[775] Super Bull

I'm amused and don't know that I'll be able to articulate this in any way that will capture it all, but here's a shot.

I was asked, “Don't you think it's weird that you have a plan that involves self-banishment?”

I said, “No, my life's been trending that way for years. I want to create and pretend to help things in my own way bred from deep resentment and distrust for how life seems to operate in general. You can't behave that way and think you're going to get along particularly well with a social species in the regular framework.”

Sooner or later, they all leave. This has been as loud a trope you could paint my life with as anything else. The torrent of cliches fill in the gap. “We grew apart,” “I've changed for the better,” “That's the old me,” “I deserve better,” on and on until you've knitted yourself the coziest coat of excuses and self-affirmations imaginable. It is the night and day, black and white, yes or no in whether or not you're willing to take responsibility for your feelings or blame them on someone else.

As such, when my relationships “break,” there's consistent themes. They want me to be something I'm not. I offer to be more like that thing. They resent the offer. They'll ask me what their plan going forward should be with regard to what to do with me. I refuse to play along or be condescended to.

I cannot fix you. I can barely keep me on a consistent page with hundreds of anchors in writing. I suppose it's the degree of compounding hatred that's hard to conceive of when the first block starts to slip. Say you marry someone and it makes sense because of the math. You've got the years on the table, the romantic memories of your dating, they check boxes related to your family or looks. So you lock it in. Someone shifts. That's the nature of things. You get to a point where you start asking yourself, “What was I thinking?” The dates are less magic. The conversations less exciting. Their behavior, be it from their own stress or self-involvement, suggests to you the situation has dramatically changed.

That's when the dragging up of things from the past comes in. That's when the, “Well I certainly don't feel like I'm to blame for that” statements get traded. “I never meant,” “I don't think you're appreciating,” “I've got my own problems,” Where were you when?” until you've produced the finest self-sabotaging silk slip-over to help keep your racing heart contained in your chest.

I'm told I'm consistent. If nothing else, I'm still me, infinitely annoyingly so, while everyone else is getting “mature” and old and “more reasonable.” More power to them. If I wanted anything to do with that, I'd pick that. If I thought they could contribute in more than errant dollar amounts or occasional laughs at the party, I'd make bigger asks and offers. None of those things are true though. People are right where they are. I, and those who show up from time to time, are the reason I get anywhere I actually want to in life. I will be that person in a field. I will be that person with $1000 or $100,000 in the bank.

Others? I don't know who they'll be without the dollar designation. I don't know who they'll be without “the love of their life.” I don't know what their interests will be if their job doesn't pan out or they get sick or they get disillusioned. I don't know anything about anyone else except that when I draw the remotest satisfaction or presume to have a plan or understanding, that's what they're willing to latch onto and turn into a problem for them. Cool. I'll force myself out. Fine. I'll take responsibility for the shitty place I go to when I reflect on that behavior, and turn it into play and opportunity I'll be under no obligation to share.

We're all treacherous spirits. That I wear mine on my sleeve doesn't make me wrong, doesn't mean I've lost my utility, and you'd think would suggest I'm capable and willing to be a vengeful God. We're all doing the math regarding the relationships in our lives and we're all trying to map the future with the most perks. Well, sort of. Most are doing it by playing the horse race of individuals in their lives that suggest a certain amount of money or looks they can play off of. I'm basing it on the amount of opportunities I can give myself to fail or profit through my individual effort. If I ask you to do something for me, I offer to compensate it. I don't rely on the “unspoken bond” with anyone beyond my dad, which harks to my posture regarding what it means to be a parent and why I'm not one.

In any event, I cannot put voice to the joy of the idea of having and owning my own thing. It's not something “pure” of any negotiated reality nor exists somehow independent of our collective world, but the nature of the chains becomes more manageable. The problems I want to have need to be further down than “I gotta pay the bills!” I won't get into disputes regarding “partners.” I won't ask anything of you that isn't what I've put in. All of the mess and assumptions and resentment (that's really playing the key word role for this round) go right out my window. You know how I act like I don't really need you? I can't wait to hear how you feel when I start showing it in even bigger ways. Of course, I do need you. I need holes dug and walls built and gaps in my knowledge filled all the time. I just need those considerably more than the damage you bring with you to everything else I wish to be or create.

That's not a mean sentiment either. It's the truth as far as my experience. The people that help me, do so because they want to, or they get some kind of gratification in turn upon seeing mine. Others, pretend they're not making a transaction, and get confused and angry when they run out of money or the high doesn't last as long as it used to. My contingency plans assume, they don't hope. They assume you're going to pull out of my life. They assume you're going to throw my habits and preferences into my face. They assume everything is going to burn down and I will be left with no one. In 30 years, the best examples I have to suggest the world doesn't operate like that aren't even remotely enough to suggest behaving differently.

[774] Paper Moons

I feel like I should be smoking a cigarette in slightly slow motion as a camera pans across me at an over-sized desk with my needlessly expensive pens and novelties laying disheveled amidst disorganized papers and a short glass of whiskey. I don't even really like whiskey, but I'd be drinking it to mimic every depiction from 1920s dick to modern titan of industry that's washed my brain with regard to what the sleek and disturbed, yet powerful, men get up to as they contemplate their lives. I'd start out speaking in a voice much lower than my actual tone about the many lives I've lead and the countless souls I've no doubt crushed in an over-indulgent and prideful bout of slick self-delusion. There would be a poignant stench and crust as my sentiments creep over the edge of the desk and sink into the floor that's been slowly opening up and swallowing me for more years than I could remember.

