[1207] Extra Ordinary

The last 2 days it’s been incredibly hard to focus. I’m entirely sure if anything happened. I feel like I’ve lost a beat, or like something that was previously animating dropped away. The days prior I was having fun, or trying, in spite of some aggressive feelings I was having towards no one in particular. When the weekend ended and I started back to work, I found it, and frankly still find it, hard to lock in and give a shit.

Yesterday evening I emailed my boss indicating a desire to maybe pull back on some of my work responsibilities and focus. My job, while not proving to be the often immoral and ridiculous environments most show themselves to be very quickly, is pretty messy in some foundational ways. I work for a sober-living/IOP operation. I conduct groups and carry out casework tasks. I’m currently obligated to carry out new person orientation and have been creating material for life-skills and case management that didn’t seem exist…at a company that’s been around for at least 5 years.

At first, this job was supplementing the paltry salary I was getting working for the Y. I got there in the morning after my first Y shift, left before the beginning of my 2nd Y shift. It’s messiness barely touched me. I decided to get myself fired from the Y, then I could neatly become “full time.” The messiness grew. I took steps to try to make it less messy like asking for the materials I’d be teaching in advance so I could make copies. I insisted we get a white board that showed the daily schedule so everyone could be right or wrong in the same way. There’s many, very simple, fixes like that which the place still needs, that I think can be accomplished in relatively short order.

At the same time, it hit me how often I seem to experience the same pattern in my relationship to work. I show up, experienced, energetic, consistent, and with a good and genuine nature at the prospect of demonstrating the work or a fix. A slow-creep of things that undermine the effort come in, and if I notice and speak to it, I also have to ensure I don’t do so in a hyperbolic or sounding-too-aggrieved type of way. There’s all this excess labor that forms “shouldn’t have to be this way” kind of sentiments in my head and gut.

If I don’t want to be rushed to make copies right before class, and to their credit, they give me the lesson plans in advance for 2 weeks, but forget the 3rd, I’m pulled right back into the anxiety and frustration over something “dumb” and “simple” that I’ve tried to fix several times in asking for the whole curriculum so I can spend one afternoon getting prepared for months in advance. Surely, it’s just a series of .pdfs somewhere. The rush in the morning bleeds into my attitude or sense of preparedness for group. The notes and tasks due after group maybe take a hit. Now I’m angling to “reset” the next day, trust violated, and my grasp of the spirit to make things work better loosened ever so.

On balance, I don’t know if I get 3 out of 5 days a week that I’ve worked there (it’s only been 2 months) that I’ve been able to anticipate, technically, scheduled and easily anticipated things. It’s incredibly disorienting and feels compounded when we’re trying to model behavior we hope our clients will adopt in service to maintaining sobriety. Do as I say, not as I do?

In 2 months, I’ve been witness to improvements. I’ve contributed heavily to them. I’m feeling protective or maybe defensive of my perspective that, for reasons I’ll never understand, needed to be the one to show up and make the changes. I’m worried the changes won’t stick. Or that the people who I’m trying to shape up and do better are stuck in a place that’s going to continually undermine the attempts to create better beats and downstream effects. I, never, just “trust” that my effort will be recognized or rewarded, nor do I think as a rule most people are concerned with quickly and materially altering the consequences of their blind spots.

It seems out of nowhere, but it’s also relevant that I just got some outside work done around my property. It was a reminder that I like shaping up my property and working to build/organize things. It’s something that takes a lot of time and I usually only ever have the time when I don’t have the money or the weather. It’s been incredibly hot lately, I have a little more time, and I’d rather be doing mostly anything here than somewhere else.

It feels key to point out I’m not impatient. I know change takes time. I know I’m not prepared to ride that empty broad sentiment indefinitely. I know I still retain the power to say I don’t want to nor can work as much as I previously thought if the instability feeling persists. I’m not shooting for some vague notion of stability either. I’ve worked for enough companies at all layers of social work and interpersonal drama to know what works or doesn’t independent of the players involved. Paperwork can be a savior. A shared calendar can cut through a lot of noise.

I want to believe really bad, in something beyond my friends, indulgences, and self. I don’t have a magic sky daddy or in-crowd I practice apologetics for. I don't have bad solipsistic philosophy or the personality disorder to uncritically tout my brand and content. I want to show the principles I’ve applied to my life in order to achieve what I have so far in a context explicitly suited to doing so. It feels like such an opportunity for a Shakespearean play-level tragedy to embody the fucking up when you’re proof positive, individually, the fuck ups need not be.

I don’t know if my focus fucking off is me trying to protect myself from what might be yet another catastrophic failure. I don’t know if I’m looking for license to distance myself in a more deliberate and polite way so that I might maintain a reference that won’t throw me under the bus. I don’t know if the heat is just making the ambient space we’re all operating within wonky in a way that can’t be accurately accounted for. I do know that I’ve been pretty locked in and inspired and motivated, and then it aggressively drifted away. It’s not gone. It’s not hopeless. It’s not even got a decently long list of issues that can’t be fixed. No one has shut down attempts to try or deny they are problems altogether like they did at the Y.

My coworkers are overwhelmingly fun and funny people as well. It’s as close to DCS coworkers as I’ve found, and even more raw in places. We’re dealing with about 80 people, on rotation, in early recovery and regularly getting shit on for things both in and out of our control. We got jokes. The elements that were impeding structure and growth were removed from the work landscape, the ones recently hired (basically 85% of the staff is less than 4 months) read as capable and reliable.

I want my focus back. There might be more begging for my attention, but this is my best first guess.

[1200] Quite The Day

Today has all the makings of “a day.”

First, I get an emailing denying a 4-hour punch-card request to make up for 4 hours I did not record last week. The reason it’s denied? It’s our responsibility to manage our punch-ins, and my supervisor has been reminding me several times all week to go in and do so. Superficially, fair enough. But it’s deeper than that.

 

One of the first things I relayed to my supervisor when I got hired was how I’m terrible at the punching in and out. It’s not at a box you have to pass physically, it’s just signing into your phone. Well, my phone, even when I set alerts, even when I program the calendar, likes to pause, silence, or ignore my settings. So, when my A.D.D. self is particularly tired or distracted or has literally anything trying for my attention, I’m gonna miss a punch, which happens a lot.

 

For months, this has been alleviated just fine, either by her in the old system, or by me in the new. Well, 6 months later, I finally miss a day to correct, and my paycheck is 4 hours short. I already get paid terribly, and when you’re missing a tank of gas or two when you commute an hour each way to work, it stings. It stings more when you accidentally miss a MANDATORY meeting because you’re at your second job, you know, because one isn’t enough, and instead of just not getting paid for the 1.5 hours they did things like hand out “employee appreciation” totes (in lieu of money or courtesy), she insists you use 1.5 of your personal time or vacation time hours because, again, that meeting was MANDATORY. A meeting so mandatory, one of the three supervisors that’s supposed to be there has blown off twice.

 

I’m surrounded by a lot of people pretending to be adults, pretending to care, pretending there’s any sense or order about the rules and expectations, and pretending they’re exercising their power with any tact or wisdom. My job bleeds staff every few months. My job gets sued regularly for negligent behavior at its different sites. My job worked aggressively to excuse the violent behavior of children in its care for as long as it could, pinning it on us and the idea that we weren’t being “inclusive” and “accommodating” enough to kids that would feature in an episode of interventionist TV. My high-school kid employee, religious para-professional otherwise housewife, and spouse of someone recently swept up by ICE are expected to dutifully handle getting hit or pulled on and demanded of every day. They’re supposed to 1-on-1 deal with “behaviors” for 3 hours, whilst presumably ignoring every other child in the program as they pretend to be educated or certified in that level of attention and care. Cool.

 

The YMCA is a global brand. They have money. They still raise more off the backs of their poorest families. They refuse to pay employees enough to retain them or train them to do things like keep the kids clean if they shit themselves. They refused to hire the kind of help it would take to monopolize a child’s attention so the room could otherwise function. The latest kid to cause a notable disruption I was castigated for including his teachers in attempting to redirect and calm him down because it was after school. God forbid I include the alleged professionals when our ridiculous unworkable YMCA “plan,” which includes a license to hit other participants, somehow, doesn’t appear to be working.

 

My supervisor, also underpaid and overworked, I feel defaults to this kind of robot or brick-wall just mouthing words she knows doesn’t make sense and doesn’t believe in. She’s younger, looks perpetually overwhelmed, and has shown herself unable to even just generally lead or communicate, let alone engage in an adult human level with her other adult, and often more experienced, leaders. Today is just one of dozens of emails I’ve gotten that tout, so disingenuously, some “letter of the law” kind of sentiment where some common sense and grace would do. I finally broke, and pulled into a parking lot to write her a digression about how much I struggle with what feels like being completely abandoned by her. How every time I need something from her, it’s the hard way or some stupid tit-for-tat fight or pedantic debate. I could quit tomorrow with what I anticipate her response will be.

 

Bear in mind, I have her behavior and responses I can compare directly against another sometimes supervisor, also young, also with her own frustrating blind-spots and peculiarities, who has been demonstrably better. I can also compare her to my newest supervisor who has shown a level of understanding and support I’ve almost never found save for one or two people at DCS, and then way back in the day at Showplace. So while I have her needling in the background, something else comes in.

 

A parent emails her and me about how she thinks I’m “annoyed” by her special needs child and have made it my goal to remove kids from the program who have elevated needs. She alleges we’re not following or enforcing the right plans for ensuring her son can continue to participate. This is a child who is weirdly strong, and been forceful with my tiny staff who relayed their fear in the past. This is a kid who has held up items about to swing on me with them. This is a kid who has left the room to run outside. This is a kid who, his mother has stated plainly, has a condition that severely impedes his ability to control impulses. I’ve ripped up a write-up he absolutely deserved at one point, months ago, in an effort to accommodate and be patient and incorporate information mom was then willing to share. Someone, that write-up rip up guy is also targeting her kid. Her kid was targeted by the last site director, so naturally I am too, and I waited until 3 weeks before school was out to turn the screws.

