people I'm connected to aren't coming or inviting or speaking at all, it's easy to believe you're meaningfully different, and maybe not in ways you really want to be.
But I write. I search. I try. I work. I invest. I continue to acknowledge the infinite ways I can describe my experience until I find a frame that allows me to choose, and feel like it was a real choice, a step in a direction I want instead of a direction I "have to." If that practically translates into all I can really do is keep picking my words and hills to die on, that's what I'll do. If I must be in debt, I want to know it services experiences and things I can hide from repo men or the consequences of bankruptcy. If my writing has no capacity to "wake up" others in the way different authors have helped me to, I can trust it will at least continue to help me to when I've drifted too far into the wrong infinity.
I watch so much TV. I get my stats sent to me at the end of the year through Trakt. They look more insane given most of it is sped up, but even if they weren't, I can easily sit with it on for hours. 6.7 hours a day on average, according to Trakt, so 3.35. It feels like considerably more than that, but what does that mean? I spend huge portions of time in metaphoric realities.
My brain doesn't care. It needs stimulation. I can only play an instrument for so long before my hand cramps. I can only "grind" in a videogame for so long before all of the years that built up behind me quitting playing for over a decade start to bubble. I don't have the social group that's doing something every day or calling regularly. I'm not obligating my time towards family. It's cold and I'm not inclined to work outdoors in it.
I have no more practiced a habit than sitting around. Of course I'm fidgeting and ADHD-ing, and rearranging furniture or books. But I'm an isolated, sedentary indulger more than anything. The TV show is paused while I write this, but whether it starts up immediately after, or while I'm driving, or while I'm waiting around before a concert or comedy show, something is on.
I almost use it to mark time. I've always been suspicious that we've got an incredible amount of time, and yet most of us will claim how much of it is lost, never to be found. I feel in some ways I've practiced slowing down so much, that it makes sense to not only watch things sped up, but fit as much as I can into all of this space that's in the here and now. It makes me happy to think if it takes you a month to watch a season, I can get it done in a few hours.
I've always been that way though. I was perfectly comfortable cheating on old video games if it would help me get to the end. I took pride in speed reading. I would get my homework done as quickly as you told me what was required for that day, then become a pain in the ass the rest of the day with nothing to do. If it's a physical task, like moving hundreds of bricks or pallets, I'm going until I start shutting down and hurting myself because I can't focus anymore. I used to speed constantly. Even if it doesn't sound particularly musical or show up in any song you care about, I like seeing and hearing speed picking and El Estepario tapping drum sticks like hummingbird flaps.
Almost married to this preference and propensity is a desire to be "comprehensive." To this day, I feel a sense of injustice, I even think I've written about this before, on a 3rd grade report I was assigned to write about a U.S. State. I was told, explicitly, not to provide every town and city. That just didn't make sense or sit right with me, so I printed one anyway for the state of Texas. I had all the other stuff she asked for too, but you and I both know you're not reporting on a state if you don't even know what towns and cities are in it. Duh. I got a C, and note in red that said "I told you not to give me a list of cities."
I watched a video recently explaining the difference in the sizes of infinities. Not all are equal or "as infinite" as the next. I don't know what sense can be made of the sentiment, but I feel like I hop between different infinities. It can simply be a matter of descriptive word choice categorizing what I'm engaging. The broadest concept might be "media." If I can watch or listen to it, I could plug in to that infinity and keep a rather opaque resolution on what all that noise is doing for me. Distill it down into movies, shows, books, podcasts, news, music, lessons, lectures, clips. Break all of those into genres. Each one provides a lifetime. An infinite sea from which to draw inspiration or distraction.
I think I seek both simultaneously. I notice the duality across a lot of these infinite spaces. I'm both full, comfortable, safe, and warm, yet my muscles are tight; my head and eyes are begging to start hurting. I'm full of salt, fat, the wrong carbs, and I'm protected only to the extent of my proximity to dangers I can't see coming. I'm mostly warm provided a given part of my body is against a heated blanket. No one state is in the extreme, and no one shift to a little bit more or less in either direction suggests something "meaningfully better."
That is, I'm "comfortable enough" to continue to sit here and type. I'm lucid enough. I'm TV-satiated enough to keep it paused. I'm satisfied enough with my body to not think more closely about what I'm feeding it. I've got enough of an ambivalence towards my debt to work just enough to keep its minimums paid on time. In turn, that's enough for the credit card companies and capitalist machines that want nothing less than me to never feel satisfied enough with the amount of things I own.
