[1066] Wobbles

I think I'm ready to claim feeling stressed out now. It only happens when a series of things build up over time that I feel little to no control over. I wasn't looking forward to going to Louder Than Life. 6 hours driving on a Sunday by itself set the poor mood. An inability to catch one of the main acts I wished to see soured it further. Spending 25 minutes in a fast food lane having not eaten all day before leaving for home just poured it on.

Over the weekend I'm already riding the annoyance train with a client who overstepped several times after being told explicitly to stop. He doubled down Monday. I drew the line in the sand with my job telling them they can fire me or simply allow me to be fully remote. I'm sick of wasting 3 hours in drive time, the goodwill left in my oil or gas guzzling vehicles, and general productivity sitting around the fucking office for no reason. I'm fairly certain the relief I'll feel in leaving will be greater than any meager satisfaction if they cave.

My head hurts. My stomach has been upset for an hour. I hit a fucking dear driving on the fucking highway I had no business being on leaving the fucking building I had no reason to be in. I've never felt "caught up" in my sleep after the late arrival home Monday morning. Now I'm home at 10 PM writing because I can't just be left alone to eat whatever shit I must to work this job without the added resentment of getting fucked on top of it.

On the plus side, I managed to steal a new sink head after trying to just buy one, being told it would be a "special order," so I unscrewed one from the display. The flow was immensely satisfying when I washed my hands. I popped a Tums for my stomach. I got all my shit and groceries inside. I need to lay down before a headache hits.

I'm 35 years old. I can't seem to find a friendship, relationship, or otherwise that isn't begging for a diagnosis. My clients, overwhelmingly, wish to tread water. I've NEVER worked for a dignified genuine leader. The people who I've popped in on or learned about are living the 30-something version of sadness, depression, or anxiety having tried to do the exact things their parents did to get us in the cultural mess we're in. For all of my work, interests, demonstrated capacity, and genuine enthusiasm and goodwill I exert on this miserable existence, I feel I'm owed considerably more. I'm some bizarre version of hermit-hipster-tech bro desperately trying not to espouse some ironic detached view of the world only to be pummeled to death the more he plugs into it.

I am not blind to my otherwise regal status, but it rests on a story of infinite precarity and spite. Does no one else crave something balanced, trustworthy, and well-reasoned with regard to how they work, what they're worth, and why?

[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.

[942] And, I Stress

I just got done watching a movie in which a reviewer said something I agree with. They were sad about what the movie “could be.” There were elements that were interesting or entertaining. There were thoughtful twists and intriguing narratives. But it was messy, and kind of got away from itself. The tone was disorienting and it’s as if too many thoughts went into how it unfolded.

I used to think it very weird to criticize movies or art in general. I can appreciate a pretty face and broadly prefer order to chaos, but my perspective heavily skews towards “I don’t know” or “I can’t recognize” what it is people like aesthetically or artistically. I like things that make me think. As such, most of what constitutes life I’ve already categorized into neat, uninteresting categories which do not serve that purpose. I’m not watching movies to get lost in each one, nor reading to confirm my biases.

For example, a “cool” car, to me, is one that works, gets good gas mileage, or operates as a useful tool like my truck. My opinion on color, body style, year, special features, engine rumble, yada yada is non-existent. We already know how much I’ve suffered the anger or resentment for not being able to take in the scenery of whatever we might be wandering through or past. My own sense of presented “style” is what makes the mot sense for the sheer amount of mud and dust I tend to experience. My curls are almost always pulled back out of the way.

To say any given movie needs to serve a purpose might suggest you haven’t seen very many. Sure, many want to make money. Obviously, there are genuine entertainers and writers hoping to make people laugh and feel. The impact of any given piece of work has always felt incidental to me. Whether or not someone is a brilliant performer, painter, or other kind of artist does not dictate what the masses or observers are going to respond to. Joshua Bell performing on a 1.5-million-dollar violin, on the subway, to maybe the appreciation of 4 people, one a child, over the course of an hour comes to mind.

What could have been? What might you make out of the experience of a world class musician on a world class instrument if you caught the pedigree, ear, or dialogue of classically renowned music? You’d have another check on your list of experiences? You’d feel it resound in the depths of your soul? You might walk away with an autograph?