 

Do I have any faith my supervisor will back me up? Doubtful. I suspect from mom’s response to mine that she at least played it neutral, but this is a girl I had to fight for 3 months about a child who, every single day, would have total meltdowns, screaming for 20 to 30 minutes stints, kicking and hitting tables, tearing things off the walls, and throwing things at other kids in response to staff asking him to sit down or line up for the bathroom. When I explained my plight in front of her boss, a complete 180 and now it’s, “You know I supported you!” No, I articulated your negligence to someone who, ultimately, doesn’t even really care to be bothered.

 

There’s much I can assume my supervisor doesn’t give a shit about regarding my life or what contributes to my ability to meet their professed aims. During my interview, it was a running joke all of the second and third jobs the rest of the site director’s had because, “You know, the job doesn’t pay much. Seriously, you get that right? Ha ha! We all work so much! We just believe in these kids and the mission!” That’s all fun and games until the practical reality and small asks I make to be accommodated come to fruition. Then, “You’re expected to be X Y Z, as we discussed during your interview.” Yeah, bitch, along with 100 other things you conveniently forget when it suits you.

 

I’ve been actively making peace with the shit all adults have to eat about their broad cliche levels of negligence, laziness, incoherence, and waste of most work environments. I was finding my pace and routine and setting up to just kinda ride. But then I get these emails. Then I find myself needing to negotiate time or a space. And it’s like a triggering event that just spikes my sense of absurdity, angst, and exhaustion. I’m already eating shit, just like you, why are you making me dance? Why do I need to be punished on top of the struggle?

 

The answer, always, of course, is because I am an unyielding puncture through the artifice of their farce. When you learn how to behave, play along, and survive by unshakeable allegiance to The Party, any remote criticism or ask to be “human” is an invitation to the whole world behind it of taking larger chunks of responsibility. We don't have a basically functional culture that can pronounce words like “responsibility” or “accountability.” Why would some helpless 27-year old who’s had exactly one job, pretending to be a leader at the Y, find the inclination for a robust longstanding and reasonable human professional partnership? She got an even shittier education than you, was encultured by the shameless and insecure, and is now terrified of literally everything I say to her. That doesn’t feel “winnable” or like a real problem to be solved.

 

Therefore, I take it day by day. My power remains in my ability to explore the entire world of possibilities I’m otherwise ignoring by staying plugged into this system. I’ve got my head to barely above water when it comes to bill-paying. I have the 2nd job I can always up my hours with, or I can situate around some other pursuit. I can’t escape the thought that maybe life does, indeed, have to* be this way for some mysterious reason the further you pan out. Maybe each new little ridiculous or hellish scene is just driving me to an inevitable destiny. A destiny it’s impossible to see as I contemplate the guilt of a mother who wishes she’d aborted her special needs child. A fate I won’t find beating up on the lost skinny white girls with all of my questions and criticisms of their intransigence and naivety.

 

As I contemplate this, I learn my cousin is about to die. I’m considering telling my job it’s my brother and taking bereavement time. I’m sure they’ll ask for a death certificate.

[1198] Not My Job

If this turns into something I actually post, it’ll be the 3rd time today I’ve tried to write it in a way that is both comprehensive and yet doesn’t annoy the piss out of me.

I’m a “site director” for the YMCA. I refer to my job as glorified babysitting. On paper, including the extremely misleading job listing, I’m in charge of “programming” as well as a host of other administrative things related to ensuring compliance with trainings, overseeing “camp” activities, and theoretically remaining pliable enough to be utilized wherever I’m needed. It pays $17.25 an hour, I make $1,107 every 2 weeks. I drive a 2002 Ford F-150, with at least $1,000 in needed repairs, an hour or more each way to get to my first shift at 6:15 AM. The afternoon runs from 2:45 PM to 6:00 PM, unless a parent is late, like they were today.

At a glance, and by my own perspective, I don’t make a lot, but I also don’t do a lot. This is a statement relative to my history of jobs, often in social work, and one I can now compare to the 2nd job I got addiction counseling that I wedge between my Y shifts from 8:30 AM to 1:00 PM. It pays $21/hr during “training,” which…we’ll get to that, and $23/hr for me to conduct 3-hour IOP groups for people recently sober. A 10-minute conversation with a single person in that environment can be more loaded and complicated than 5 days of poorly-listening kids.

I don’t want either job, I want money. If my time is destined to be utilized in captured ways, I’m looking to maintain a basic sense of belonging or flow as I exercise what’s needed. I live alone, an hour dead into the center of the middle of nowhere, and yet I’m begrudgingly extroverted, creative, and don’t want to sit around all day. I don’t have a particular affinity for kids or the sick and intransigent egos of addiction, but I do have a knack for speaking my audience’s language.

I spoke my supervisor’s language, as well as 6 other site directors’, at the Y to get hired in the first place. I am overwhelmingly on time, communicative, and accountable to the expectations of my various roles. I used to be the type to never take days off. I’m not saying that as a point of pride, but to hint at the depth of my former pathological allegiance and sense of pretentious pride.

Today, I recognize more both about myself and the environments I work than I used to. I don’t believe the grass is greener elsewhere. I don’t believe most places are run particularly accountably or by people with any real competence for it. I don’t expect everyone at all times to rise up and be the hero that champions higher pay, proper protocols, and meaningful consequences for those who betray the “values” we’re allegedly in charge of protecting or instilling.

I still have values. I still hold expectations. I still aspire to more than merely talking my way into new ill-fitting environment after new ill-fitting environment after I’ve drifted too far into a personal financial crisis. These values get aggravated the moment I’m met with the practical reality of navigating someone, technically, in charge of me, but clearly barely in charge of themselves. They become even more aggrieved when I’m forced to “need something” from those people, and they lack both the capacity and willingness to entertain a real way of meeting that need.

One supervisor, for example, ChatGPT’d me an answer to my informing them of the hours I was hoping to finagle. She doubled down in her response. When someone has no interest or capacity in engaging with you they’ll do things like, “Per our discussion 6 months ago when you were hired…” or “The site director role requires…” They’ll cc HR on the email, because you’re clearly becoming disgruntled by the side-stepping and ambivalence. They’ll throw up their hands and shrug their shoulders about the necessary consequences of you attempting to weasel out of the strictest interpretation of your role that serves their purposes in any moment.

These, mind you, are the same people who said, literally no less than 5 times, how little the role paid and were quick to offer all of the 2nd jobs their other site director’s take. It’s something of a point of pride? They just all believe in the cause so much, it seems, that they’re willing to sacrifice adult wages and ever-fleeting time so they babysi…I mean, enrich children’s lives. Should I recall that part of our conversation too? Or, what about the part where you said, “I’ve been trying to get them to change that job description for months because you’re right, it doesn’t match at all what we need you to do.”

I have 6 people that work under me at the Y. 4 of them make $20/hr or more. One of them last week said, “That’s messed up. You’re in charge and run the program, but they’re paying me $20?” My direct supervisor has lamented this, but then always tags the conversation with how little she makes. Her boss has been roped into discussion and offers nothing. His boss avoids the issue and is noted for having shit on my friend who used to work directly under her after my friend attempted to fix that discrepancy. It was one of several reasons that contributed to my friend quitting as common sense was routinely rebuked, and often devolved into Mean Girl politics.

Anyway, I’m at a crossroads, and have until May 9th to figure out if I want to keep playing along. I’ve yet to email my counseling job the hours the Y says I need to work, and I’m not looking to add anymore messiness to their operation that I’ve somehow refrained from speaking more about yet. The Y is the current devil I know. When it’s smooth, it’s still annoying, but tolerable. When literally anything comes up that feels like an unnecessary fight, I’m daring the universe to push me over the edge.

The relationship is over, if it ever really began, and I’m not exactly clinging to it, but it’s hard to directly compare my hatred for job-searching and restarting against my hatred for these disingenuous and not-so-secretly mean-spirited exchanges. One of my supervisors still holds a grudge that I expect kids not to be covered in shit as they go to lunch. You think a person like that is working overtime to keep me around? She literally is like Y lore for not even doing the bare minimum of her job.

If I leave, I’m still driving, now an hour and twenty minutes, to work each day, but I’m able to sleep in until 6:30/7 instead of 4:30/5, and getting home before 3. I could devote my freed up time to learning and getting certified in insurance sales, and attempt to break into where my friend that left the Y started working. It’s also a space endorsed by another friend of a friend who has been doing it for a decade. I’ve a standing goal of finding a fully remote job, and this has presented itself as a reliable-enough road to that.

Then, I’m no longer playing frisbee and basketball every day. I’m not crafting or making volcanoes. I’m not really getting outside. I’m not accumulating the knock-on effects I’ve yet to even explore of having a role that isn’t the heightened drama of social work broadly. I get along with my coworkers. I’ve earned a place of trust with my school and respect from my kids. Those aren’t nothing. They aren’t paying the bills, but they are a far cry from the types of things I utilize in describing what I hate about work, poor authority, or society in general. I’m not particularly sentimental, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve definitely felt more human, and it’s made more sense why people fist-fuck themselves in service to others within systems that can’t be bothered to get their shit together.

It’s a different kind of role. Even in counseling, the onus was on the adults to follow-up with me and my free nonprofit service if they really wanted to keep in touch and weren’t just talking out of their ass about my impact on them, as “addiction services” teach you to do. I’m second-guessing the impact I might have on the kids. Or, at least the kids that like me, as if I believed any of them hold particularly reasoned, strong, or salient opinions. I’m also feeling “old,” and not like I accept negligent authority for its own sake, but that am able to tolerate certain manifestations of it better.  If I never had to write another email, I’d probably never again flirt with getting fired.

I’m also on the road to exhaustion. I’m already “behind” on my IOP notes, not because I haven’t written them, and not because they take even 10 minutes to get entered into the system. The “start-up energy” and “messiness” of that work environment is regularly impeding my ability to develop a flow and system. I’m extremely competent in building “loose” obligations into a machine, and right now, there’s a larger machine that’s crippling my capacity to do so. I’m told things last minute. Schedules aren’t kept. Rides show up late. Expectations vary wildly between other IOP counselors. Meetings appear to be held and cancelled at random. I came in an hour early today do notes? As soon as I unpack my computer and open the browser, they want me upstairs for a new-to-me team meeting, even though I’ve been in “training” for a week and a half.