I think we employ the language of "enough" miserably. "Why can't I be enough!" we might scream at our romantically idealized notion of the person we claim to love. They cheat. They grow distant. Instinctively you might feel like it's about you and everything missing. It seems like it's only when we've had enough misery, and not just enough misery, but enough misery with the right prerequisites and under specific conditions, that we move to change something. Could we change sooner? It's a question of what resolution your infinity is dialed into. If you're a big corporate monstrosity who deals in "data" or "information," which can be indefinitely mined, tweaked, and reinterpreted, it doesn't interest you to curb greenhouse emissions until a more specific descriptive number threshold from outside your preferred genre makes a compelling impact.
The presence of so many infinities suggests to me that they are the rule and so by definition, nothing, ever, will be "classically" enough. Enough doesn't exist that way. All the self-esteem genres telling you you're beautiful enough or smart enough or worthy of love just as you are are lies. Not malicious lies, mind you, just lies that don't understand the nature of the game we're stuck playing. No one idea is meant to account for the whole of anything. Innocently, you might just consider it a mathematical impossibility that you'll ever be complete. You will instead be enough to suffice across a different set of infinite domains.
You might be fuckable to a lot of people, including your designated "soulmate." You might find yourself entertained by Star Wars AND Star Trek, or all of science fiction AND sports, or find the requisite levels of continued enjoyment in studying quantum mechanics and vibing with Bluey. It's never either/or. There's not conflict or contradiction. There's different levels of your experience you can access an infinite amount of ways.
From the outside, you can't necessarily tell if anyone is actually doing that or just adopting the infinite linguistic disguises that claim to. We peacock values we don't know how to practice. We're a beleaguered and confused "middle" who lazily votes for fascism, or downplays how fascism happens, because we literally don't know any better. We can't see our infinite capacity for destruction anymore than we regularly entertain ideas of our infinite potential.
As I was cleaning up old emails I came across old fights. There's math breakdowns I've sent former supervisors of how much money and time I'm wasting working for them. There's back and forths with me and one of my exes. There's exchanges I've had in pissing-match format with people online. I save this stuff for the same reason I keep almost all of my writing from back when I started at 15. I have new eyes at 35. Infinite gaps in my perspective are sometimes traversed by a more infinite truth. Was I arguing like an entitled immature cunt? Or had I figured something out, and now it was time to die nobly on the hills of my choosing instead of at the mercy of my combatant? As time goes on, I'm thankful to discover far more of the latter.
I think there's something of an inevitability towards people seeking "spiritual" or "religious" scape-goatery with its embodied allegory for the infinite. This especially so when paired with the sense of never feeling like you're enough. Fancy that, here's a thing that calls it "sin," and conveniently lasts forever to match the infinite sea of whatever you need it to in any given moment. Infinitely insecure? No worries, these paring rituals are blessed and divine. Infinitely attracted to children? Check out these power dynamics and forgiveness concepts. Righteously indignant and protective of your ignorance? Brother, we'll point you in the direction of where to blow yourself up straight into the arms of the infinite reward that matches your commitment.
My only excuse, at least when I've slowed down, written, picked a direction, and decided something is worth fighting and biting about, is an ongoing infinite conversation that ends the moment the decision is made, and starts up again the moment the decision is being evaluated for change. I don't get to pawn my failings off on Jesus and claim forgiveness. I have to weigh the evidence. I have to describe what I can make of the context. I can count the amount of people who seemingly never want to talk to me again or the extreme limits of my network. I have to see who keeps coming back and wrestle with why. I have to make sure it's not because I'm taking advantage of their infinite capacity to feed something I might disingenuously or greedily eat indefinitely.
There's peace in attending to this duality. But the peace doesn't feel like anything more than potential. I don't feel "good" or "bad." It's still hard to use the word "hope" without sarcasm dripping off my tongue. If I "hate" something, it's really just the same thing over and over, the seeming lack of sense, awareness, or accountability, playing out across genres of situations. Will I be "happy" if every one of my dreams comes true? Hundreds of my dreams have come true, and continue to remain true every day. I would not describe myself as "happy" lol.
I'm happy when I can share something. I'm happy when I feel like there's a real connected intention brought to the same space. That's why I don't get along with people who are "just doing their job" in realms like counseling or DCS that require far more personal responsibility and integrity for them to meaningfully represent their impact. It doesn't mean they'll be conducted that way, but it does mean when you fuck about, we all get to experience the infinite cascade of finding out. That's how a 5-10% minority eats 80% of the time and space we pretend can't exist in service to anything else.