I’m the kind of person who stops and watches street performers. I dance and sing to songs playing in stores. I saw a performer in Colorado doing something of a circus act. As much as I noticed and appreciated him practicing his craft, I’m also the kind of person watching the people who walk past. He had about 30 people watching him when I joined the crowd. He ended the performance with more than double.

Why? Did they all appreciate his show like so many $100 a ticket buyers for Joshua Bell the night before his performance in the subway? They clapped. Many gave money. He’d clearly been to some sort of school for crowd work. Did any of them walk away thinking to themselves, “That would have been really cool if only he had…” We know people buy-in to the crowd and environment as much or more than whatever’s going on on stage.

Our experience is just that, ours. When I find myself struggling to figure out what to do, I try to pay attention to what anyone else might be suffering or sacrificing their attention to. It’s our struggle, unlike so many dictators. We’re all, mostly, trying to live well and die peacefully in our sleep surrounded by loved ones. We’re all attempting to do meaningful work and find recognition for those things about us it’s impossible to put into words. Certainly, I’ve continued to talk and never feel complete.

I take on a lot of things at once. Until recently, I’d never really describe my life like that. I take on what I think matters, what I think I can pull off, and what is worthy of someone like me. But, it’s a lot. Where I see people find the focus, or limit the pain, of pursuing one thing in earnest, I want it all. I want to flip houses, and start a business, and evolve my space, and read everything, watch everything, and make fleeting stabs at staying decent on several instruments. It’s not structured, it’s not consistent, and at least for the last few months, it’s felt like an incredible amount of stress.

I think I conceive of stress differently. To me, it’s inevitable. Things piss me off pretty much by default. It’s stressful to have a problem with…existing. So, you build it into a certain kind of ethos and coping strategy. It’s not going away; it’s a chronic condition. It becomes a challenge to yourself to pick what kind of stress you want. That’s maybe harder than it seems with a lot of unknown unknowns in terms of consequences. I had to start by denoting the kinds of stress I didn’t want.

Let’s say in relationships. I used to be the open ear for all of the drama in my friends’ relationships. Trust issues are core. Communication staticky at best. Whom has the most feelings for whom, and when, and why, if so, did they so disappoint? I didn’t want any of that, so I stated my values about sex or commitment that, let’s say have yet to be fully appreciated by anyone flirting with partnership. I didn’t want to cite my mortgage as a perpetual reason to justify my inability to change jobs. I want to continually experiment and explore routes to both independent wealth, and free exercises of my time.

This shit is hard to live up to. It’s not just hard to carry your giant torch burning with all of your values, dreams, or intention, but it’s fucking raining constantly. I’m proud of the work I do in getting this house flipped? Well, just take it on the chin and move on when your buddy’s dad comes down and says most of it needs to be redone because the aesthetic is wrong. It’s an aesthetic you can’t recognize and was in fact discussed and decided upon weeks ago. It’s “wrong,” seemingly likely to devalue the house if not fixed, and you’re left adrift, wondering if this vitally important and specific thing needed to happen no matter what, why does it no longer feel like “our” struggle to convey to me how it needs to be. I don’t need it to be that way, and, not for nothing, I barely know what I’m doing.

What is the work for? Mine is the experience of any artist. To grow in your craft. Every exceptionally rich and famous person has been told drastically more disparaging things than “this has to be redone.” All in all, it’s not even an overwhelmingly time consuming or difficult task. But it hits deep and is extremely stressful nonetheless. Before you find the temerity to judge the work, are you asking yourself what you could have done to improve it, inform it, or understand it?

When I at least have some consistent beat or obligation, I tend to even out in my pursuit of constant stimulation. Even a bad job can be a consistent job or subject of gratifying focus. I haven’t had that in a while. The work on the house is in spurts. I’ve, not once, returned to the house where a thing discussed that might be done in my absence was done. It’s not “our” struggle. It’s my series of limited crises, until I get around to doing the work. It’s my increasingly desperate search for evidence that things will be okay or progress when I’m not there. I’m struck down again when I get to learn my work isn’t worth what I thought it was either.

Meanwhile, I have already hours-a-day level problems in attempting to navigate insurance companies and bureaucratic grudges. I have a replacement outdoor unit, and now a wood burning stove, neither of which are installed or keeping me warm. I need to find a job, a car, and keep my pissy and combative cats alive. It all exists as a measure of my chosen mental fog. It’s “better” stress that, once I work my way through, I might have a lot more money, working knowledge of things I didn’t previously, and if the cats are good for nothing else, an inability for too-late critical feedback is a major plus.