Am I still in training, and getting the training pay rate? They don’t know, because also they forgot to get me enrolled in payroll, so I’ll need to fill out 8 missing punch forms they’ll send me…eventually. Is yoga every Wednesday? Yes, says the office manager. It happens to be in the middle of your 3-hour IOP session, but whatever. Also, it’s not on today, so that 25 minutes of going upstairs and waiting around, yeah just head back down and cross your fingers your group regroups in a timely way. Teaching material? It’s in a binder around here somewhere, let’s make sure we never quite show you where 7 minutes before each of your groups when you might need to print 100 or more pages. Do I work from 9 to 1? or 8:30 when you want me on the meeting as I’m driving there on raceway 465? Good question, let me check on that. You ever been attacked by 6 pissed-off women at once who cite their PTSD about men after you asked them to not talk over someone who was sharing?

I can do just about 4 hours of that once a day provided I have low-stakes routines and games to play a few hours later. I will not be attempting to increase my hours if I leave the Y.

I’m stifled. It’s different enough from stuck. My goals have transformed to include some measure of stability or desire to see different fruits of different investments. I don’t want to perpetuate treating work environments and the people in them as disposable as they insist on making me feel. That’s giving them too much credit as though it’s intentional or that anyone can truly * make you feel one way or another. Of course, superficially and colloquially they can and do, but what kind of counselor would I be if I wasn’t interested in the conscious clear-eyed choices there are the moment you recognize and distance yourself from the feeling? I don’t want to go out on a reactive email. I don’t want to get caught pleading with, literally, a chatbot employed by someone wholly nonplussed about the smell, or taste, of shit. I don’t want to find myself racing towards the next iteratively negligent space crafting new naive narratives about its potential.

At least I have 9 stays to stew.

[1175] Boss Baby

Oh, shit! You ready? I haven’t written in almost 3 weeks. In that time I’ve started a new job, gotten sick, my car shit the bed, I experienced what felt like a Craigslist “missed connection” at a comedy show in Chicago (Phil Hanley late Saturday show if you’re reading this, Sam!), and have already begun plotting on how to morph my new job role into something that isn’t tantamount to babysitting+.

Let’s start local. I got pink eye. I don’t think I’ve had pink eye since I was 4 years old. I’m a site director now for the YMCA. I’m around, by definition dirty, kids and the things they touch for at least 5 1/2 hours a day. No matter how much wood I’ve knocked in recalling how infrequently I get sick, they got me. This happened at the tail end of getting over a mild cold that decided to get worse just as I thought I had efficiently beat it. I wear contacts and don’t have backup glasses. My eye’s aren’t terrible, but driving has been extra.*

While sick, I’m getting a handle on the true nature of my role and responsibilities. As with most organizations, they have a “mission” and “ethos” and “goals” which are on thousands of pages of wasted paper and policy, but no less inform how some of the most true-believers operate. I’m at a poorer school that no less has figured out how to raise enough funds to consistently engage its kids. I’ve found some people to click with, and found some people who it’s clearly not in their nature to click. Underneath that is the fundamental problem all companies seem to have with basic demonstrations of competence and communication.

I can’t pretend that my job is that complicated, especially given my experience just in my hobbies, let alone at DCS or in counseling. I try not to say it in a condescending way, but I have said it dozens of ways, that I’m a glorified babysitter. At least, that’s how the role was translating my first few days when it sunk in that the difference between a YMCA program and an actual daycare is, drum roll, the programming of activities. If you don’t have anyone concerned with implementing and consistently executing programs, you’re just babysitting. Hence, in spite of 9 people currently hired to oversee 30-ish kids at my site, they hired me to, you know, actually direct something.

At first, naive me was asking things like, “Why can’t the 9 adults do what I’m told needs to be done here?” Several more days of watching people respond to my questions with deer-in-the-headlights faces and pensive toe digs while trying to explain how they’re getting paid to essentially hang out, I got my answer. Also, everyone before me is to blame, as well as the broader chaos of the YMCA leadership.

I’ve done that thing where I have immediately found common ground with the most adult and introspective person and we’ve had quasi-therapy sessions in the mornings about how things are ran or what informs our perspectives. She will be vital in helping me get on committees and pushing reforms that hopefully flesh out that identity and values the YMCA professes. The takeaway is the same as elsewhere, you need to be the adult.

I’ve got some experience with children, but I’ve never been interested in raising them, am bored to tears after too much of doing whatever it is they want to do, and am generally ambivalent about people which informs how I engage with them professionally. A key thing about this is that I don’t seek to control or dominate. I don’t yell at kids. I don’t condescend. I, viscerally, remember what it was to be a child, and actively attempt to mitigate unconscious cultural norms that aren’t helpful in cultivating what you want.

Thus, I have to be the adult for both the kids and the adults I’m now responsible for directing who might feel licensed to get loud and lecture-y and disingenuous in their approach to a kindergartner. For me, who does not profess to be an expert in child-rearing, but who is informed by his experiences, developmental science, and in watching how others operate, I maintain a certain degree of confidence my kids will figure out how to operate along more structured and accountable lines. I’ll suggest something like, don’t reward and entertain the kid who is being performative in their crying. I’m pliable, but keep a decently strong opinion about the efficacy of certain types of intervention, for what age, and under what circumstances.

Some people deeply appreciate this approach, others get petty, aggrieved, and gossipy. You will, under every circumstances, become “the enemy” in one form or another by virtue of any whiff of change altogether, but more accountable change in particular. That’s baked into any leadership role. To me, this means even more not to try to be a dictator more than demonstrator. I speak to the kids like I want you to speak to them. I credit them when they do something right. I trade in time, so when they waste ours, they get theirs wasted while they’re itching for the gym or playground. It’s literally only been 3 days of mild implementation of “my” way, and I’m already seeing positive results.

It’s hard for me to not think about what my day-to-day looks like at scale. We’re now tasked with hoping and praying our way through the next Trump catastrophe, but that’s only to frame it as though we aren’t the fuck ups. That’s to again distance ourselves from our impact and ignorance and hate that dictates the ship. I’ve no less been listening to all my podcasts and reading about how people attempt to digest the zeitgeist. I can’t recommend enough listening to someone like Anthony Scaramucci and then the 5 vs 4 crowd back-t0-back. Or the guests of Michael Moynihan and Bari Weiss and then up-in-arms Leftist academics on Michael Shermer. The nature of wanting/needing a story to supplement or replace personal responsibility beams brightly.

I don’t think there’s a room with or interaction between any two people that exists where there isn’t both an obligation and potential. The obligation would be to something like an imagined universal human value. You treat people a certain way or expect something even as simple as holding the door open for all of space and time. The potential is for that interaction to be dictated or mitigated by personal folly and ambivalence. “It is what it is” as though you have no conscious choice. As though “reason” doesn’t exist or isn’t defined by how it’s executed in good or bad ways.

Monday this week, at 4:45 AM when I tried to leave for work, I discovered my tire was flat. I live in the countriest of country. It’s pitch black, freezing, and recall, my job isn’t that hard or needing of me to actually be there in order for the kids to be kept basically safe and supervised. It’s already extremely wasteful the hour drive I make there and back every day. I’ve been sick. I’ve got the excuse to stay home and sleep in playing out brilliantly. My truck is at my friend’s house. I’m not sure if the new-old car has the equipment to change the tire, further complicated by being on a gravel driveway. I could have left it at that.

I informed my boss of what happened. I sat briefly with my coffee, and proceeded to get to work navigating the problem. The tire wasn’t just flat, but the car I’m driving is very old and 2 windows are taped to try and hold them up. The tape failed, so the car froze on the inside too. Gotta get that fixed. After 3 hand-cranked failed attempts to get the jack to balance, I get the boot on. I drive straight to a tire shop up the road from my job. It takes hours, I overdraft my account paying more for needed tires than the car cost, and navigate from the lobby trying to get money from an account I almost never use, forgetting the pin. In the waiting hours, I cross the highway to mail a package, get food, and make some other errand calls. I was at work for the after school shift.

That night, a flash frozen rain descended upon the area. Parents were over an hour late to pick up kids. Wrecks blocked traffic. I’m perpetually tired the last 3 weeks adjusting to my schedule, sick, and am trying not to ruminate on the irony of being more in debt after getting a job and in needing to get there than by just being broke and at home. I’m staring down the hour and a half minimum drive. I, too, have to navigate remote country roads at 5 mph so I don’t end up like the SUV I stopped for just before I reached home. A “let’s drag this day out even more” cherry on top.

This is either a story of one massive bitch-fest meant to draw sympathy or a basic story of adult accountability employing the tools and skills of perspective and resilience to meet obligations. Some people will view it defensively and try to engage in a pissing match about who has it worse. Some will be ambivalent because...yeah it’s just life and we all get flat tires and deal with the cold. It’s vitally important to me that we all understand most the moments of inflection and choice. I could have sat out the entire day, blamed circumstances, and lied about my ability to address any part of it. I think that’s precisely what we’re doing at less viscerally obvious moments every single day.

You are accountable to you first or you cannot claim to be accountable for anyone else. I would not deserve a leadership position if I were the type of person to pretend I don’t know how to begrudgingly change a tire in the dark, freezing, and on my gravel driveway. I do, I did, and I’m sure I’ll have to do it again some day. I’m sick, so even if it’s more debt and I can’t “really” afford it, I have my medicated $150 eye drops and Urgent Care bill, and began reflexively disinfecting everything I touched at work. I need to continue to watch myself not being an excuse-ridden piece of shit in the world in spite of my very real, very reasonably felt grievances for things I suffer each day.

I unironically bring up unionizing in every job I take. I get zero enthusiasm, feedback, or curiosity about it. Everyone is keen to complain about the pay, disorganization, conflicting feedback, etc., no one, ever, will even entertain the conversation about how to do it better. They also know that, on balance, they’re probably getting away with a certain kind of murder in how they’re making their money or conducting their role. A union is an attempt at a more formal accountability. We, as a species, instinctively and reflexively do not want that.