Big changes are coming. If I only look at the kind of things I'm finding new interest in as an indication, it might resonate as merely capitalistic boredom. How dare I investigate an array of fancy and “individualistic” pens? What a privileged joke. What a laugh to look into “box of the month” subscriptions, as though a random array of cost-effective junk shipped to me is going to take up more space in my mind than my tables and trash. The harder truth is still mostly unspoken. The tide and power are shifting, and the people at the front line are doing all they can to keep it off their tongues and out of sight.

I'm excited and willing to keep speaking in the abstract because I like the tension. I like the idea that it's finally not me who's got to suffer every waking moment of anxiety and questions about what's going to happen next. I like being able to treat people like they’re the kid who never knows when the punishment is going to take place, because why pretend I'm somehow above my influences and past or care to not perpetuate a force that played such a powerful role in shaping so much of what I enjoy about me?

“I wanna be the minority. I don't need your authority.”

I was thinking today of writing my mother a letter attempting to explain how my perception of her has shifted over the years. They say you get older and start to realize that your parents are just people too. We know I've read enough psychology or social science to pawn off significant amounts of responsibility on the forces we're born into. My job conjures up a kind of hopeless sympathy for the people you know are going to be...about where they are...their entire lives. So, surely, a deliberately crafted piece of prose about my empty sympathies and mild-appreciation for the times that weren't terrible could act as a nice capstone before a new resolution to never speak to her again. It's poetically retarded.

One of the things that makes me afraid is my capacity for conscious and deliberate evil. It's a place you go to when you're craving a kind of evening of the scales or lash out to “take back” a kind of individual sovereignty your environment or social scene appears to be robbing you of. “Oh yeah? Well wait till I get control.” The cold irrational morality of the “hate your manhood, hate your race, hate your power” community draws from the well in perfect irony. It's only in granting myself the realization of that capacity that I allow myself to grant you equally depraved agency. It's why my heart infinitely breaks when you're all talk and get unduly old. It's why I allowed myself to be deceived in what I thought we could mean to each other.

That capacity is a drug. It's the drug I think Byron took in his politicking. I think the people running around and making their introductions and asking to sit on boards becomes immensely gratifying. I think any criticism of the process, or the reasons he lost, provoked some of his darkest impulses. I think he forgot, or disregarded, that a revolt of 1 amongst equals is a losing strategy when both are excited to annihilate.

What that annihilation looks like is anyone's guess. For me, it's the continuation of what my not-so-subconscious has been telling me for an exceedingly long time. I need my own space, alone, away from everyone, where I can do things independently of the trappings of modernity. Debt from a car payment literally becomes an existential threat when you've been doing it like me for as long as I have. How can you not remember I was willing to get my spine tapped to not fit in? It's not hanging from hooks and face tattoos, but the severity of pain and degree of panic I will never forget.

I draw power from what I do with my own space. When I'm not thinking about anything else but how to flow from one thing unto the next. It's occurring to me that with this job, and the nature of it being that there's just enough to do each day, just enough manageable variety, just enough thinking on the fly to navigate different personalities or juggle the 5 things that fall into your lap at 4:15 on Friday, it lessens the “dragging” nature of me not getting what I want. When I have to figure out how to build, mend, and brew in the off-hours combined with the occupied-enough of my day to day, I'll be right back here at 32 in a too-comfortable position with a radically transformed circumstance. I'll have nowhere else to go, because I'll have cultivated the environment that forces a collapsed set of more likely outcomes.

And then what? It's a story cliché that before you get everything you ever wanted, you have to shed everything that came before. Think Thanos killing Gamora. My theory for why this happens is that you become something so entirely removed from all of the forces that pushed you there, it's basically a mathematical imperative. It's over-filling a cup with water. Yes, technically there's still a cup, and it is indeed filled with water, but each particle was replaced until it was in some exotic or indefinable way different, and the people who used to drink it now prefer pop.

I like the idea of a kind of cold denial and rebuke. Let me get that access or the perks. Let me start living the example people imitate, but never quite feel in their soul. Then let me deny them the invitation. Let me shed the last shells of facebook impersonalities and picture posturing. It'll taste sweeter than that wildly over-priced chocolate I considered ordering the other day.

I'm still persuaded that the more you allow death into your narrative, the more grounded and aware and honest you can be about your place relative to other things. I think the world looks the way it does in a large proportion to what people have or haven't dealt with in regard to their death. What's your “best” if it mirrors the behaviors you've learned about your worst? What's your motivation that pulls you out of bed independent of every obsessive rage-inducing thought or sweet suggestion of seductive suicide? What's the place you occupy when the shelves for your experiences of “love” or “trust” are so cluttered with a dusty and broken mess, yet so devoid of the objects that would encapsulate what they mean to you?

I welcome death, so I don't bemoan watching your suicide. I memorialize the broken relationships. I sing a sad song for the pages left unturned. But I always awaken right back at the end of another step in the direction I want to go. I always manage to find someone, just as erratic or judgmental or contradictory and ridiculous as you, to take your place and ride along until it's their turn to breakdown. It's a crass motivational poster to regard everyone who's ever hurt your feelings as a novel bump or stepping stone and learning experience. The trembling resolve of stolen wisdom in lieu of embodied practice.

I've never wanted to be liked by anyone I didn't like for one reason or another a little more than me. My dad and grandma showed the kind of committed family resolve I thought was paramount until that family decides it wants to eat you from the inside out. I want to laugh and joke, or let you play with my hair, if I know first and foremost there's as much of your individual shining through as the space we're occupying can accommodate. I treat naive-lamb people not maliciously, but like children who need to be listened to and indulged just enough while you account for the things they're over-looking. I don't need the approval of the monied because they're rich. I don't need the fervent insistence that I should be “normal” in social obligations and go through the comfortable routine. I don't need the flip and condescension when I discuss my potential to change the world or my interest in exploring things well-beyond my current level of know-how. I only want those speaking my language, who show up, and who recognize they're either all or nothing.