We can ground that specifically. It's every abusive family member one of my clients "can't help" but wrap themselves around. That's the frequent flyers of our prison and healthcare systems. It's any monopoly of power and wealth. It's the job, family, or hobby you know someone is abusing to eschew a conversation about balance or the real extent of their responsibilities. It's the jaded cynicism of pundits and influential personalities beating fear and hate drums. It's virtue-signaling language you try to stuff every conceivable, especially its opposite, idea into. You know, because pumping gas can be "green" too and words are "violence."
Whatever scale or frame we choose to adopt has to start with the acknowledgement, acceptance, and voluntarily adopted responsibility for the choice altogether. You choose to respect and weigh evidence, or you bolster the strength of errant faith claims. You choose to "stare into the void" or touch the infinite capacity of your potential, and you can allow yourself to feel diminished and helpless, or emboldened to carry on more deliberately in a manner you can increasingly see fits. Fits what? Fits your given moment. If you see the same things I do, maybe we start manifesting things we both wish to see verses a random array of noise we struggle to cope with.
I care very little, if at all, about what I'm watching if I have someone to watch it with. We can share in how bad it was or jokes we make about it or references years later. The parties I threw weren't about collecting hangovers. The business I want to run isn't about being catastrophically rich or irrational defiance to conformity and oversight. The access to the freedom and headspace to enjoy my time isn't so I am always available to tend to another cat. Insofar as the vast majority of the people I'm connected to aren't coming or inviting or speaking at all, it's easy to believe you're meaningfully different, and maybe not in ways you really want to be.
But I write. I search. I try. I work. I invest. I continue to acknowledge the infinite ways I can describe my experience until I find a frame that allows me to choose, and feel like it was a real choice, a step in a direction I want instead of a direction I "have to." If that practically translates into all I can really do is keep picking my words and hills to die on, that's what I'll do. If I must be in debt, I want to know it services experiences and things I can hide from repo men or the consequences of bankruptcy. If my writing has no capacity to "wake up" others in the way different authors have helped me to, I can trust it will at least continue to help me to when I've drifted too far into the wrong infinity.
Friday, April 14, 2023
[1033] Stormtroopers
Today reached a stressful point. It did so because I didn't see it coming. I couldn't see it coming. There was no "one thing" that was definitely more annoying or catastrophic than normally happens each day. I even went above and beyond what I normally do on Thursdays and ate food between my block of groups that often leave me tense if not with a headache every week. But, it just didn't stop. I couldn't run my decompression pattern. I couldn't find a fucking moment to breathe. I find it incredible and fascinating that so much happens "all at once" like this to...test me? It's bizarre and too coincidental.
My baseline nature to want to attend to things or apply "fixes" was pushed too hard. Idiots at work who refuse to take responsibility for their shitty attendance and communication wait until precisely the moment I close out my last note to open a can of worms we'd been dancing around to get done for two weeks. My friend's car breaks down, can he take my recently gotten home truck again? My favorite tool which I immediately put to good use and started making plans for utilizing for other things as well? The one with 220,000 miles on it and just cost $1500 and 2 months to fix? Can he also get $50 because drug dealers don't take credit cards?
I've got childishly entitled clients on the brink of emotional collapse raring to lose it any given week. Nice enough people, decently hard-working people, selfish, normal childish and entitled people who will come to me about "my dose" as though it's my job to just continuously answer their every panicked thought at any hour of the day. I ignore most of that, to be sure, but it's another phone ring. It's a call for my attention. It's a passive aggressive comment locked and loaded for next week about what it is we aren't doing to help.
I've been told about 9 times over 3 weeks that a "had no reason to believe she was that chaotic" client was going to get signed up. She apparently wasn't receiving texts and emails, has the money and then doesn't, wants individual counseling, but then maybe for her kid who has massively improved from his traumatizing situation, but actually hasn't at all. At the end of the day I get to spend several hours at the least convenient time troubleshooting, quasi-counseling, caseworking, and I've not been paid. Then, I get to dodge panic attack paragraph texts as though I'm an emotional support animal on retainer.
Did you hear? I'm not just in debt, but courting more of it because I just don't care anymore. I want stuff. I want to go to shows. I want to build more on the land. I just don't care. I'm not likely to get fired, getting directly paid through my business, and haven't scratched the surface of where referrals can be generated from. I'm, inch by inch, day by day, on the verge of fundamentally shifting the priorities and nature of my problems in life. But, it's not here, and I'm still debt-ridden first-world poor, and the things I have walk an incredibly precarious line of functional instead of financial burden. What if I then played the imagination game?