Don’t be a screaming ape or in denial about your inner insecure kindergartner. We live and die by what we are bringing into or seek to take away from how we engage with one another. I want patience. I want beat by beat reasoned understanding and reflection. I want an earnest investment towards positive changes and values that aren’t empty abstracted truisms eking out of ambivalent cliches masquerading as adults and leaders. Getting by or through each day on some egocentric story of your rights, victimization, or entitlements is not the same thing as demonstrating your understanding and embodiment of your value system. You might profess to be the boss of your own life, but you should be acting as a avatar of what the best version of that life could look like.

[1167] Players Gonna Play

I’ve been wanting to write about my experience temping for the Taylor Swift concert at Lucas Oil Stadium since the moment I arrived. It’s Monday, after 3 days of walking the perimeter and collapsing lines in the world’s worst shoes. It’s a little after 5 PM, and I can honestly say for all of the thoughts I wanted to explore about class, privilege, and the specific conversations and interactions I had, the loudest thought right now is still, “I’m tired.”

My first job was in a movie theater. This role brought me back there. Crowd control is the same, as well as the clothing requirements. The, extremely soft until a cop shows up, power to move people around. The ones I worked with ranged from groups of, what appeared to be high-school, but maybe college, athletes to people with the kind of standing aggression and swagger of growing up in lower-income neighborhoods. There’s the grungy white guy with dreads, varieties of neck tattoos, and snap-to-attitude when a moment highlights the nature of their underclass status.

The first day, it was chaos. You enter the stadium area via escalators at the end of a large hallway and convention center. Another long hallway connects to a staging room where just beyond you either enter the grounds, or go up into the main lobbies. There were over a hundred people milling about, either temping through different agencies, or part of the previously mentioned athletic groups. There were regulars who were scouted and picked out of the crowd to join teams with supervisors who liked them. One younger gentleman got called out by the fattest and looked-most-in-charge guy who aggressively said, “You got white shoes man, those ain’t gonna work!” He was subsequently still hired on for the day.

The Insta-work app portrays the role as being from 2:30 PM until 2:00 AM. You’re expected to show up early so you can clock in on time. I learned our particular temp agency was the lowest status step-child. This means everyone in that room got checked in, their credentials, shirt, and walked to their positions before we were allowed to. This meant if I got there at 1:45 the first day, I stood in place until almost 3, or just after, each day, before I was officially clocked in. These kinds of things are the first cuts in death by a thousand.

The “attitude” of the space stuck out to me. I’ve been decently white-collar for the last few years. There’s an, often enough disingenuous, light touch and politeness that I’ve come to take for granted in those spaces. I noticed my “pleases” and “thank yous” and “yes ma’am or sirs” existed in isolation and felt mildly “wrong.” When I smiled and softly said to teary-eyed scammed hangers-on that they needed to leave from meandering about the gate, behind me was my supervisor, literally yelling, “Get up, keep moving, get off the premises!” Often, they were moving and readily compliant, and still met with his approach. The generalized complacent exhaustion of people consigned to their roles in life blanketed every moment.

Leaving aside the quasi-self-imposed pain of the wrong shoes. the job is extremely easy. You’re either standing scanning in tickets, or saying the same handful of things over and over about where something is located. At first, no one told me where anything was located, so I misdirected people as to where the floor seats entry was, along with a large portion of the other staff. Before we ever got started, we were expected to just literally stand around and hang out, in total for about 2 hours before we had any kind of task to carry out, lending itself to the story of why they wouldn’t bother to clock us in on time.

Now, I’ve heard as much as anyone about Taylor Swift and her concerts. Beyond perhaps a larger portion of people willing to dress up, in general it felt very normal. I got some bracelets. The people were mostly in good spirits. But, there is a dark side underbelly that weaves its way through the sea of synchronized claps and “There’s a lot going on right now” T-shirts.

Dozens of people got scammed. The stories all involved tickets that were sold twice, obtained fraudulently, or bought from “Stubhub, or, not Stubhub, but facebook Stubhub,” which, of course, isn’t a thing. I heard the bemoaning of lost dollar amounts from $2,000 to $9,000. Girls pretending to flirt with me. People offered cash for my jacket. A couple wanted to get loud and fight and “see the policy” that said they had to move from lingering outside. One girl broke down, fell to the ground, and had a seizure when it was clear they were scammed and not getting in.

Incidentally, as I was walking to my first shift, one of the loading pages for When We Were Young festival said I was in. Two years ago, I had 7 browsers open that took 2 hours or more for one to allow me onto the page to buy a ticket. I planned to do the same thing this year before I took the shifts. So, because obviously, right as I’m about to go in, I have to navigate what is often a stressful, time-sensitive, and buggy-as-fuck process from my phone. I fail 3 times to pay for the tickets, and think I’m fucked until they announce day 2. I manage to still select the 4th tier, more exploitatively priced, tickets, and throw them on layaway. The show isn’t until October of next year.

Taylor might almost be more popular than every band that will be at that festival combined, if only because they all get 2 days, she got 3 just in one city. These people are such big fans and willing to be desperately crying and wandering the premises that they haven’t looked for a ticket or discovered the fraud until now? The nature of Ticketmaster and reselling hasn’t made it’s way into the broader culture knowledge bin yet?

I think it’s incredibly important to set the stage of both I, and every Taylor Swift concert-goer’s environment. We’re, extremely, decadent and privileged. I’m working a temp job, but I still feel well within my rights and capacity to spend a few hundred dollars on a trip, and capable of paying off debt. These people paid $1500 minimum for each ticket to fill up a football stadium. The ones who looked for and found tickets up to 2 or 3 hours into the show, paid anywhere from $2000 to $6000 for a half hour or hour from the worst spot on the floor or random nosebleed. Does anyone have that much sympathy for anyone willing or capable of throwing that kind of money around like that? They certainly don’t project it towards me and my debt or indulgences.

I can only speculate what it’s like to live a life like that. I’d be drawing on my experience of yelling, “You can go to any line, even if you have a bag, disregard the sign” directly into someone’s face, and they, after having locked eyes and nodded along respond without hesitation, “But what if I have a bag?”

I feel like you must have that, I want to use the word “impossible,” lack of self-awareness and attention in order to operate at the level that doesn’t think twice about spending thousands for a ticket, that you never tried to get well in advance, hundreds more on merch, alcohol, and maybe a limo ride to the stadium, and when presented with clear loud instruction…what? What is it you’re doing besides responding like a barking dog with no grasp as to what’s happening around you? But the sign! BUT THE SIIIIIIGN!

Many people laughed and responded quicker when I eventually discovered saying, “The sign is a lie!”

It only took until the end of the first day for the people in charge to recognize what I bring to any role I take. I was assured I would work the next two days regardless of my “technically” “paid backup” status. A supervisor picked me out of the crowd on day 3. The importance of what I take for granted as “the basics” get highlighted in those environments. Are you basically decent in your disposition? Did you follow the, albeit woefully incomplete and slightly changing or contradictory instructions as you were given them? Could you be trusted to not look painfully bored and distracted even when there wasn’t that much to do?

Taylor concerts are long. As someone who’s been to 170-something in the last 3 years, I had a lot of them to compare the crowds to as they were leaving or leaving early. This quasi-religious event mostly seemed to exhaust people. It doesn’t mean they didn’t have fun, but it does mean I felt myself feeling suspicious about the motives and headspace of the many fans. Broadly, you wouldn’t necessarily think someone who’s way too into a band or artist is particularly mentally well. But Taylor has a culture built around her that reminded me of The Dead. It’s gross to dance barefoot in unidentified moisture, and makes me uncomfortable when everyone around you carries on like it’s cool or normal.

There’s a lot of normalized pathological behavior and attitudes that come with wealth or just too much money for you as an individual to know how to utilize it effectively. That’s baked in to the “joke” written on the T-shirts about how much dad had to spend for tickets. I started saying that you’re either living in a way too comfortable place, or way too darker than we wish to imagine place in being part of that crowd.

I say this as someone who has spent, at his peak, $1800 for 4 days of “Owner’s Club” at Rockville last year. Back then with my job, that was about 1 paycheck, and I don’t have kids or more than $5000 a year in must-pay bills, so I understand how enough people can arrive at a place where the high cost still makes a certain kind of sense in their life. It’s harder to understand if you have rent, a mortgage, or “keep up with the Jones’s” kind of life. I’ve never had a crazy-high end paying job, so I’m sure there’s plenty wiping their ass with thousands I could barely imagine.

You just kinda realize that it’s not about her? These people didn’t look or sound any happier or “better” than the people I’ve been around at $15 shows. It’s generic to say that people want to belong to something, and even trying to frame it in terms of “people” doesn’t distinguish seizure-girl from out-of-touch mom from 20-something daddy’s-girl who clearly doesn’t appreciate where the money was coming from. If the tickets were 1/3rd of the price, and that money went to paying everyone on the grounds double, and people who were fans who could never afford one currently were as prevalent as hedge-fund children, like, wouldn’t “the world” be better off? Why do we have to swallow Ticketmaster monopolies, subsidized and greedy sports-stadium practices, exploitative temp agencies, and the general aggressive resentment yet ambivalence that comes with knowing, deep in your soul, and with practical penalties, you don’t belong in the bowl.

I envisioned poor kids sneaking in and peering through cracks at a coliseum while I was there. You never see, at least in movies, someone coming over and throwing the kids off the wall. Today’s kids might be a touch more dangerous, but I think there’s something to the notion of music and an alleged community built around it doing as much as it can to foster and expand. I know in Seattle she set up a whole system so people could watch from the parking lot who didn’t have tickets. I know she gave her whole crew major bonuses. How do we get more of that from everyone everywhere who has the power and money? If we’ll never be able to matter-of-fact expect them, when will we get around to compelling?

