[1212] Make A Wish

Superficially, I have a problem with a refund.

On July 4th, I pretended I had a nephew that made $436 worth of purchases on the game Last War to unlock a gorilla. It’s over a month later. None of the attempts to get the money refunded went through. There’s been some miscommunication between Google Play, the game developers, and maybe the credit card company. I’m now locked out of the game. They believe $125 was, in fact, refunded. It wasn’t, as confirmed by Google Play and my credit card company yesterday.

The last time I wrote about what I had done, ChatGPT told me that I was defiantly asserting my agency under a backdrop of circumstances that often feel overwhelming and out of control. I found it curious how quick it was to justify my behavior. I wasn’t looking for “real license” to make what I had done “feel better” or seem reasonable. But, like I’m sure the vast majority of what those algorithms have trained on, I found it.

Less superficially, I have a problem with the goals and purpose of my money.

I’m the kind of person who has spent years of his life proud to eat Ramen and hotdogs in service to saving. When I had a goal to buy land, I saved and sat on thousands until I could buy it, in cash, for $15,000. Before I began working with a debt consolodation company, I’d never missed a credit card payment. I never even owned credit cards until 8 years ago, meaning I lived by the idea that if I didn’t have the cash, it wasn’t “for me” or I couldn’t afford it.

I recall getting business advice from some older gentlemen who headed some business association in Bloomington. I’ve always been entrepreneurial. They said, “Get a loan.” It made sense to them, having started their businesses in the 70s or 80s, that you just get loans, pay them back over time, and it’s fairly simple and easy to get rich if you just keep at it. They had not updated their perception of the landscape. I graduated in the wake of the financial crash. Business loans for enthusiastic up-and-comers hadn’t been a thing for quite some time.

I also, once, got a loan to get a car. I found the entire process and prospect of paying it off so miserable, I’m almost positive I crashed the thing on purpose so insurance would pay it off. That, surprisingly, went exactly as subconsciously planned. I’ve been loaned $2,000 to pay off my shed-turned-house from an ex-girlfriend. I found the experience so torturous, I worked 20 hours a day for weeks to pay her back in 3. She didn’t need, want, or ask me to do so.

If you look at my entire life in terms of assests, I’m in the black. If you look at my day-to-day approach to money, you’d think I was a desperate poor person just trying to enjoy fleeting indulgences in a way that invites and deserves judgment from onlookers.

As I’ve gotten older, and acquired the things I wanted, my approach to money has gotten even looser. Thankfully, I’m generally in good health. I don’t have to keep my prescriptions flowing. I don’t have kids. I don’t have a mortgage. I don’t need premium gas for my car that cost less than my guitar. I have “first world poor” people problems in trying to find memorable experiences and tolerable people to engage in…whatever it is we do…kind of things.

I could pay another $125, get my access back to the game, reassure my alliance that it was just a hiccup, and kick myself for playing with fire. I could then spend another few months arguing with the world’s dumbest, slowest, and most intransigent “support,” I’ve encountered in years trying to get that money back. With each paycheck that comes in, it’s easier to swallow “stupid” and “wasteful” expenses, so 2 months from now when they’re still trapping me in some AI email loop, I’ll open my account, see 3 or 4 thousand dollars and think to myself there are better ways to spend my time.

But I will still have a deeper, ongoing, and predictable problem. That money will face the same circumstances the $1,000 I have now does.

Let’s provide even more financial context. I bought a $475 dollar My Chemical Romance ticket. I’m in the pit for Linkin Park in 2 days, and the pit for System of a down on the 31st. I’ve spent $6,000 on people I’ve tried to hire in service to getting past business ventures launched. It amounted to an expensive lesson about how to manage and what to expect from people, particularly working with them remotely. Every meal my friend and I go out to lands somewhere between $45 and $100 dollars. I’ve paid my electric bill for 6 months in advance. I’ve spent, approximately, $4,000 on band t-shirts over the last 3 years. I almost never donate to charity and would piss in most collection plates.

I don’t “need” any “thing.” I’m full, clothed, and entertained even when it just looks like preoccupied. I have an budding opportunity to open my own extension of my current job, a step-down sober-living house, that could gross $4,800 a month within the next few weeks. I could go make enough money to cover every “stupid” thing I’ve bought Door Dashing at peak times for a few hours each day. I’m in no way unable or unwilling to account for my worst instincts or decisions regarding cash-flow.

Not superficially, I have a problem with meaningful investment. 

For years, arguably, I’ve been “fine.” Not driven. Not motivated. Not “passionate” (a word I continue to hate). I just am. I’m just capable, therefore maybe I do. I get jobs when the aimlessness of not having to be anywhere starts to grind me down. I spend money I both have and don’t to introduce drama, perhaps, maybe, but probably not, worthy of “me” and the creative ways I might go about fixing the problem.