I have the sneaking suspicion that when the generalized yet modest marginal debt captain of my plane says it's time to walk about the cabin, most of you are going to go down and resent that I offered a parachute. I'm the pilot. The safe and predictable or practical place you occupy all the way down will feel perfectly righteous and reasonable. The power and perks of your path will surely match or exceed whatever it is I'm rambling about that day. And we'll all get exactly to the end of our negotiations as livened or wise as we'll ever be. Let the shedding begin.

[773] Fear And Delight

I consistently feel gross when I watch someone's tragedy on a reality TV platform. My first impulse is to ask, “Where would the soul of our country be if we couldn't find deformed or ugly people to sing for us?” There's been at least one trending story about “The Dr.s” basically stringing along someone who's face was eaten by cancer. The struggle fodder for a “look how we can fix you!” narrative. It's the general and pervasive sense that “people,” in their struggle or talent are a kind of redemption that will save us all. We can't talk about “exploiting” people we're “uplifted” by. We can't ask questions about who's getting paid what and by what standard they're judging. We'd rather cry in solidarity for the voice of an angel we'll silence in ourselves in a second if it kept us looking “normal” and “average.”

We're not out of the woods because there are stirrings of excited Left rhetoric and sense seeping through. The consequences of our obsequious relationship to what's shiny and full of feels is still the beating heart of our internal narrative. Trump backlash is not a substitute for knowledge, and game shows are not a substitute for genuine empathy through shared struggle. The scars or boils are still there, but we'd rather pretend not to look. Another story of a veteran who had no one going to his funeral made its rounds before thousands showed up last minute. Good thing we're so inclusive and accountable to the living in the meantime.

I'm restless. Like an old and worn pattern, I find a smidgen of positive feeling for my potential and the future, and like an addiction, my head pounds with wanting more than I have in front of me. Part of me is concerned that I've genuinely managed to render “positivity” as a form of good feelings into malady. I can't handle believing in myself and not watching myself carry out what's on my mind. I can read the book on how to build an underground house for $50. At 11pm on a Monday, I kinda wanna be outside digging, at least two shovel-fulls enough to know I don't really want to be digging.

It's at least a two part problem. One, I can kinda solve this way. I want to talk. I don't want it to just be pressure behind my eyes. Taking action, sometimes horribly wrong and distracting for distraction sake, is the second often sought solution. It's immensely gratifying to see even slivers of progress on something, whatever it is, whenever it registers as progress. I don't want to achieve one more episode. My eyes are strained from reading before I started this. I don't know that I'm tired enough mentally or physically to not just find myself like this trying to write myself into an excuse to shut down.

That part I try hardest to forget is how fast I work relative to other things. That's something I kind of appreciate about the State. It's slow by design. It lasts because it takes an exacting understanding of its various machinations, and you have to literally dedicate enough of yourself to appreciate it or it will eat you. The private world is where you get the Wild West potential and narrative. I've moved to the Wild West, and my obligations and training are all to do with the “real” kind of world. I know there are alternatives. I know I'm of the spirit and capacity to make big dramatic overnight change. I know not all change is good change, and I don't want to treat myself like an angsty loaded weapon.

What I see is like trying to describe the parties, or, at least what the parties were to me. You had to be there. You had to hear THAT person tell a certain kind of joke. You had to taste the once-in-a-lifetime concoction from the blender. I could build things that only I could build! My house could be a greater extension of my identity than some floor plan or generally accepted convention. I could have something to sell in that it's individuated and wise beyond some hippie arrogance or the purview of an introverted recluse. A number of times I've echoed the line, “be the change you want to see in the world.” And I could! I could do it every night after work. I could do it all weekend. I could do it in the rain or cold. I could build it into my hopeless budget that pretends I can't be debt free in a year.

Can you not see how every waking moment isn't at least a mild hell not being able to do so? Do you realize how much deeper I will breath when I'm NEVER told to turn down my music or TV show again? When I can make little Insta-stories of holes getting deeper or walls going up or materials I've found to recycle and create something new with? What more could you ask for than the freedom to express yourself? I mean, once you've accepted you're going to bother to keep on living and are honest with yourself about how little a “helping others posture” does for you when you've no idea what it is people really need. It's a process.

I don't think it's that I'm impatient either. I think there were people inventing and creating and devouring well before we had “instant gratification” as if that's what Googling and YouTube are providing us. It's almost instant, and I wouldn't equate placation with gratitude. I think it's that I'm indignant. When I start having more examples testifying to my myth, I'll be that much angrier I couldn't get people to help or play along. I'll have that much more judgment and resentment for the paths people pursued out of fear or weak approximations at adequate judgment and criticism. That anger certainly has to blend into the mix of the pain behind my eyes. I'm perpetually scowling at a world I'm dying to work incredibly hard to exist more parallel than perpendicular to.

What? 9 days I'm back to “even” brokeness after paying off the credit card. 2 weeks after that I can take half my check and do who knows what with. 2 weeks after that I start contemplating paying the rest of my car payments for the year, or internet bill, or for the means and supplies to build a garage. 2 weeks after that I send a stupid text or facebook message to a friend I'm probably still not going to see despite some wiggle room. How quickly a month and a half goes, and I'll be, maybe, settled into my must-be-cleaned space, weather providing, most days getting used to the idea that I'm the only person in the country without a gun.

If I build it, will they come? No, but at least I'll have built it.

[772] Teetering

It's the sense of anxiety when everything has been going well for too long. It's the friend's story that comes to mind when you're reading about the “life lies” people start out telling in small ways which come to subsume their existence. It's the depressive episode and pending financial ruin you may casually scroll past on facebook as someone chooses to share something more than their latest vacation pictures. It's the edge between chaos and order.