[1163] Boo Collar

It's official, I can say I've "worked in manufacturing," even if it's been barely. I found myself on a shop floor moving things from one bin to another and one said of the room to another, tailing an older gentleman who had been working there for 22 years. 90% of the job I learned in the first hour. I have a solid-enough instinct for staying out of the way from racing forklifts. I made 3 small errors that took less than a minute to rectify.

I was there because i've cornered myself into absolutely needing "a job." A temp agency placed me there. It's a touch more than half of what I'd make in my field. They've already made an issue out of "overtime," essentially keeping it secret what that would precisely entail until you're on the floor. The shift is, technically, 6:30 AM to 3 PM. You get a $2/hr "bonus" if you have "perfect attendance" which can be undermined by showing up 5 minutes late any day. With overtime, they expect you to stay until 5 PM. 

 What this means is essentially a 13 hour day, 5 days a week, at what is grinding, mind-numbing work. I have to try to force myself to sleep early, which never works, wake up at 5:30ish, get to work early enough to not threaten my "bonus," and then get home 6ish. Invariably thinking about how fucked my life has become. I know, even as my best self, I cannot sustain that. It's not labor intensive. It's not too quick paced. I'm not going to complain about my aching back and hands from walking around and pushing things on wheels. 

What struck me most was the people. You could see the deadened resolve of "these are my circumstances." No one was really talking to each other. Very few people even feigned smiling or head-nodding as you walked by. You are made into a machine, and you perform your function at or better than the pace indicated overhead. The gentleman I got temp-hired on with worked there previously for a couple years, then explained how bad it got and why he had to leave. He complained that similar jobs were on offer in or near his home up the road in Brazil for $18-$22 an hour, and he's just biding his time until one of them calls him back. 

 I'm desperate enough that I think I can shut my brain off for a couple weeks. I also immediately applied to every remotely open, regardless of how poorly rated, addiction counseling company, located anywhere, I could. Certain experiences have a way of clarifying why you’re no longer willing to be picky or high-minded about what impact you might have. Watching souls actively leaving dozens of bodies is one of those experiences.

It also got me thinking about the fervor and entitlement in the voice of the guy who hired on too. It brought me back to Steak N Shake, where the drug-addled children spoke so highly of themselves and how screwed the place would be if they quit. Everyone has this story about their place and vital position in these massive corporations who literally wouldn’t notice if you died 30 seconds after your shift and just outside the parking lot.

It’s with that blind and naive pride that you get people defending their low pay, exploitative overtime hours, and weird gamification for $1,000 drawings if you download the company app and spend too much at the company over-priced mini-mart. It’s one, insanely huge thing, to negotiate with yourself to handle financial business by entertaining a place like that just long enough. It’s entirely another to be born and bred from that culture, baked into it like it’s normal or human to be set on repeat, insofar as we are pattern-seeking animals, but goddamn.

It’s one more instance I get to bear witness to as far as “chronic conditioning” is concerned. You might be fooled into thinking it’s more a Tetris-like zen going through the set of motions related to your very specific lane. But it’s so much darker than that. And, to be sure, I begrudge no one who enjoys their work or provides for themselves or their family. I just find it excruciating to think about how the baseline conception of a conscious human is so far removed, it’s less hard to imagine why we’re always teetering on a meltdown.

[1154] Scream Queen

My disposition is shifting into a familiar gear.

For as much as I espouse the value and virtue of having the freedom with my time to do with as I please, it comes with caveats. First, I don’t know anyone with time like I do, so I’m almost always alone. When I have time, it doesn’t mean I have money, or the required tools, or skills, or focus, or motivation, or weather to do the things I otherwise like to do with said time. Most of my hobbies are not ends unto themselves. I’ll fiddle about on one of the instruments, but I have to be in some pretty low places to find the focus to actually write a song and fight with DAWs I don’t understand.

I get dozens of ADHD targeted ads trying to…apologize? for what maliciously might be described as “laziness” or “wasted potential.” You see, I’m actually just without enough structure. I’ve navigated the structures of school and 15 different work environments. I’ve never had issues showing up, doing what was asked, and moving on. Whether I was working 20 hours a day like when I started my coffee shop, or just needing to meet my 1 client for an hour once a week, if the structure is there, I stick to it.

Well, I’ve had no, or not-enough structure for too long, and it’s throwing me into, not precisely a panic, but it’s raising a lot of alarms. I’ve complained about debt for years now, and until the last few months, I’d never paid a dime of interest. Interest is now 9.7% of the money I have spent all year. I cannot psychologically stomach this. As a result, this morning I debt consolidated. How much debt am I in? Right about equal to the amount of money I would have gotten had my uncles not stolen money from me when my grandma died. I’m twice the amount I was expected to make (when it was half as much) from selling a house I spent 10 months renovating. I’m about as much as I would have hoped to make from any sane and reasonable grant for offering counseling and casework services at 20% of what the State overpays shitty monopolies.

Most people are familiar with the horrible, horrible process of applying to jobs in the modern world. You think you’re done just because you have your resume uploaded to half a dozen “the jobs are here!” websites? HA! Spend literally hours on the worst designed systems known to man filling out the same information on buggy spamming websites for prestigious roles like bagging groceries or delivery driving. You know, jobs that absolutely need 7 pages of redundant information.

I’ve gotten really lucky in my life so far. I was able to do drug studies for a couple years and amass enough money to buy my land. As I was trying to transition out here in a smart or patient way, I got fucked. The consequences of that fucking are still playing out. But, what it’s meant in general is that I have not had to spend the vast majority of my adult life swallowing loads of complacent shit about how I’m infinitely bound to whatever my shitty job might have been at the time. $5,000 a year pays my property taxes, electricity, and internet.

When I work shitty jobs, I do the math. It usually costs me somewhere between 25% and 33% of my take-home pay just to drive to the mother fuckers. So, even when I’m technically making enough to cover “basics” (if you’re raised poor enough and know insurance isn’t always part of that equation) I’m still often losing money just because cars break down, gas fluctuates, and the handful of times I’ve tried to meal prep I ended up throwing out half the food I got sick of

I’ve spent my adult life, save the last 3 years, pretty much living as though “fun” isn’t a thing. I’ve gone in debt to get my house in order. I’ve bought “toys” like a new computer because I absolutely needed it for my job and hadn’t upgraded for 15 years. I drive cars that have been crashed into or guzzle damn near as much oil as they do gas. Half my clothing is free giveaways from places like bars or clothes that have somehow maintained some kind of shape since high school. I know how to apply and get SNAP. I know how to cope with being functionally indoors or at home for weeks and months at a time.

I’m the kind of person who should NEVER be in any kind of debt, difficult situation, or piddling “I’ll take any job!” kind of place. I have my degree. I have special skills when it comes to interpersonal professional engagement. I have a supervisory level addiction counseling credential. In the past, I’ve gotten my real estate broker’s license. I’ve engaged hundreds of people at a time at varying levels of ongoing crisis. I’ve learned how to do fun things like woodwork in my free time. I’m a doer. I create. I struggle with every second in which I can describe myself as a “lazy piece of shit” because I didn’t occupy it with something to stimulate my brain or demonstrate my worth. It truly is a pathological base disposition to belabor my strengths as I lament excruciating details impeding my small conceptions of progress.

The self-hatred spilleth over. Now, I want every shitty job. I want to exhaust myself until I’ve paid off the money. I want to ignore my hobbies, TV, or the idea that I deserve a single second of my time doing something like this, instead of moving some box from one side of the room to the other in a warehouse or bagging your groceries at the white trash Dollar Store up the road.

If I could have “simply” maintained an uncritical and complacent disposition, I could have just kept my job enabling addicts to not really improve. What’s wrong with me? I pretty much had my remote position, wasted gas to the office 2 days a week 1.5 hours away aside. This is the critical piece of what is wrong with me. I fucking believe in myself! I try, desperately, to practice the behaviors and beliefs I arrive at after writing. If I think I’m being an exploited and exploitative cunt who is contributing to the veneer of insincere “help” that plagues disingenuous social work, THAT ACTUALLY BUGS THE FUCK OUT OF ME! I can’t ignore the ick. I can’t play along and adopt the catch-phrases.

I have left so many otherwise straight-forward or “comfortable” positions for this reason. Until recently, I haven’t had a job, paying next to nothing or otherwise, that couldn’t pay off my debt in 3 to 6 months. Why wasn’t the debt paid? I needed to go to extreme levels of distraction and coping because I was spending 12 to 15 hours a day poorly playing along. If I couldn’t pack the handful of hours or weekends with other shit to do and think about? I might lose my shit around clients. My mouth will get me fired and more alienated than it already does.

The wild swings between doing “nothing” with all of my free time, to this craving to occupy every second with something on the clock making me any kind of money I know is wrong or inappropriate. But also, I need to hype myself up. I need to get comfortable with the deadening that happens. I need to mourn the loss of the things I’d rather be doing while I’m standing for 8 to 12 hours a day or being directed by someone who gives me immediate pause and cause for concern.

I can’t ever seem to find some happy middle ground with my collection of skills and experience. It’s either 40+ hours a week, in office or equivalent, taking home 70% of my pay and eating 70% of my day, or it’s peanuts in the form of plasma donation and odd-jobs offered to me out of pity, no less appreciated and very needed, from friends and family. Part-time? No no, that’s a trick to get you in the door so they can impose mandatory overtime. Well, that’s the case no matter what role you get.

I also can’t seem to stomach the idea of constantly starting from the bottom. Every field has its “pre-license or certification” “x-hours you need to blah” “a year from now you might be qualified to tie my shoes!” kind of stupid fucking process. It’s fees. It’s tests. It’s arbitrary because the role they hired you for actually needs something they’re gonna take 9 months to even hint at bothering to show you how to do.

I should deliberately avoid trauma-dumping my experience across roles right now.

I had to back myself into a corner that raised my internal threat level. Included in my debt consolidation plan, I’m also thinking about returning to school for my Master’s in counseling. Why? Because I don’t want to pay some greedy asshole for the privilege of using their license number to run my nonprofit. I don’t want to have to keep reminding the people fawning over how I do counseling that I’m not licensed, technically, just “credentialed” and trusted to conduct crisis intervention. It’s about the money and plausible deniability for liability if someone loses their shit, not that any of the companies I worked for genuinely give a fuck. I’m extremely timely and organized with my paperwork, they like that.