You think my truck is insured for another driver? You think I trust my friend's parents to help him replace it because, you know, could he? The parents who fucked me on the house? What happens when the wobbly car-jerking issue with the Scion finds me in a wreck. It's begging for it. If 2 is 1 and 1 is none, I might have a solid half with my 3. I have a coffee van that doesn't reverse, a truck who picks a new thing to break every couple months, and a Scion with an as yet undiagnosed issue I'm genuinely gambling won't go catastrophically wrong on my frequent hours-long trips.
I didn't exactly forget that life is always coming with the next thing to charge you, but I felt it in a deeper way recently. I got home insurance, of course catastrophically expensive because my home isn't "normal" and abnormality, regardless of the actual value, risk, or practicality, means you get fucked for the invitation to play the insurance game. Add the utility bills, interest charge (you know because you got fucked on how much it cost to get your water back because the only person you know who can do it can't fucking figure out how to bill, record, or communicate to save his goddamn life). You don't pay down as large as you planned. You don't pay off like you planned. You can't take enough long showers to feel like they make up for yet another negative spiraling trend built into your financial picture.
Let's not forget though, I don't really care. Most people my age carried tens of thousands in debt, which they paid towards for years, mostly in interest, never paid it off or barely have paid it off, and they have mortgages, car payments, a few have kids, health issues, etc. I might spend $15K on 100 shows, yearly bills, a new computer, guitar, rolfing, building supplies and car repairs? Every 2 weeks I can pay off 10%. If I can get 10 more clients, 20%. I'm certainly impatient, but it's not an irrational perception of that impatience driving my decision making. I'm almost 35. I live in a fort in cousin-fuck Indiana. I live in a proto-fascist country. It's kinda time to live it up, especially if we're the new tornado-alley. (Oh man, that would have been such a cunty thing to nickname my ex when we were fighting.)
My licensed therapist is in some, probably emotionally abusive and awkward power dynamic with her husband, so when I need her to fix something related to login information or to help our insurance wranglers proceed down the lie of the "80-100" day process of getting empanelled, she just won't respond to me. She'll call Hussain and get panicky and ask him all sorts of shit he can't answer, won't even respond to a text of mine. Won't send me a picture and bio to advertise on the site. Talks about spending money she claims to not have to rent a building in town to hold sessions individually, but also confidently asserts how perfectly unable she is to handle the business end of things. I have back ups, but it's all so needlessly convoluted and always in the background nagging.
I want to be reliable. I want to "help" and "fix." I feel like I'm constantly trying to do my best and do more while the people around me are getting by. They're along for my ride. I created and threw the parties, they were happy to drink and fuck and puke on things and carry on right into the resentment for inviting them and locking them inside. I provide the platform, pay for the infrastructure, maintain the fighting and cheerleading spirit. You think anyone ever calls me with news about who they contacted or who might help in getting more referrals? Hussain, to be sure, but that's why he's the business partner. Have any resulted in us getting paid though? Well...
It doesn't matter how much I do, create, risk, build, or invite to join. It will never be enough. It will never be persuasive or indicate that it's worth a kind of investment and sacrifice that I've made so many fucking times for so much shit that hasn't panned out. LIke, I fucking own land that I've offered for people to live on for free lol. I'm fucking ridiculous. I've paid thousands to live on a fucking couch after getting fucked out of my affordable apartment! How am I not the most entitled and shitty fucking cunt on the planet? I never get help moving. I've spent most of my life begging for an extra hand or the recognition that I would put up with emotional abuse for the better part of a year after finding someone who actually cared to work alongside me.
There's a decent chance if I ever get particularly successful I just disappear. I'm sick of talking to your memes. I'm sick of "normal" conversation about the infinite list of things holding us back. I'm sick of politely engaging every iteration of sit-and-spin you can bring to your imagination. I know I'm fucking sick of it because I'm this fucking frustrated in spite of literally every week if not often each work day, someone tells me how much they appreciate what I do for them. The words feel empty. I gave such rousing encouragement to one of my people who I was so proud of, she nearly broke into tears. Professional courtesy, of course, dictates that we're not friends, and neither she nor I should exist in a mutually supportive context where we're getting the help or money we need to feel secure and grow versus being reduced to the cursed encouraging words.