I've spoken before about always needing to know that I can “lose my shit,” in a manner of speaking. The randomness that accompanies each moment is where my last vestige of icky “hope” ever resides. The sheer ignorance of not knowing who I'll meet today, what I'll discover online, or what flash of inspiration I might get after the random array of experiences mash and condense is as little of and the whole of why I bother to keep living. Well, that, and handful of Marvel movies and television series I'd like to complete.

In less dramatic and foreboding terms, that precarious place is what general “society” seeks to undermine. Terms like “the middle class” and “the state” are meant to instantiate the idea of immovable forces of stability or conservatism. I would guess that most of us get paid every week or two. The implicit assumption that you're going to persistently wake up on time, not crash your car, slog/enjoy whatever it is you're doing, and make decisions for your future self in every committed act of your current moment. To get that long-term job you have to commit to four or more years of school. If your caregivers had any “sense,” they made your transition into doing so a “natural” one.

There's been a random array of terms floating around my head. “Natural” is one. “Expectation” another. In our seemingly demonic capitalistic and hedonistic society, a return to the natural seems to get a lot of buzz. Let's get back to the old ways of doing government! You know, when they were “sane.” Let's return to the earth and chuck as many babies as we can to erase even the memory of bath water. I was asked what I expect to work on and get better at in doing at my job. They want to know how to keep me, but because they're wise enough to know we're always failing, how do we codify a target? Let's protect the authority of a mini-manager worker bee reinforced or undermined in each, hopefully mechanized and consistent, decision to make the state's will be done.

The horrifying and, hopefully solid attempt to tie that last 4 paragraphs together, truth of the matter seems to be that it's always an unknowable chance encounter. Did you arrive at a good place just because it feels that way, or is it the last good sensation you'll have for the discernible future? Many things are going right and wrong at once influencing your “now.” Maybe every feeling of things going well is because you've made yourself incapable of seeing how they're not. Maybe even after you ferret out the lies at the center of your being you're not strong enough. Maybe the new job isn't going to help, the new partner another flimsy and fallible shield, and the time invested never found the decency to even teach you anything.

Maybe there isn't anything to “figure out.” Do I ever really figure something out in writing? I sometimes gain a temporary resolve as I set sail on a thought process about things so specific as to be perfectly arbitrary to anyone else reading. I don't know that you can “learn” yourself to a “good” place. The monk, stoic, or enviable dispositionally biased example are always human. Every utterance you can take about as far as your own. Or, don't make idols. The “cool” cats have as many examples that would hurt the brand as anyone else.

“Radical” is another floating term. The radicals on either side of the political arena. Those willing to allow bat-shit into their moralisms. The “radical act” forever enshrined as the sheer ability to pick otherwise. Radical is localized. The rebels have always and will always exist. The counter-culture exists across literature and history. The revolutions are on a cycle mildly less predictable than the phases of the moon. “You can't say that!” Don't kick me off the ice barge, no matter that it's been set adrift. That's a nice description of the war going on for your mind. The faux-stability fighting against the faux-capacity to dramatically alter the course of events. Alter in a manner you'd prefer, that is. We can always quickly and easily destroy.

I'm looking forward to the weird places I might get into when I'm alone. I don't know what motivated this beyond falling asleep and waking up too early. I think a line I'm about to fall on either side of has made itself a little clearer. Or maybe I had something to do with it. I don't know, but I think I'd like to try walking a new precarious edge for a while, as if there's more than one.

[771] Not Giving Away My Shot

There's no escaping trying to capture this moment. First, “rent negotiations” sends my head spiraling after what's arguably been a prolonged period of uncharacteristic passive aggression. Then, I decide to do better. Now, I'm sorting through how to proceed. As a not-human, I think it's important to explore how this parallels and differs from my seemingly similar experiences of the past.

If there's a trope cloud hovering over my life I wish I could shake, it's the saga of roommates. From living with people who grow to resent you, to random people, to literal mental breakdowns, the surprises in expenses, the being left responsible for the shit they leave behind or bills they decide they're no longer responsible for. I've had everything beyond any evidence one of them has stood over me and watched me sleep. Relationships with roommates seem to mirror relationships between people who seem to have chosen to be with each other, and so there's at least an angle to depersonalize it.

My closest and perhaps longest friend and I have generally managed to avoid that kind of mess of human crap. He literally lived in a mess of his crap in my tornadoed living room for a while, but hey, it was his space at the time. Now, having lived together in the ever-falling fallout of my last living arrangement, familiar bells start to get rung. I'll skip right over all the ways roommates can manage to get under each other's skin and try to dive into the meat.

It's safe to say I've felt on the brink of madness given my desire to move out to the land. I want to stop calling it my garage or shed, and start working on and refining my home. I've sacrificed incredible amounts of time, money, probably health, and even the idea that I have much control or value but for what toothpicks and Popsicle sticks I can cobble together in so many labored motions.

So I hate my car payment. It doesn't matter that I can afford it. I hate it. I hate car insurance. I hate interest. I hate the new plates and reading the title in the bank’s name. I hate my job. I don't hate my job, but I hate my job. I hate waking up early even with little expectation to be on time. I hate driving to houses where I might have to bathe in anti-bed bug spray before I enter them. I hate listening to tired, angry, helpless liars hide their abuses and crimes. I don't hate it because it's hard, or I'm bad at it, or it doesn't pay enough. I hate it because it's not me out on the land learning how to make soap or build a pool.

This hate I try to mask, but for everything I've ever written. I try not to let it affect how I engage with people. I try to stay basically quiet and “even.” When you no longer feel that way is when you appreciate how hopeless a task it really is you're engaging in. It has to come out. There's a higher-order truth that underlies your existence that needs to be reckoned with, be it in entertaining your most horrifying and terrible thoughts, or in some physical manifestation of stress or pain. It's there. It's going to win something, eventually.