As a counselor, investigator, and general advocate working with people on their linguistic barriers, self-esteem issues, and terrible framing of their circumstances and capacity, it’s incredibly hard for me to spin a story about my life or behavior that isn’t true. That doesn’t mean I don’t have blindspots. That doesn’t mean you have to agree with or believe anything I say. It does mean I know when there’s a temptation or desire to be deceptive or downplay the extent of when my behavior feels pathological or like “some addict shit.”

I didn’t really want to talk about the gorilla spending. It felt particularly acutely stupid. It also felt like it nagged and highlighted that incoherent hole at the center of my “fine” that’s never as fine as it “could” be. I feel like I owe, at least one person in particular, money who, also, hasn’t asked, doesn’t need it, and wouldn’t have offered it if she didn’t recognize what it was paying for at the time. Part of me still feels hung up on getting fucked for $12-20K in the effort to flip a house to only my ex-friend and his parents’ benefit, and the $25K I was supposed to get as a result of my grandparent’s house getting sold. I’ve been fucked out of more money than I’ve lost in service to my actual goals or folly combined, for 20 years, 4 to 5 times over.

My experience with money feels reflective of my increased richness in time. Traditionally, I’ve found ways to give myself “too much” time. I spent most of my 20s learning how to depress myself reading about the world all day, getting good at guitar, and learning how to watch TV. My friends stopped wanting to hang out, or even leave the house. Then they started moving away, and have never found the nostalgia or romance button that bothers with meeting up again when they came back. I’ve been able to spend good portions of time with the last 2 people that will have me, my dad and friend who will both be at Linkin Park with me. What are we all going to do there? Drink expensive beer, buy expensive t-shirts, scream with Chester’s ghost over ambient feelings that one hopes don’t echo reasons for a new self-righteous suicide.

Music means something to me. I’m genuinely excited and anxious and don’t wish for anything to go wrong so that I can experience the shows coming up. I’ve been to 362 shows in the last 3 years. Most often, you see solid and talented people who put on a good show. There’s a handful of bands that really seep into my bones, and they’re all mega-famous and playing in Chicago the same month.

Once, I didn’t fight to stay at a concert I only saw half of because my friend got sick. I tried to maintain perspective and respect. I’ve seen 2 of the 3 bands we missed, one at least twice, in the past. I watched full recordings of the shows a few days later. My friend means more to me than seeing the shows live, nagging “completionist” itch notwithstanding. The game, I’d been playing for 380 days straight before I was locked out, at least an hour each day, tapping the screen hundreds, if not a thousand times. I’d made “friends” at least as superficial as any in “real life.” I’m probably in the top 20% of players in terms of team power and time invested.

But I don’t really care about the game. I care about letting my alliance know what happened to me. I care about getting treated “fairly” in one more arena that is designed to exploit and extract. I care about not feeling at the “mercy” of glitches and not falling prey to sunk-cost reasoning. I could spend the $125, start the new arguments, get right back into the “flow” of tap tap tapping to collect resources and upping my stats. Why? Had I not been invited to an alliance, I would have deleted it shortly after downloading it and finding out the advertised scroll game was only a mini portion of the whole thing.

I want to have a life full and meaningfully busy enough where I don’t find myself embroiled in problems like these. I ask people often if they’re attempting to “fix” something that has nothing to do with them or their real goals. I’m rich in plenty of ways, but still don’t “feel” rich or responsible in pissing away money to account for mild inconveniences or so I can double down on a game that’s designed to function like a slot-machine addiction. I can’t even take solace in the idea that I’m just suffering compulsion. I’m not. I’m meandering into things because I haven’t felt enough of or the right kind of pain that might lend itself to growth or stability. I’m sweeping up the mess of debts, disorientation, and disaffection.

[1203] Same Page

It’s 3 AM and I’m home from day 2 of the Limestone Comedy Festival in Bloomington, Indiana. Earlier today, I was at St. George Serbian Orthodox Church in Schererville where I was a pallbearer for my 45 year old cousin’s funeral. It was close to 3 AM that I arrived to the area driving up the night before, and after a viewing, church service, burial, and lunch, I made the drive back, finding myself exhausted and briefly/uncontrollably drifting lanes just before the Lafayette exit I was looking to pull over on to take a nap.

 

For what my decision to buy a VVIIPP badge for the 3-day event might’ve suggested would be a flatly “fun” weekend packed with “comedy,” my cousin’s death being the most obvious wrench in my expectations is not even what’s mostly on my mind. I learned more about him from his obituary and eulogy than I had ever heard/remembered family talking about. As a basic human, it’s sad when people die and I’m not coldly dismissive of what my aunt is going through or anyone else in my family. Especially because I’ve gotten older, I just don’t play along anymore than I have to.