I wonder if I’ve learned how useless it is to ask for help. People rarely seem to understand me, even if they can appreciate the jokes or just before the resentment for the work kicks in. My buddy’s dad said, “I wish you guys would have called me.” We have, a dozen times, and with him not on site, he’d either offer advice that didn’t quite fit, or we couldn’t make sense of it. He flirted with changing the decided-on wall color. It was suggested that the floor I laid down in the kitchen would need to be pulled up to accommodate where the cabinets would sit. This has been an emotionally traumatic roller coaster. It’s not because of the work in and of itself, but because my face is pressed right up against a burning “What is the work for!?” sign, and I’m not coming up with good, emotionally gratifying and consistent answers.

There’s always the “one day” narrative. I know “intellectually” how things can play out if we crank out a nice house and I learn to match the “right aesthetic.” It gets a little less fun and meaningful at that point. It feels less like learning and more like the same parody of “professional” environments. It’s not lost on me that this house should in no way resemble mine for a “normal” market, but I return to, it’s not like I’m getting paid for my time, and by the time I do, I’ll have made considerably less than minimum wage. I’m dealing in a certain kind of “promise” currency, in which I promise to keep myself available and working indefinitely, and they promise around the time I’m in my late 30s maybe early 40s, I’ll have everything I expected of myself by 30, and maybe 5-10 grand in 10 months.

Man does not eat faith, hope, and dreams. I have zero real genuine belief or inclination my buddy nor his family would fuck me or are less than sincere or capable of supporting what we might become. I’m still poor, and my inability to find a satisfactory monetary path makes the idea of tearing down what I’ve been working on all the more searingly painful. The idea that I’ve lent myself to this task over one just as important and potentially lucrative and revolutionary in how I wish to construct it, starts to feel like I’ve betrayed myself or have been incredibly naïve, again, to make such a large bet on something I don’t understand.

I need structure. The unfortunate reality is that it will most likely be imposed by another stultifying transitory work environment. Whatever guilt I might conjure for not having done “enough” in service to any of my chosen stressors will get to compound in the hours I’m driving or stacking or taking direction from someone born to be middle-management. Are we in it together? Am I not persuaded that it’s my burden, nay, responsibility, to weather every critical review or unintelligible insurance form? I have to keep myself warm, even if the cats are quick to jump in next to me. Who am I kidding? They’re first to jump on top.

[765] Clench

I think I'm losing control. Something I never quite understood was when people would be “stressed” about things they had no control over. I've definitely found myself at the bottom of a dark and dead pit after reading way too much terrible news about the world, but I suffer from the delusion that I can do something about it. It wasn't the terribleness in and of itself, it was observing myself, day after day, doing shit like delivering food or watching the blood shoot from my arm, somehow still thinking that “just around the corner” I would be all...”it.” The many steps removed you might be from “doing genuine good” while you're engaged in the things I have for money are as despotically described per your degree of hatred for capitalism or sympathetically understood by how much we all seem to have to pay the bills.

 

Importantly, up until I've adopted these “real world” jobs, I felt in control. When I needed to drop out of my “gigs,” I could. I picked to work back-to-back shifts because, again with my delusions, I thought 2 or 3 concurrent sources of income could be maintained on fleeting hours of sleep. I was “happy” enough to make the drives 6 or 7 hours away to try and get into drug studies. Whether I used my stays to sleep most of the time or read more in a week than I could in a year, it felt like I was steering myself into chosen icebergs.

 

Now? In place of my quick spasms of grinding teeth, I appear to have a perpetually tense jaw. I'm flirting with the “headache for no reason” thing I had growing up in my mom's house. I'm getting extremely lax in my caution against ridiculous meals and the amount of money I'm willing to spend on them. The stakes don't feel as high. The reminders and the language of the “old” and “settled” are surrounding my every waking moment. I'm not “randomly” interacting with “my kind of people,” be it for their off-kilter eccentricities or hopeful and naive language about what they want to accomplish.

 

For the variety of aberrant and “crazy” I may encounter throughout the day, it all speaks to a kind of underlying sickness that needs a cultural breed-out program more than haughty middle-management.