Interpersonally, this is the underlying kind of hatred I view in people. The one they always hate me even more for antagonizing. I don't want to be hated in secret. I want you to be able to let it out, as petty and hurtful as it may be. Remember, I'm not human. I have 5 minutes and a meal to get over it, or what else are we really doing here? My attempts to honestly relay where I'm coming from adopt the hate word plenty. This leaves me vulnerable to a kind of disregard or disrespect. How can someone so uncomposed be worth too much consideration? With so much to pass around, what of him are we really to take seriously?

I've always been a fan of the Greek Gods. I liked the idea that they acted like people, could actually hurt each other, and were like Divine White Trash. They're Gods, after all. Incredibly powerful, practically eternal, and a persistent analogy and lesson. Me, in leaning towards the idea that every individual is tantamount to a God, clicked with those stories. And now, when I feel like I've hit a significant height of grievance, I try to remember that I'm a God too. I'm no more at the mercy of the corners I feel backed into than the ultimatums or the lazy and incredibly tasteless words. I get to choose how to use my lightening.

That’s what has me always return to writing instead of driving my car over a cliff or borrowing Byron's gun to just get it the fuck over with. Don't you know? I'm to blame for my stuff getting stolen. That's the line I get to think about, or has wedged its way in tonight. I didn't buy the right kind of lock. I didn't find the right builders fast enough. I didn't check on it every night, ready to shoot or samurai chop whomever I may have come across. Because of course I am. Just like I'm responsible for this government shut down. Just like I'm responsible for every misfired neuron addicted to sugar and every second I stay up later tonight than my, simply poorly controlled, brain wishes to allow.

We worked out that Gods could be bargained with. They can be bought off. The mightiest politician and business mogul all have numbers underwriting their pathologies, and my situation is no different. I lost things monetarily when they were stolen. The “tension” of this shared space is all of a few hundred dollars that were poorly negotiated from the onset. The apparent lack of tact I've exhibited in carrying previous roommates' feelings inevitably carved out more. So, yes, I'll keep worshiping money and the chance to have more of it than you. I'll buy your silence. I'll retreat to the farm and build walls and install cameras. I'll find the price it takes to stop playing the dumb games.

Because that's what they are. Incredibly small and weak games. We will cut each other up for emotional damage points when the heart is that we want a little more space or money. When we discover that's not what we really want, it gets even smaller and even weaker. You know why I want to be left alone? So I can actually play a game that's worthwhile. So I can focus on what can be instead of reimagining and adjudicating the past. In the span of 3 days I had one friend tell me they'd be pumped to come out and help me build things, they just need to be shown how, and another tell me it's my fault the things I moved out there got stolen. I think I'm playing the wrong kind of game with one of them.

I'm literally proud of myself that I'm prepared to eat as much shit as it takes. I leave. I remove myself from the equation when nobody feels they have anything to account for but their perspective of me. Always, fine, you are right. There's always someone considerably worse off than me. I've met or read of many a car-sleeper. I don't need to type this on a big screen. I don't need a California King size bed. And I don't need the flak about why my life looks like it does. I don't need friends trying to “save” me from my earnest desires and goals. I don't need a slew of regular-Joe bills and a title. I don't need the facade, and with my dying breath I will profess my hatred for the million tiny negotiations it takes to exist on the edge of self-annihilating hypocrite.

I believe feelings inform. If I'm not a suicidal person, and the idea of blowing my head off or punching something or just generally destroying feels good, if nothing else, it means the situation I'm in isn't a healthy one. I didn't break anything or scream. I threw a White Castle cup of water against a dumpster, and then I picked up the cup and threw it away. Clearly, I'm not one to be messed with. The idea of my “best friendship” was offered as the stakes if I didn't capitulate to a roommate setup for next year that would cost me more money, drag me away from my goals, and downplay how, if Duke told me tomorrow I had power, I'd be cutting the hole in my wall for the air conditioning before I ever learned how to properly install air conditioning.

Does that sound terrible? To humans, sure. Who gambles their friendships like that? You do it all the time, but you don't state it explicitly. Me though? I know what he wants. He wants money and space. That's nothing. That's boring. That's the kind of petty reserved for politicians and pathological first world. I want money and space too, but my conception of how to get it and the work required doesn’t live or die based on how I feel about a friend in my living room. Our friendship has always been transactional. That's why it lasts. And when he doesn't think he can profit from me anymore or I believe he's cashing too high of emotionally tolling checks, it will cease as arbitrarily as it began. I'll just be telling him to get his hands out of my fucking wallet instead of his fucking pockets.

I'm disappointed, mostly. It's characteristic of life's tragedy to watch people change in ways you're not crazy about. I certainly desire large amounts of money and a degree of “power” to be sure, but I'm not so reflexively keen to wield how I might go about getting those things against current allies. The bossing white-guilty townies around and blow to the pride from not winning the election has made changes. The finding a new marginally-motivated white boy toy is an all-encompassing saga. And here I am, about to leave. You'd think, if he were human, that might cause him to lash out and seek to control the situation in unhealthy ways.

No matter what, keep speaking the truth. That's the only way out. If things need to die, don't deny death. If things change for the worse and people who've never caused you to feel a certain way all of a sudden do, talk about it. Own it. Those feelings are yours. Your face in front of their face doesn't have to be there. And that's okay. Especially if you're me. Did you hear? I still have my own rent-free tiny house and a million ideas I want to play with out there. I even have a friend who said they'd be wickedly excited to help me build it. I should put more time into that game.