I’ve worked 4 jobs at once before. I very nearly passed out, but I did it. I was also 24 and not 36. I also know that when an idea gets stuck like “I’m fucking sick of this, fix it,” I won’t be able to let it go. Before I started writing this, I applied to 15 more jobs, all over the map, but applied nonetheless. I’m getting up at 8, it’s 2:15 right now, no matter how late I stay up, to hit the job placement spot in town. I’m reaching out to people who might let me host a fundraising event for free in their spot. I’ve got the list of things sitting around my house and property that can make their way to facebook marketplace. I can start breaking down the large pile of scrap I collected over years because I thought that’d be a good and consistent form of money-making for too long.

There’s a world where I go into something of a fugue state and fix my problem in a few weeks or couple months, but I genuinely shudder and worry about what the true cost of that would be.

I want balance. I really do. I want a healthy medium between how much TV I can watch, or the 20 years of video games I need to catch up on, or the 80 hours of music production tutorials I need to filter through, or the dozens of pieces of wood I’ll fuck up and my otherwise capacity to deftly psychoanalyze, encourage, and model behavior. I wouldn’t advocate anyone do what I’m gearing up to do. But, more to the point, I’m not at the mercy of the compulsion to try, I just deeply appreciate the utility and my capacity.

The goal is clear, get out of debt. My arms and legs work. I can operate for months on 4 hours of sleep. No one is going to “save me” from myself like when I reached out to my “friend” that helped drive me to this fucked place altogether. I was thinking so naively that it’s worth turning every stone once a certain psychological threshold has been breached. I gathered his distance-putting pretense and superficiality immediately. You know what happened when I called another friend later that day? He sent $200 in anticipation of a work I’m going to do to install workbenches around his garage. He sent it after I told him 8 times not to. My former friend? He doesn’t even think he’s done anything wrong. This isn’t the mind-reading I caution clients against, this is me reading tone and his phrasing, “I can see why you would have that position.” Yeah, I bet.

This is the most chaos-like I’ve written in a long time. I’ve got like 4 separate things I could bitch indefinitely about. I’m fishing for a sustainable approach to what’s a flatly irresponsible and unrelenting place I’m inviting into my behavior. I’m so beyond whatever levels of anger or frustration I’ve bled onto pages in the past. Or maybe the numbing is doing its job. Or maybe, and this is a symptom of this state of mind, the fact that I’ve eaten 3 pieces of toast and some Cheez-its all day is maybe starting to sink in.

If I get 1 or 3 jobs in the next couple days and my new budgeting spreadsheet put together, it’s entirely possible I’ll write a 3 paragraph matter-of-fact digression about how I’ve solved my problem, and in 3 to 6 months at yada yada pace (with no overtime or a return to dreaded meal prep) this will all register like some frenetic fever dream accident blog reflective of a bygone era. Do I dare hope?

[1087] You Really Like Me

I hope this one does the trick. For weeks I've felt like I'm floundering. I can't commit to the process of finding a job. I can't feel "more serious" about pursuing my hobbies or side-projects that might eek out a means of profitability with enough investment and focus. I can't justify sitting back and just watching TV or looking for the next show to attend. My mind has been all over the place, and for someone who exists with that as a standing condition of existence, it's felt acutely elevated.

Evidence of this state of mind is me making a doctor's appointment. I don't really know anything about ADHD beyond the amount of kids I came across with the diagnosis and the increasing cultural awareness of the behaviors associated with it. So much of it is as familiar to me as the feelings of when I read/learned about autism. I've never been one to much care for many people's claims regarding a diagnosis or the implications that followed. The more I start to meet "pathological" impediments to my sense of well-being or capacity to get shit done, the more my sympathies grow.

I discussed recently how I can manage well-enough with structure. In a closed-enough environment with rules and consistency, it can be really easy to downplay or ignore what about you that looks to derail. Most jobs pretty much insist you have to get up at a certain time, pay attention to the commute, fall within the guidelines for behavior to not get fired, and keep the threat of not keeping the bills paid hot enough to justify indefinite suffering or excuses. The longer I go left to my own devices, I feel consequences of a lack of structure compound.

One way that happens is the "drama" of the space between doing things gets elevated. If I'm not otherwise plugged into something, it lends itself to irrational negative emotion. This gets complicated further because I'm, on the whole, generally muted emotionally. Whether we want to chalk that up to a learned behavior trauma response to my upbringing, autism, or deliberately cultivated practice given age, wisdom, and the nature of my professional responsibilities, I'm willing to entertain it's all that and more. Practically, it means I will never be persuaded by the "passion" or "depression" or "anxiety" or "angry" that others claim moves or motivates their behavior.

In fact, particularly with the word "passion," I regularly discuss how much I hate that fucking word and how stupid or misleading I think it is. It's employed to downplay the circumstances and privileges that enable someone to pursue one route over another. When you don't have these swings in emotion, very little signals to you to change, dramatically or otherwise, whatever you're currently doing. I'd like to believe it makes a certain amount of sense the reasons I build through writing and conversation to do one thing over another. Whether or not that's the case you only care to the extent it affects or entertains you.

Broadly speaking, you're not invested in my well-being because you have your own life and things to suffer and barely figure out as well. That sentence feels like a major part of "the rub."

I feel myself envying anyone with a community. Even shitty communities, there's a sense of togetherness, belonging, understanding, and consistency that I sorely lack in my day-to-day. For most of my life, I've felt explicitly on the outside playing observer to how people treat each other, what you're "supposed to" say, or trying to figure out what "really matters" in the dynamic.

If I thought to myself, "How do you get a girlfriend?" No exaggeration, 9 out of 10 relationships I would observe would be explicitly abusive. No, not everyone was beating the shit out of their girlfriend, but yes, both parties were using emotionally manipulative and personally guilt-inducing behavior to maintain that dynamic. In fact, the older I get and the more I've watched relationships maintain or falter, it's not like that pattern has gone away, but the "healthiest" couples realize, maybe in their mid-to-late 30s that they have been behaving in those fucked up ways towards each other and start therapy.

This kind of disconnect permeates pretty much every level of my life. I'm not, nor have ever been, "normal." Yes, I exist like all things, and there is nothing new under the sun. I'm not claiming "special." I'm claiming "aberrant" or "noticeably and consistently different." I'm the only Vulcan on board. There's a whole fucking planet of Vulcan's, but I'm the only one on my particular ship.

This means when I sit here, contemplative, with a level of "anxiety" that I will never score higher than a 1 or 2 on a scale from 1 to 10, I may or may not address that by a dogged pursuit to "fix" what is probably 10 different things nagging that at one time. I've been paying extra attention to how all-over-the-place my mind is when I've got nothing in particular I care to focus on. I can start vacuuming in the middle of making a sandwich. I'll start a movie in the middle of another paused show.

Incidentally, as I finished that last line, my dad calls me and we talk for a half hour.

My dad is my most consistent force in my life. When people are acting like complete shit-heads, I'm not looking over my shoulder for my dad to fuck my life up or take advantage of me or threaten my safety like my "best friend." When I talk about the projects on the land I wish to focus on or when I needed to get things done to make the house livable, like how I imagine some people's friends and families work, he offered and continues to offer to come down and help me. If I were to strip away a lot of the nonsense related to my approach to work or fantastic dreams and what I am or am not doing every day in service to them, it makes an incredible amount of sense for me to spend more time in the region with him trying to grow the gravesite cleaning and yard work business.

My closest friends continue to maintain different forms of distance. They have their own families and paradigms. Very much to his credit, I do believe Hussain would help me with a project on the land and has offered to do so. That's not, like, the only or most important criterion for whether or not I can call someone friend, but it's akin to the question of "Who helps you move?"

Who enables your expression and embodied physical manifestations of space? The drywall in my house was a result of my dad helping. My nice electric guitar my dad again. He's also the most frequent one coming along to shows. The..whatever's left of it…garden outside and room extension have everything to do with Allie. The vehicles that have gotten me all over the midwest have been worked on, for free, or bought from Hussain. Jess, Hussain, Brandy, and before the break Byron came to shows. That's pretty much my network of people I see or interact with in person with any remote regularity until I get a job and meet coworkers with no desire to unionize or talk about anything that helps us transcend our capture.

I also feel like it's not for lack of effort or compromise that I find myself most-often alone and wondering what to do next. I've tried to start the regular meetups with not just the people from college, but different coworkers over the years and with Hussain and Byron. Whether it's just to grab a drink or hit the bowling alley, or see a movie. I want to be clear, it's not that I can't or can "never" persuade people to hang out or chill, but doing so is distinctly not the priority. One might disingenuously personalize and take it a step further to consider themselves the lack of priority, and while that is practically true, it's not an honest way to comprehensively understand the dynamic. People care about themselves waaaaay before they "don't care" about you or what you're up to.

The psychology of this is spoken to by too many things to account for. We blame the isolating echo-chambers online. We can point to the dire economic situation where "the jobs report is improving" has nothing to do with even the concept of a living wage, savings, or what it means to live day-to-day. You have dedicated institutions meant to obscure how we talk about or understand how to "fix" anything, and overwhelmingly you meet people who are just exhausted and adopting versions of "slave ethics" in order to cope and squeeze what little positivity they can out of their circumstances. If that comes with waterfalls of denial, compulsive abuse, or sweet smelling stories of personal dignity and direction, all the more comfortably they sit with no one bothering to notice or care how they play out.

I think about the conversation I got into with Smash, and at one point I said something that triggered "that face" that people get when they are convinced you can't be persuaded or have said something so egregious they both feel sorry for you, angry at themselves, and abjectly hopeless in considering there was a point to beginning the exchange at all. What, of course, separates a Smash from a regular person is that she pushed through it and we found a better place to resolve whatever the discrepancy was at the time. That's a special capacity and awareness we don't practice culturally. If we're already suffering, working incredibly hard to deny or downplay it, what purpose does more serve?