You see, it's not just that I feel less like the arbiter of where I'd like to steer this ship, I'm watching myself play out the drama of the people's lives I engage with. Intellectually, nothing I encounter in these people's lives is “mine,” in a very important sense. Practically, I have to suffer the phone calls preventing me from getting something else done. I have to stress out about my car not making it across some backwater Indiana road. I have to take in the array of poverty and neglect scents. I have to feel the waves of denial and hatred pour out of insistent liars about how they perceive their family members and how they engage in the world.

 

I get it now. I don't want to recall my last hour explaining in detail how I managed a crazy situation, but not unlike writing, it feels like I don't have a choice. It's this, or bite through my jaw. Only now the stakes are higher. I take in too much crap into this kind of job, you can really fuck up someone's life. A fact that doesn't bother me at all, but a real consequence if I felt I was flirting with forgoing paying attention at all to how it's eating at me.

 

This is the kind of job that people can treat like they’re on a mission. I get the impression that whether they want to admit it or not, there's a little tingle in their downstairs about the power you have and it's almost throwaway amounts of good will you get from people who can't imagine what it's like to do your job. I think we should make an extra $20 every time someone tells me they wouldn't want to. But, there's a case to be made that via your “proper upbringing” and capacity for de-stressing and organizing, you may bring some good into the lives of people who desperately need it. My last meeting of the day, I caught a look from a mom who showed the mildest hope that I had told her something new and potentially powerful that apparently the legion of caseworkers and people they've dealt with before had not.

 

I know I'm a more positive influence than negative. For however terrible I may make you feel after you read something from me, I don't then go into my work or friend life and attempt to act dumber than I am or meaner than I feel. There are a fair number of people as or more competent than me in their different fields all, I'm assuming, experiencing their version of isolated personal hell as they cling to the drops of positive difference they make in the world too. Isn't that the problem? I don't operate under the presumption I can help anything. Like most things, I consider it something of a happy accident after enough probability waves can be tricked into flowing a different direction. By that same token, I can, at the very least, practice dismissing all the waves of shit that wash over me. I can function as a buoy that the errant parent or child can cling to for a moment before they inevitably drown, fine, nature of the game. I can't let all the rest start to surround me and make me okay with a level of complacency that I'm finding exhausting in a way too many work hours never has.

 

Job shit combined with that life irony of thinking I finally got something accomplished land-wise and energy wise, still waiting, doesn't make for a good “in the meantime” story either. I waited for months of good and honest work before I paid in advance to get this final piece completed. You'll note I'm not typing this from my heated and electrified home in the middle of nowhere. Is it inexplicable or egregious yet? No. Does having to “hide” my plastic drawer with clothing in it in Byron's room for apartment home inspections feel like a greater indicator as to the state of my life right now?

 

I think it's a blessing and a curse that I don't believe what I'm not doing. Maybe it's a relationship that doesn't quite click until we start talking and I realize you haven't killed yourself either in a similar way I'm attempting to avoid. I literally have my own rent-free place and land, and without the work done and me sitting there drawing inspiration about how to classy up the place, it's not quite real. I could be doing a great many deals of good service in my disposition and dishonestly-described “poor” work ethic, at least by comparison, but you're hard-pressed to persuade me otherwise that I'm not mostly going through the motions of semi-direction with regard to things that are mostly thoughtless complaints from the ignorant about the ignorant. And in the spirit of moral or litigious propriety, I have to treat everything like it's at least a touch on fire.

 

The State worries about “burnout.” They don't want your baggage to become client baggage or reflect badly on the work available to the public. They'll shuffle you between counties. They'll let you seek out different positions. The last day of training was a serious examination about self-care. I think in order to be truly burned out, it takes a level of both investment and disenfranchisement it's impossible for me to achieve. I take my job seriously, but the state of my moral soul and conception of myself is not in believing I'm doing any good or measured by the thank yous and tears. I can hate the fact that I've spent 3 hours of “overtime” in the rehashing and bitching, that my mind would do about something else anyways, but now it's consistently related to work, but not wake up 10 years from now wondering how I stayed there so long and on the verge of a breakdown.

 

As with everything, this too shall pass. Maybe next week I'll be home and not discover my stuff burned down or stolen, and you'll get a blog about how I plan to decorate or something. Maybe my mind will figure something out in my sleep about how to process and condense bullshit I don't have tonight. Maybe I'll have another sporadic removal and catch hella overtime that results in a check that makes me forget all about any particularly difficult client. Maybe I'm meant to just be disappeared for a while.