[770] Shawshank Mode

This exists with a mission. I actually want to find something by the end. I don't really care about what's to be discovered along the way. I want the explicit feeling of a kind of charged energy or intention after doing away with whatever is daring fog to take over.

 

I'm so normal. I wake up at a consistent time each day and get tired around the same times at night, even on weekends. I entertain the thought of going out to do something irresponsible before quickly receding back to my couch. I even forwent a beer I was considering drinking, no doubt my subconscious trying to protect me from the unbearable stomach acid that creeps in if I eat or drink in the late hours (sips beer while proof-reading). I watch my shows. I pay my taxes. I get in inane troubleshooting conversations with Amazon representatives. I wear about the same outfit each day. I rearrange furniture like a troubled housewife looking for fulfillment beyond her kids and kitchen.

 

There's this huge problem I have with this. While I have hands, feet, and a face all connected to a body with other human things and capabilities, I'm actually a robot. The voice in my head that provokes these digressions is just a mirrored and entangled interpretation of infinite waves, and I never know where it's going or what it will get up to next. All the human body stuff tries to compel it one way, the news another, broken plans and working environments another. It's one thing to have an overbearing parent, perhaps, it's another to have every waking moment be compelling you to do this, that, or the other.

 

And then the irony! I've got no direction! I pick a direction, and the weather tells me what to do. I set an obligation, and I find myself slowly start to resent things that make me happy. Don't turn your hobbies into chores in a weak attempt at being “productive.” No one cares what you're learning or how good you are at music, the cynic in me says. I care that I represent mediums in a way that matches how I feel about them. I don't want to be a shitty musician winging it all the time. I don't want to Bob Ross my way into skirting over the years of practice for something passable. I don't want to compile ever-higher stacks of notes and books I'll never be able to talk about with anyone outside of an online forum.

 

What do us non-humans do? Or, what did I used to do? That's just it. I did. I just did! I just searched for and bought land. I just went to drug studies and faced whatever fears or skepticism I had. I just talked smooth and went for what's now hotly demonized flirtations. I challenged and antagonized. Now? I sit, and wait. I felt what happens when you burn too bright too fast, and persuaded myself sitting and waiting was best. Then I tried to regiment that spirit into something “wise” and incremental. But I don't work incrementally. I work now.

 

It's incredibly hard to explain to people what you're attempting to create when it's the ever-fleeting moment. When it's the spirit of momentum and infused enthusiasm. When it's the “peer pressure” to be or do a certain way. I piggy-backed what I liked about friends in college into pressuring myself to achieve more and faster. That's the vital human component, something to push against, I need. I also need hands at work, but I don't have selection pressure. I'm now only that thing that people think maybe has a better than chance shot of doing something interesting one day. In my head, I was maintaining an idea that whatever I was working on was exactly what I needed to be doing, and doing fast, right now, and whatever it cost it cost, time or money wise.

 

There's obviously holes in that strategy, but it also carries a certain kind of wisdom about not holding back and taking chances as they're afforded. Each new “normal” obligation I add to my pot, the less I get to be “at the ready.” It feels dumb to spend $500 for ten hours of website work when that puts me up 2 and half car payments. That's a problem. That's why I have my tiny house, so come hell or high water, that problem is designed to be phased out.

 

I don't “relax.” The reason my jaw clenches is because my natural non-human state is in devouring information, churning through people, and forcefully asserting myself all over the place. It makes me think of when people criticize my writing as though there's something to be gained from bemoaning the compulsion. You know how little shame I offer the drug addicts I talk to? There's an underlying guiding principal not being addressed, not mere decision making gone awry.

 

For some reason, this feels like the time to differentiate suffering from making yourself suffer. You can make yourself suffer by just restricting your diet. You suffer when you're starving. I'm not making myself clench my jaw. I'm starving for something no amount of regular paychecks and comfort can provide. And just like the populations starving for healthy food or non-destructive work and play environments, without huge investment, cultivation, and a fair amount of luck, there is no way to resolve in a healthy way. Here's where the stoics or Buddhists detach. I only detach as things and people become dead to me. I'm not entirely convinced this is the best strategy.

 

So what do I do? I could just keep writing and writing and writing. This is one of the few times I'm notably at the kind of “current moment” space I always want to be. It's this, or when people are freaking out or yelling at me. Talk about a weird wake-up call there. I'm the guy who's an embodied contradiction, right? So when you're flipping the fuck out, I'm having the best time possible. I'm certain I learned this as a self-preservation habit after enough crazy exploits with my mother, probably.

 

I have to stop writing at some point. I've got 60 books on my Kindle. I've got hundreds of comic book histories to try and get lost in. Those 15 games I bought for my PlayStation I've managed to complete less than half of one of. There's always something to do, right? There's always ways to leap right out of the moment and keep pretending you're going to find the right inspiration from the obscure line in a song or someone else's characters.

 

My concern is remaining outside of the realm of doing dramatic and rash things. It's not like I have a hankering at this moment, but it wasn't that long ago I took acid on a whim at 3 in the morning. Nothing bad happened, but neither did anything particularly good. I just managed to like The Beatles less. It was another petty attempt to externalize the responsibility for finding what I need and, no shit, it didn't work. To think we have such a stunted culture that you can have any number of rising YouTube personalities and celebrity types feel very good about pumping out mantras of having goals and making dreams manifest, but no one gets around to discussing what happens as things linger on the vine. No one deals with those who simply can't get what it is they need. If there's a will there's a way? Horse shit. It's like “life happens for a reason.” Yeah, maybe it's a bad one, as you can have any number of terrible ways you fill a hole.