I put it to you that I'm just an extension of my circumstances first. Before I can ever attempt to "personalize" something or claim some power of "will" and freedom to express it, I'm just reporting on the cold, the silence, the self-reports, and variations on the theme of "I'm confused and struggling." I'm not a lowly detached desperate-for-any-kind-of community person flinging out theories about how life works or doesn't. I'm reflecting on my own, not-comfortable-enough or not-comfortable-in-the-right-ways circumstances as well as the literally thousands of pieces of input I've received professionally.

I think there is a palpably different experience between "life is hard" sentiments and "there's a concerted effort to keep you feeling empty and desperate." I think we're suffering the latter. I don't think it's precisely a "conspiracy," but I do think it has a lot to do with us losing a sense of honesty and ownership regarding what we allow to pass as acceptable from each other. I think we're like Byron, allowing the consequences of our behavior to pull guns on each other, and without irony or malice, remain perfectly baffled about what we should be expected to do to be accountable to that.

The "middle-ground" Nazis play the same role. The vast majority of Germans were not in the S.S. or filling up mass graves. They were still Nazis. Apologists for Trump, fascism broadly, religiously-motivated persecutors, and every single time you point your finger before you recognize your own hand plays the same instrument. This is how people get so comfortable ignoring atrocious behavior. At absolute bottom, they know they're doing the same thing. Or, they know they don't care.

"I'm not doing the same thing!" You protest. No, you're not butt-fucking children, but you thought about it, because I just typed it. You didn't enjoy the thought, but the more specific I get about that old Catholic dick inching towards that blonde-haired innocent little booty hole, I take over your mind. Your infinite sea of ridiculous and random thoughts is a source of infinite guilt, denial, distraction, and confusion by default.

If you expose yourself to information often enough, you might think to yourself, "Man, I have a problem with how often I think about butt-fucking children? Does that make me a pedofile?" Of course not, you just work at DCS. The problem is not the thought in and of itself, as any meditative practice will teach you. The problem is not recognizing how much your environment is disconnecting you from a feeling or capacity to get your thoughts organized and acted upon. You're being intruded on. But, worse, you're intruding on yourself with algorithm-assisted means to make you feel good about it.

The best person who has ever existed is still a mammal, a person, and completely fallible in the ways you are. What better way, Jesus story, to comprehensively justify and placate all "sin?" You are born, often enough, into a culture that insists you don't question the dictates of your prophet, lord and saviour, or all-powerful "mysterious force" that absolutely must "make sense" when infinity is over. It's an analogy for your infinite potential. It's a way to not fall into literal insanity trying to calculate the combinatorial explosion that is existence.

Say I return to my younger self. Say I ask "innocent" questions like a child would and tried to analyze the current landscape in front of me. "How do I be an adult?" Take a job that doesn't pay enough, fall into debt for literally any reason, but definitely for school, health issues, and car or mortgage payments. "What does it mean to love your family?" Put up with them just flatly and consistently disrespecting you, from your sobriety to anything you've accomplished, and make sure you show up to any and all gatherings regardless of the gossipy hateful things that have been said and done every day in between. "What does it mean to be a 'good Christian or Muslim?'" Protect pedophiles, cheer Hamas, deny science, control women…

Our narratives are generated from broken internal systems. We don't identify how they break. We double down on mistakes until we turn them into virtues. We act confused and innocent when asshole autistic-types like me bite down on these discrepancies and shake them with as much or more religious conviction than you've ever experienced. Appeals to do things "differently" or "better" are viewed with hostility and suspicion. We'll find ourselves undermining others in their effort to do so just in how we talk about them. Extolling the pageantry over what practically happens.

Then, I need to come full-circle and figure out how to blame without blaming. I need to figure out what's the next piece to take responsibility for and hopefully more deliberately than not choose a course of action that accounts for how perpetually harmless you're going to hold yourself for our collective dynamic. Consolidating and sacrificing aren't optional for "things" to start changing for the better. We're not hungry, there's certainly plenty of food, but we're absolutely starving. We show up when it's "convenient" or if we're desperate, which means we're not showing up at all.

I need a robust network of both accountability and potential. I'm so at the mercy of that need that I've tolerated years of emotional abuse. I want friends so bad I'll talk about them in quotes for dozens of blogs for years and years before it sinks in they aren't friends. For every tool at my fingertips, I'm not inspiring anyone to join me, play music with me, build anything, or contribute in any way to the effort of creating a means to own the work we put into the world. It's not exactly that the more I look the less I find, but even some of these Upwork hires are helping me compare and contrast what they've accomplished in a few weeks compared to me and "my network" over years.

Intellectually, I'm comfortable with things constantly in flux. As a human, I would appreciate stability and predictability along certain metrics until the day I die. I don't ever want to be confused about the location and safety of my food. I don't want to feel like I'm gambling on whether or not I'll get to keep my stuff or have my house burn down to humble me and teach me the value of still being alive. I don't want to occupy an environment that's Mad Maxing every time I leave my house because the collective psychology is arrested by violence and in-group out-group primal instincts. We either drag what we want the future to be into the present, or we suffer the fallout of machinery that compiled all of the survival mechanisms naturally-selected to keep us alive so far. The infinite vacuum of space is "natural." Not good or bad by itself, but wholly antithetical to life as we know it or would prefer.

[1086] Fixing

Let's try to capture the mood over the last few weeks before my "day" gets started.

Why is "day" in quotes? It's 4:39 PM. I've been out of bed approximately 15 minutes. I haven't been precisely asleep all day, but finding the reasons or motivation to leave my bed were not forthcoming. It's been that way, off and on, since the middle of October.

Having developed the habit of "just get the ticket," even though I left my job, I didn't precisely cease spending money. I left before I paid off debt. I left, not precisely in a reactionary way, but I couldn't ignore the consequences their behavior was having on my disposition and willingness to choose shittier ways of expressing myself.

Practically, while if I kept the job, I could still reasonably say something like, "I'm only 5.66 months of paychecks in debt," now, for that to remain true, I'm staring down sitting in my car in service to Grub Hub or Door Dash all day until I hit $100.

I want to make sure I'm very clear about one thing. I don't regret any show I've been to. I don't regret any instrument or tool I have. Whether I was $5,000 or $50,000 in debt, if, as modern reporting indicates to me, we're all in debt, I feel, hopefully not "delusionally" good, that mine is in service to creative options, hobbies, and things that don't aggravate anxiety or anger. I don't dread the 1 to 12 hour round-trip drives to the venues. I'm not cursing myself for standing in the cold before the show. I don't look at my band T-shirts and go, "You fucking idiot!"

 
If our system means practically inevitable debt to live a remote semblance of a "middle class" lifestyle, if this be my lot, so be it. My house is literally a series of combined sheds. I drive very old cars. I have no children. I have no mortgage. I have no health insurance. I have the opportunity to have as much fun with my fleeting youth as possible before I either get sick, some new tragedy befalls the world, or I proverbially break and tame my spirit to work indefinitely in service to something I hate, is "beneath me," or "poisons my soul."

You should know, I do attempt to think creatively about how to work in a field or on something that doesn't fill me with unyielding drad. I think maybe I write a bunch of letters to creators and artists I admire and see if they have some kind of position I could occupy. I mean it when I say I don't need much. Even a relatively small Youtube channel who is getting sponsored might stand to need an assistant, right? Maybe I do the same thing with different bands I like. With 2 thoughts around 1 idea, I've opened up hundreds of letters or emails to send.

What do I say then?

"Hey! I like what you do a ton. I respect [x y and z] and [such and such] has meant a lot to me because of my [personal anecdote]. I'm wondering if there's any spot I might fit to help out? I mean as a job, in any way, big or small. I want to see you succeed and concurrently learn more about how you do what you do. I'm [all the ways I'm amazing, but humble.] I've had every kind of job from scrubbing toilets as a generalized social worker to working for The Department of Child Services investigating crisis situations and resolving gigantic interpersonal logistic problems.

I currently live in the middle of nowhere Indiana and have wide open availability. I'll be real with you, I'm sending some version of this out to well over 100 artists, bands, or creatives that I admire, but will never simply ignore or not respond to anyone that hits me back. I genuinely wish to change the direction of my life by plugging into the work of creating more than coping, and there's so many worthwhile operations in effect I have to believe deserve what I can bring more than my past work environments.

And just as a show of good faith, if you have some task you'd like me to work out to prove my timeliness, communication, or sincerity, please send it along. I'm a complete stranger reaching out from the abyss. I suspect we'd both prefer my work speak for itself."

Think that works?

In the meantime, I'm still waiting to hear whether or not the non-profit gets its tax-exempt status. I believe one or two more grants have been submitted or are pending submission once we get the letter. I still can't find a replacement therapist for supervision and billing. I have an appointment Tuesday with a new client. And I've made $58 from Grub Hub, $20 of which I spent almost immediately the same day. I put in 6-12 applications depending on how explicitly fake you wish to consider some of the listings. I have a 16-day streak of reading at least 1 article each day, 23-days of reading at least a chapter, 17-days of doing squats, and 11-days of practicing an instrument for at least 30 minutes.

I started the habit-tracking in October. They say it takes 3 months to develop a habit. Just because you theoretically can do something "more" than you are, that's not the task or point. The point is the consistency and overcoming the resistance to introducing a new behavior. The closer I've paid attention to this distinction, the easier it's been to "feel right" in engaging the practices. I've finished 12 books, done 1,100 squats, read 110 articles, and played for 44 hours that I promise I wouldn't have otherwise without this app and setting the bar so low.

One of the things that persuaded me to quit my job was an ongoing reminder to myself that there's "infinite work." There are thousands and thousands of people within driving distance who have work to do, work they may or may not even be good at, and work they would be just as if not more likely than me to pay someone to do, if they knew how to find that person. Statistically, if you put yourself out there long enough, you will land somewhere. I cannot trap myself into thinking I "have to" work some menial miserable job always playing catch-up to debt. It's just irrational and wrong. It can just be hard to be your own cheerleader, especially when you spend 99% of your time alone with cats.