 

I suppose, again, we arrive at the notion of “playing along.” To be sure, I will never “forgive” nor “forget” the horrible things my family have done to both my dad and step-mom, grandmother, or myself. These are thieves. These are liars. These are greedy, insecure, and angry children who, as recently testified to in my cousin’s death, are willing to let those in their orbit suffer for their lack of accountability. My dad is 1 of 4. They all got the same parents, and he managed to be the only one who didn’t find a way to mock the examples my grandparents were trying to set.

 

At the same time, as I can already sense this is sounding incredibly judgmental or callous, I don’t pretend that anyone is anything less than an animal first. I had this moment as they were lowering the lid to my cousin’s coffin where I just looked around the room and felt this lightness about the terrible and inhumane or exploitative shit the people in my family have done. There was a useful narrowing of focus and forced perspective as the sickly mouse-like face of my cousin descended into his coffin and I looked at the congregates hold back tears or stare just past where he laid.

 

There’s a certain poetry to the idea that I go straight from comedy festival to burial and then right back to festival. There’s a certain highlight that I, in spite of my best effort, would find myself flirting with death on the highway. You really do want to believe something about the bigger picture. I couldn’t escape the thought that the reason we have this whole lengthy procession is to distract us from the responsibility that is begged in thinking death is the end. What if my aunt simply failed her son? What if she’s continuing to fail her remaining one who is struggling deeply with alcoholism? Now now, fuck all that noise, we’re gonna hang out soon in heaven!

 

The comedy festival is feeling feeble. There’s plenty of funny people, but I’ve never felt more like an afterthought in buying the highest-tier badge for something. Maybe the System of a Down “VIP” tickets once, but this is right there for considerably less money. You don’t feel the energy. You don’t get the sense the ones who have been doing it for…12 years…have figured out the rhythm. Did you know I get reserved seats right up front for shows that haven’t sold 1/5th of the room? If 30 or 40 people got invited to it, why am I seeing the same hosts and features multiple times? It’s very first or second year energy. They told me my badge would look the "coolest." It’s the exact same badge as the VIP.

 

I’m exhausted by what feels like perpetual unreality. My family isn’t real. The competence and “love” of comedy by whomever organized Limestone isn’t either. It’s so many people playing along with some idea of what they think the thing “should” be. At lunch, my surviving alcoholic cousin and I get along in a weird way. His energy and my fluid acceptance of it did not match the pleasantries vibe at the table. He shakes. You thought he was going to drop each bowl of food as it was passed around. I recognized how important it was to him that he wasn’t babied as he still managed to serve himself without spilling or breaking anything. He’s dealing with real shit, including recently diagnosed cirrhosis of the liver. I gather he clocks me as someone willing to meet him where he’s at.

 

The comedy festival is interesting if only because it’s a majority female comics, and younger people than me. It’s like this weird little microchasm into the broader fucked up world of lonely fascist men steering us to Handmaid’s Tale-opia. Tonight was karaoke, and by 1:30AM, when the songs were done, it was 30 girls in mom jeans and 90s dad sneakers talking too-enthusiastically to each other as people like me I assume felt reasonable in not even thinking about hitting on any of them. Tomorrow, we can get brunch with the comics. From what I’ve gathered, they’re mostly comfortable talking/working within their fellow comic cohort and marketing themselves or playing friendly with the locals wasn’t quite explicated in their contracts. I don’t blame them.

 

When I first started writing this I felt this desire to get on the same page. I was going to just list the things I “individually” felt and thought “everyone” could kind of support or understand. Instead, I’ll take one thing, like sneezing and saying bless you, to illustrate my frustration. I think we need to be saying “bless you.” I don’t think it has anything to do with religion. I don’t think you’re remotely sane if you find it offensive. At least half the times I sneeze, I don’t get a bless you. Every time I hear a sneeze, I say bless you. We need things like that to save us from the individualized algorithms. We need social norms back. 30 funny creative women should not be meandering about a bar in a college town during a festival because they can’t trust any man because “toxic” is all they’ve known and men are no longer being properly socialized.

 

The ideals live and die with each of us. My grandparents set examples. They died with 3 out of 4 of their children. To me, that says you need to work 4 times as hard as you might assume initially to maintain whatever it is someone was showing you is worth maintaining. You think you worship Carlin, Pryor, Williams, and Chappelle? Create something, in 12 fucking years, someone like them would want to play at. Stop “doing comedy business” and seek and celebrate those with the message. If you want family, don’t perform and pretend like mine, hold the line of standards and respect for yourself and what you contribute to the pot of wellbeing.

 

I think there’s like 5 separate blogs in here, but I had to say something. I have to say something because, whether it’s 40 comedians or 3 days or acquaintances who only see each other at deaths, no one else is saying what needs to be said or what I need to hear to suggest we’ll ever find each other again.