 

Even in the “down” time my life feels trapped in, I search for that “productive” angle. Here again, irony, as I mock the idea of finding inspiration from a line, and that damn BuzzFeed article on burnout struck me in rethinking my “on-ness” as pathology more than productivity. I've always kind of been like that. But then, I've always been finding ways to cope in becoming mildly-ocd, neurotic, and, as I'm learning, maybe overcoming PTSD. I'm very slow to label, despite the many on offer, and I'm all-but prohibitive in my advocacy for constant medication. I think I have my shit, you have yours, and there's always a conversation about how to shovel it together. Not every veteran jumps at loud noises and I stopped dodging people moving to scratch their face or brush hair years ago.

 

The main thing that concerns me is that I'm starting to get headaches again. I'm sure they're partly from finding every wrong way to sleep on a couch, but even after the stretching and readjusting, I'll get them from just the...stagnation...of sitting doing whatever it is I'm doing at work or home. It's the old constant screen-time story coupled with the tragedy of soured expectations. It's the tunnel vision of praying towards the God of Payday. It's the professional-speak dressing up the mess of “state minimum standards” as “responsible 360 investigation.” You can be doing good work and doing well while still be doing the wrong thing. That isn't lost on me. There is no amount of deference paid to my job title that will feel like someone reacting to the environments I'd otherwise prefer to be creating. And that's even with one client calling me “the coolest guy he's ever met.”

 

I need an obsession. I feel best lost in something I can devour. I don't need it to even be something I like, but it has to be a degree of meaningful involvement that I find myself basically doing it all the time. It was supposed to be the fucking land! Manual labor has so many concurrent benefits, and I thought I was going to be ankle deep in so much dirt. One board at a time, one trip to Lowe's at a time. One weird but workable way of transporting something that has no business in a vehicle my size after another. Then the moment when you stand back and eye your handiwork or attention to detail. I don't want random “skills” or credentials that might maybe one day speak to something, like when I got my real estate license or in attempts to learn coding. I don't want to be the foremost expert on Marvel trivia or Smash Bros combos. I don't want to keep making failed attempts to ingratiate myself to the weird pockets of townies who technically share my interests, but in no way jive with the kind of non-person I am.

 

So at least we're pushing out some of the things I don't want to do. I still want to watch TV, but that usually has a hard and fast stop mechanism built in when I can't be bothered to focus my brain or eyes anymore. I do want to keep going to dance classes, which, after months of berating, I've dragged a friend into. I do want to keep planning interesting visits with friends in driving distance, and maybe one day be bothered to coordinate rides from airports. I want to keep writing away the fog. I'm not depressed or particularly sad. I'm comfort fog. I pay bills. I eat. I watch. I am not I, just American fallout. I really do want to play my guitar more. I look forward, more than most things, to being able to just be loud. I'm very likely going to make one of my “personal care” or “toys” expenses be as many online training and theory classes as I can find.

 

As much as I hate this language, I don't know how else to say it. I feel like “the universe,” having not gotten its clues through to me in any other way, just added numbers for me to stare at as evidence that I need to slow my thinking down and keep pillaging whatever it is I can make of my circumstances. No doubt I'll miss it and end up reincarnated or something until I figure it out. That's another idea I hate as well. I read a few short stories suggesting you eventually live through every life that's ever been, and by the end you get to like graduate to God-level or something. Fuck all that noise. What a useless idea that you need to be every gassed Jew to figure out why you shouldn't do that or every starved child before it sinks in surrounding them in greed wars was evil from the get-go.

 

I do find it striking that I manage to remain dead even, basically always, with regard to how I manage my finances. It's easier to make adjustments bi-weekly than think to myself I need to save for 6 months to buy (x) which may or may not be relevant by then. I didn't hesitate to spend the 15 thousand for the land. It was just math. 3 years of rent and utilities? I'll take the permanent spot. I didn't blow that money on indulgences or trips. My life generally stays about the same with or without extra money until certain conditions and thresholds have been met. If I had $50,000 in the bank, we start playing a new game. How long would that take? In theory, less than 2 years, if I never eat out, don't drink anything but water, don't buy anything new or fun, pay special attention to how I use my gas pedal, learn to love my functional clothing, and just generally adopt the mode and mindset of a poor kid who's stuck where he is with no expectation of moving.

 

Then what? I'm 32, accumulated a solid amount of personal and sick days. I've let the land basically stay static so as to pay off taxes and the car. I've cracked a few times and still pay for the gym or bowling I sporadically attend. I'm very tired and increasingly arthritic. I watch the seasons pass. I just float along with the sea of my circumstances. Surely, the world around me will resent that if I'm saying I'm dead at 30, to “waste my youth” as one of my co-workers expressed recently, by not appreciating 32, it will be as much or more egregious an offense. (She was upset I took a dance class...? I genuinely don't get it.) The over-arching story of my life could still start with the BuzzFeed-esc line YOUNG ENTREPRENEUR TOTALLY REIMAGINES HOW PEOPLE LIVE CLICK TO FIND OUT HOW as I thump my Thomas Jefferson fact about writing the Constitution at 33, so there's still time. And surely, every day in between won't be devoid of reading or surprises or morning laughs at the insanity my coworkers bring to safety staffing. It won't be bad, it just won't be right. One must always leave out the details and get airy and flip to really sell the angst. 

 

The truth is that I've been slowly making myself accept that story. Whatever you practice, you reinforce in your brain. The headaches are literally my brain molding to better cope and deal with a measure of complacency and “acceptance” as the alternative is pounding forlorn pain for what can never be. If I can fight back the in-love impulses that wretched my stomach and ratcheted my brain, I can snuff the palpable but mild disdain for every waking moment I'm not exuding the spirit of an overzealous teen-spirit awardee. You know, using grit and grinding my teeth in a way we can all respect. Of course, I'm always going to be looking for the hard out. I'm always going to try to talk myself into the poor financial decisions, like this New Orleans trip that just got canceled because I'm tired of feeling like I'm never caught up, and I don't need to spend $300-$400 for 22 hours in a car and a weekend of stranger's tits. It's something to do, not what I really need or want to be doing.