I've been buying expensive black band T-shirts too. I don't want your branded bullshit from the jobs I work. I don't want to be buttoned up. The whole of my feelings in blogs are summarized by the collective works of the artists I enjoy and the creative energy they inspire. Maybe in 30 years they'll get special vintage status and I'll get to be even cooler than I already am, also for no one to care or notice lol. I have so much shit filled with so much potential fun and worthwhile consequences, but it only feels like it when I can cast a convoluted verbal spell that lays out the embedded vitriol and sabotaging forces. I have no reason beyond chaotic chance to believe I won't continue to get everything I want, provided I can keep it specific to things and experiences that merely cost money.
Do I want you to share my spirit? Do I want you to find the energy and the way forward no matter what? Do I want absolutely anything from you, and each time I allow myself to accidentally set some subconscious expectation delight in the inevitable let down?
I will always be fascinated by how many people wish to dress up as stormtroopers. I will always be baffled by how many wish to be a mere crew member on the starship Enterprise. People delight in the uniforms, soldier status, mythological families, and piety. I have always, always, looked at the hero as the thing to emulate. What is the main character doing, and why? Who supports them, and why? What is their obligation? What transcends their flaws? Who are people but nameless trudgers along micro-fascist environments. They're capitulators, persuadable, and predictable. They're not trying to be heroes, they're imbibing the reassuring feeling that someone or something will save them no matter what.
You fucking idiots. No, they won't.
My baseline nature to want to attend to things or apply "fixes" was pushed too hard. Idiots at work who refuse to take responsibility for their shitty attendance and communication wait until precisely the moment I close out my last note to open a can of worms we'd been dancing around to get done for two weeks. My friend's car breaks down, can he take my recently gotten home truck again? My favorite tool which I immediately put to good use and started making plans for utilizing for other things as well? The one with 220,000 miles on it and just cost $1500 and 2 months to fix? Can he also get $50 because drug dealers don't take credit cards?
I've got childishly entitled clients on the brink of emotional collapse raring to lose it any given week. Nice enough people, decently hard-working people, selfish, normal childish and entitled people who will come to me about "my dose" as though it's my job to just continuously answer their every panicked thought at any hour of the day. I ignore most of that, to be sure, but it's another phone ring. It's a call for my attention. It's a passive aggressive comment locked and loaded for next week about what it is we aren't doing to help.
I've been told about 9 times over 3 weeks that a "had no reason to believe she was that chaotic" client was going to get signed up. She apparently wasn't receiving texts and emails, has the money and then doesn't, wants individual counseling, but then maybe for her kid who has massively improved from his traumatizing situation, but actually hasn't at all. At the end of the day I get to spend several hours at the least convenient time troubleshooting, quasi-counseling, caseworking, and I've not been paid. Then, I get to dodge panic attack paragraph texts as though I'm an emotional support animal on retainer.
Did you hear? I'm not just in debt, but courting more of it because I just don't care anymore. I want stuff. I want to go to shows. I want to build more on the land. I just don't care. I'm not likely to get fired, getting directly paid through my business, and haven't scratched the surface of where referrals can be generated from. I'm, inch by inch, day by day, on the verge of fundamentally shifting the priorities and nature of my problems in life. But, it's not here, and I'm still debt-ridden first-world poor, and the things I have walk an incredibly precarious line of functional instead of financial burden. What if I then played the imagination game?
You think my truck is insured for another driver? You think I trust my friend's parents to help him replace it because, you know, could he? The parents who fucked me on the house? What happens when the wobbly car-jerking issue with the Scion finds me in a wreck. It's begging for it. If 2 is 1 and 1 is none, I might have a solid half with my 3. I have a coffee van that doesn't reverse, a truck who picks a new thing to break every couple months, and a Scion with an as yet undiagnosed issue I'm genuinely gambling won't go catastrophically wrong on my frequent hours-long trips.
I didn't exactly forget that life is always coming with the next thing to charge you, but I felt it in a deeper way recently. I got home insurance, of course catastrophically expensive because my home isn't "normal" and abnormality, regardless of the actual value, risk, or practicality, means you get fucked for the invitation to play the insurance game. Add the utility bills, interest charge (you know because you got fucked on how much it cost to get your water back because the only person you know who can do it can't fucking figure out how to bill, record, or communicate to save his goddamn life). You don't pay down as large as you planned. You don't pay off like you planned. You can't take enough long showers to feel like they make up for yet another negative spiraling trend built into your financial picture.