I suppose I need to pull up a spreadsheet and get to tracking down the contact information of people I admire. If I can get reading, practicing, eating, and shitting out of the way first I'll have that much less ADHD distractions that feel like conflicting "should do" things. It's now 5:26 PM. I think I've started this day fairly productively.

[1085] Bitching

If there's a better time to try and buckle down to do almost nothing but work, it's winter. While I am getting a certain satisfaction in building on reading and playing consistently, I'm not a fool and completely unwilling to acknowledge the debt I would prefer not to be in. I knew I was disrupting an incredibly comfortable applecart in leaving Groups, and I'm almost certain I'm going to despite just as deeply whatever I do next as I've ever done. I continue to wrestle with that, as peace will never be made.

Bear in mind, my whole life gets incredibly simple if I get a grant, let alone 2 grants. I, fundamentally, don't need a lot of money to be comfortable. That's the overarching point I hope really sinks in, both to anyone reading, and my own psyche. I'm not in debt with a mortgage, car payment, kids, or with even $500 let alone $1,000 or more due every month in service to my bills or credit card payments.

I can still seek and work with customers in service to my company, which is arguably at "side-hustle" level indefinitely, but still technically viable and paying me peanuts occasionally. I'm discontented overall though because every time I think about my company, I'm reminded of the stupid people and stupid variables, beyond my control, that fuck me for reasons they refuse to explicate. I am livid regarding the therapist situation. I'm prepared to get obsessive and spend-happy to sue for damages with the last insurance empaneling company if the refund, due in the next few days, doesn't come.

I browse articles online that show the forever-increasing income inequality and moves the sinfully-rich are making to amass even more. It's exhausting and debilitating. Anyone who pretends they aren't functionally rotting away slaving under this system is delusional. They've likely adopted a slave ethic and sense of faux duty or obligation, side-stepping the real personal responsibility to honestly assess their situation and figure out who or what to fight. I don't really know what to do beyond bemoan the situation as well, so who can blame them?

My life gets so simple when I'm able to, even briefly, find the focus to just play my guitar or get lost in a comic book. All I really I want to do anymore is pretty much within arm's reach. This is why I would be contented with a "mindless" job doing "data entry" for "minimum wage." I have to speak in quotes because nothing is real or means what it's supposed to mean. It's another exhausting mental hoop to navigate.

Why even write this? It's nothing new or interesting. I'm just trying to gear up for another headfirst charge into a wall. I'm trying to find the sanity that struggles to maintain in the face of all my insane, desperate, or "fuck it" behaviors.

While it's true there's an infinite amount of work, it's considerably less likely you'll find that work meaningful, impactful, worthy of your time, accountable, or paying you reasonably. We're led to believe there's some form of "noble competition" in our clamoring to survive amidst the overwhelming opportunities to indulge. It's all lies and incredibly stupid. It's all an effort to stay distracted. It has me floundering with, "The system is fucked, maaaaan" vagaries because I have run out of ways to describe it.

I need to read, head into town, eat, kill time, and see a show tonight. I need to see if I can actually get paid to deliver food again. I need to put in more waste-of-time applications to mostly-fake job listings. I need to practice my guitar "extra" because I decided to go to sleep early and wake up to conduct a more-normal daylight hour existence today. I need to acknowledge and incorporate what would otherwise be overwhelming anger I can feel swelling up at the absurdity of my circumstances. Appreciation practice doesn't obfuscate or erase the practical hells.

[1070] Bad Boy

I'm doing nothing if not trying. I try so hard to do things the "right" way. I work against what I know and deliberately exercise good faith and good will where an infinite well of hatred and criticism otherwise exists. Why I bother to try to behave this way got tested and challenged today.

I think I need to just get the argument portion out of the way.

As I was explaining to one of my groups, who had yet to be informed that I was leaving, I talked about having my out-patient clinic. 99 times out of 100, if you find a therapist or counselor you actually trust and are willing to talk to, if they leave wherever you found them, that's it. It becomes a best of luck wish to find someone you might have invested years of your life with. I occupy a unique space where, if you were actually getting utility and feeling growth in talking with me, you just have to click a different link or call a different number.

I had 11 different counselors coming in to cover the 12 groups I was leaving. For the past 2 weeks I've made approximately the same statements regarding how to find me, how my company seeks to work, and how I hope to have structured it in a way that people can maintain their attendance and adherence to Groups' rules, and still afford me. I don't even trust Groups and have watched them do demonstrable harm in an ongoing way, but in that spirit of deliberately trying not to be hateful and spite-ridden literally structured my "competition" to accommodate the clients' needs first.

I've made those statements in front of providers, 7 other counselors, office managers from different regions, discussed it with my supervisor, and no one until this cunt, Richard Lembke, batted an eye. He calls it "wholly unethical" to be pitching my company to people who have expressly asked me how they can keep in contact. He reports me, takes control of the group, and kicks me out.

There's so much to account for, yet it's all very simple and can be done quickly. First, we regularly coordinate care or attempt to find other providers if Groups doesn't seem to be the best fit. We have an entire department dedicated to giving our people numbers to call and options to explore so they can keep a regular prescription or get resources Groups doesn't offer. If you're putting people first, and they've built a trusting therapeutic relationship with someone for as many as 15 months, where does the confidence come from to assert the "wholly unethical" charge? What does it say about every single other person who listened and didn't feel entitled and moved to hijack my group? What do you make of the 2 people who immediately reached out to me after that Group to either tell me they, and the rest of the group, defended me or wish to proceed individually?

Between the 4 people loosely associated with my company, that isn't offering medication assisted treatment, there's 1 person on the calendar bi-weekly. I'll maybe have 2 in a couple days. Groups can't handle that? I'm cutting into their profits too much? The subsidized multi-million dollar operation with 350 people in our office alone? K. The company that regularly admits people who are exceptionally mentally or physically unwell that we watch deteriorate or destroy groups each week? That's not "wholly unethical" when I have every supervisor and the regional medical director agreeing with me when I call it out in the meetings?

It is one of the hardest things to do to find someone you can actually trust to talk to. To get reasonable, thoughtful, critical feedback that let's you then put it to work is an exceptionally rare find. That is to say, what I do has taken a lot of practice, life experience, and adherence to being incredibly fucking ethical given how I know I could act in working for places that aren't ethical.

If I get to some level of "wild" success, I don't want it to be because I created a cult, dependents, or through intimidation. I don't want the people who work with me to feel like they are under constant threat to say the "right" things to sweep bad shit under the rug. I don't want people who, even jokingly, start to worship or glom onto me because I'm yada yada, "The only one who's ever cared…" And I don't want to be so self-assured and delusional that I'm willing to Elon Musk my way past any critical feedback or proper restraint.

Parts of the world are at war. The "in group out group" and unearned confident narratives are running amok. I initially thought about titling this "Religious Zeal" because that's what Richard made me think of in how confidently he asserted my lack of ethics. He is convinced of himself, and thus in my estimation, a dumb and dangerous cunt. His small, but righteous and mighty, perspective will speak with all the conviction of a terrorist or zealot, and smugly denote the hyperbole in the analogy. After all, he's never killed anyone, and it's right there in the rule book how we're all supposed to be.

He's the norm. Ignorant conviction following the strictest interpretation of some uncriticized norm or rule. Who wrote it down? Why? Does it make sense? Who benefits from it? Doesn't matter, daddy said so, so begone unethical beast. I didn't get the job for two days as a spy from another giant Suboxone provider intent on snatching people. I was trying to respect and protect relationships I've been cultivating for 15 months. Neither he, nor Groups, gives a fuck though. They've never given a fuck about me, they don't care if you're mentally unwell or appropriate. They care about getting thousands of submissions sent to insurance every week.

It's hard not to regress into sociopathic and "pragmatic" thinking about that. There's a dozen shady things I could do to make money, seize power, and functionally arrest people under some horrifying notion of "care" or "help" or "harm reduction." I don't. I don't not just because it's wrong. I don't because I need to believe there's actually a right and just way to succeed. Every other fucking aspect of my life is the exact opposite lesson. The companies I work for exploit. The indifferent capitalist machine churns through all of our lives. Desperate and privileged elites demand exorbitant amounts for an hour of their time. It's bad. It's bad practice. It's being a bad human. It's bad for your soul. It's opportunistic and fatalistic and empty and filled with so much screaming denial I can't stomach it.

When I encounter the Richard's of the world, a switch flips in me. I get an adrenalin rush. I get scared. I like to cause pain, to fight, and create a scene. I like to show you, immediately, what's underneath all of the practiced professional posture. I like feeling ruthless and explicit about how I might choose to begin achieving my ends. It's as dark and scary as I ever feel, because it's compelling and feels incredibly reasonable, even after I come down.

Why not? That's what I have to keep asking myself. Why not "not kill" in the same way the zealots and dumb fucks hold themselves harmless in the suicidal environments they cultivate? I can construct a world in which you're feeding from what I serve you, especially if I entertain the all-consuming addictive part of me that would like to make an example of you. It takes a lot of energy, but perhaps it's energy well spent. I'm certain no one's going to speak up to tell me any differently.

You'd get off on watching too. People want the shit show. People are eating up the war videos and rolling baby heads. We kill ourselves in dozens of ways each day, knowing we don't deserve what we have and don't protect and create what we need. So when someone else is manifesting that impulse, slide over the popcorn. I know what you watchers want as much as I know what the worst parts of me wants. You want to be right about me. I want to believe I can be right about anything. We want the orgiastic jubilation of confirmation and conviction.

I never want to be a genuine Dick. I never want to be so convinced and pathetically clutching my pearls as something to bargain with in the next life. It might take me 4 hours to properly come down from an adrenalin rush, but that 4 hours is down from a veritable lifetime of feeling like I need to react disproportionately and "now" to the infinite sea of small petty people and their indignities fired like birdshot.

The world is truly a miserable place and I absolutely hate more of it than I like. What I like happens to mean more to me in terms of what I need to see and try to create than the forgone conclusions of exercising my hated. How long do you think it took me to figure that out? Can you say the same thing?