Let's not forget though, I don't really care. Most people my age carried tens of thousands in debt, which they paid towards for years, mostly in interest, never paid it off or barely have paid it off, and they have mortgages, car payments, a few have kids, health issues, etc. I might spend $15K on 100 shows, yearly bills, a new computer, guitar, rolfing, building supplies and car repairs? Every 2 weeks I can pay off 10%. If I can get 10 more clients, 20%. I'm certainly impatient, but it's not an irrational perception of that impatience driving my decision making. I'm almost 35. I live in a fort in cousin-fuck Indiana. I live in a proto-fascist country. It's kinda time to live it up, especially if we're the new tornado-alley. (Oh man, that would have been such a cunty thing to nickname my ex when we were fighting.)
My licensed therapist is in some, probably emotionally abusive and awkward power dynamic with her husband, so when I need her to fix something related to login information or to help our insurance wranglers proceed down the lie of the "80-100" day process of getting empanelled, she just won't respond to me. She'll call Hussain and get panicky and ask him all sorts of shit he can't answer, won't even respond to a text of mine. Won't send me a picture and bio to advertise on the site. Talks about spending money she claims to not have to rent a building in town to hold sessions individually, but also confidently asserts how perfectly unable she is to handle the business end of things. I have back ups, but it's all so needlessly convoluted and always in the background nagging.
I want to be reliable. I want to "help" and "fix." I feel like I'm constantly trying to do my best and do more while the people around me are getting by. They're along for my ride. I created and threw the parties, they were happy to drink and fuck and puke on things and carry on right into the resentment for inviting them and locking them inside. I provide the platform, pay for the infrastructure, maintain the fighting and cheerleading spirit. You think anyone ever calls me with news about who they contacted or who might help in getting more referrals? Hussain, to be sure, but that's why he's the business partner. Have any resulted in us getting paid though? Well...
It doesn't matter how much I do, create, risk, build, or invite to join. It will never be enough. It will never be persuasive or indicate that it's worth a kind of investment and sacrifice that I've made so many fucking times for so much shit that hasn't panned out. LIke, I fucking own land that I've offered for people to live on for free lol. I'm fucking ridiculous. I've paid thousands to live on a fucking couch after getting fucked out of my affordable apartment! How am I not the most entitled and shitty fucking cunt on the planet? I never get help moving. I've spent most of my life begging for an extra hand or the recognition that I would put up with emotional abuse for the better part of a year after finding someone who actually cared to work alongside me.
There's a decent chance if I ever get particularly successful I just disappear. I'm sick of talking to your memes. I'm sick of "normal" conversation about the infinite list of things holding us back. I'm sick of politely engaging every iteration of sit-and-spin you can bring to your imagination. I know I'm fucking sick of it because I'm this fucking frustrated in spite of literally every week if not often each work day, someone tells me how much they appreciate what I do for them. The words feel empty. I gave such rousing encouragement to one of my people who I was so proud of, she nearly broke into tears. Professional courtesy, of course, dictates that we're not friends, and neither she nor I should exist in a mutually supportive context where we're getting the help or money we need to feel secure and grow versus being reduced to the cursed encouraging words.
I've been buying expensive black band T-shirts too. I don't want your branded bullshit from the jobs I work. I don't want to be buttoned up. The whole of my feelings in blogs are summarized by the collective works of the artists I enjoy and the creative energy they inspire. Maybe in 30 years they'll get special vintage status and I'll get to be even cooler than I already am, also for no one to care or notice lol. I have so much shit filled with so much potential fun and worthwhile consequences, but it only feels like it when I can cast a convoluted verbal spell that lays out the embedded vitriol and sabotaging forces. I have no reason beyond chaotic chance to believe I won't continue to get everything I want, provided I can keep it specific to things and experiences that merely cost money.
Do I want you to share my spirit? Do I want you to find the energy and the way forward no matter what? Do I want absolutely anything from you, and each time I allow myself to accidentally set some subconscious expectation delight in the inevitable let down?
I will always be fascinated by how many people wish to dress up as stormtroopers. I will always be baffled by how many wish to be a mere crew member on the starship Enterprise. People delight in the uniforms, soldier status, mythological families, and piety. I have always, always, looked at the hero as the thing to emulate. What is the main character doing, and why? Who supports them, and why? What is their obligation? What transcends their flaws? Who are people but nameless trudgers along micro-fascist environments. They're capitulators, persuadable, and predictable. They're not trying to be heroes, they're imbibing the reassuring feeling that someone or something will save them no matter what.
You fucking idiots. No, they won't.
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