 

So maybe that's the motivation? Stay vigilant against all of the means that would seek to distract you. I didn't hesitate to turn down smoking, drugs, and booze before the moment I no longer did. I can just turn monetary temptations into the same thing. Keep the eye on the prize. Stop pretending like it's a good idea to blow half a paycheck over a weekend just because you can if you're only going to be thinking about your car debt or next room on your house. What's the reality for me? I'll sacrifice nearly everything and everyone in an effort to keep clawing at some goal or in alleviating some problem. There's probably an excessively long conversation discussing whether or not that's doing me any favors, but I think the evidence is fairly on my side when I feel better doing me.

 

There's always the rebranding and reimagining of the past. Remember #yearofbeingboring? That could easily be #yearofwatchingthebestmovies or #yearoftoomuchusefulinformation. That’s the fun and arbitrary nature of it all, after all. Do what you want, just don't try to bend the truth so far it snaps back and knocks you out. Again I return to the idea that maybe I'm just meant to be more alone, hunkered down, and disappeared for a while. Maybe every connotatively sad word I use to describe it sparks a kind of perpetual revolt and opposite feeling in my audience, sparse as they may be, their waves of influence no less compelling. It's clearly not my job to speculate or pretend I know the future. So, as with it all, right now, I just need to stop.

[769] Holier-Than-Thou

I have a superpower. It's true. I have something that sets me apart from the rest. Wanna know what it is? You might already know. It has to do with mind control. I can't make people dance like a puppet. I can't brighten their day with a subtle linguistic or body maneuver. No, my superpower is more insidious. You'd think it would be a consequence of “negativity” or me touting my diligent pursuit of knowledge, but those are just habits. My superpower is the ability to not just make people merely dislike me or be annoyed. I provoke longstanding and downright hatred.

To ring in the new year, my general antagonism in the past played a nice reminder as to why I don't get along. I may have talked about him before, but a friend of a friend came out to visit maybe 2 years ago. We proceeded to get drunk on winery tours. This fellow had a story about his dad being unable to grow some plant, to which I responded, “Is he dumb?” The timing and tone was that of a joke, but, as a normal wretched person, instead of hearing it as a joke, he heard, “I think your dad is dumb.” These kind of distinctions are always of the sort that get us all in trouble, but me more frequently. To speak to the fickleness of his offense, 2 hours later sitting around a restaurant table, I switched gears and started asking in “earnest” about his time spent in Africa with bomb-sniffing rodents. The report from our mutual friend was that he had changed his opinion and decided I was actually great and maybe worthy of friendship.

This same person, through facebook algorithm-fuckery, had him and one of his acquaintances appear in my feed. I spoke against some downright illogical or destructive claim (think healing potions) to which he felt he needed to step up and defend his friend. He called me out for, in his words, “showering at the Y” and discussing my housing plight, both more and less severe, but still ongoing. I tagged our mutual friend in congratulations for finding a pet project with teeth, petty and disingenuous as he may be. That's the extent of our history. A day-drinking adventure where he got to highs and lows, and a facebook comment. Turn to last night, when I asked to tag along to his ex-girlfriend's house, I was denied. The reason being, he hated me, and had polluted the mind of his ex about the kind of person I am, and my friend didn't think it appropriate to test the polite face she might put on.

I'm consistently struck by how easy it is for me to find myself in this position. I don't have to steal, hit, or bring up a single thing about you personally, to be a kind of all-encompassing frustrating focus in the mind of someone. I've explored this enough to pretty comfortably say that it's never about a particularly off-kilter or dark joke or comment you made. I know in a very complex way most people's issues have as little to do with an “individuated me” as they do with insecurities and projections of their own generation. It's why I struggle to take it personally, no matter how demoralizing it is, when I can't play along in crowds deemed too sophisticated for my tenor.

I thought that I might be approaching these kind of scenarios in the wrong way. I must be hurting people. As such, don't I get to claim pain as well? Aren't I offended and scorned when I'm not invited? Aren't my feelings worth considering? Don't you just feel grossed out right now? Find better friends. Don't interject yourself into scenarios not meant for you. Enjoy your time alone. My current struggle is to literally embody moving away from “the masses.” This is such unbearably old news, the reasons I'm drawn back into it I can barely grasp.

When it's explained to me my impact on others, importantly, I'm never offered a way of contrition. I can never be forgiven. In order for something like that to take place, I'd essentially have to become a different person, presumably through traumatic brain injury or self-delusional spiritual revelation. My apologies wouldn't be believed, nay, haven't been. My asks for routes forward go ignored. My indifference to the bites and claps back are perhaps the cherry on the mountain of offense. How dare I not be phased! How dare I reconceptualize and breakdown my response, or lack thereof, into another whine session.

How does one get my superpower? I didn't come to it by way of nuclear accident. As far as I can tell, apart from being comfortable with a degree of obscenity I think most genuinely comedic spirits jive with, all I do differently is write. I take the time to actually observe the process of my being. I deconstruct and blurt out the pieces. This habit is universally hated save a few very specific domains. If you're going to be a psychopathic titan of your industry, parsing out precisely how you're going to do something lies at the foundation of your effort. Having an exacting sense of how and why is the heart of the most dominating structures society has to offer. I'm finding that in a social work job like mine, the dominating and explicit tone is a natural remedy for the abject chaos many I encounter embody. You don't get to be a crazy abusive meth-head in my presence, or else. You don't get to scream and railroad the conversation, or further interventions will take place.

I'm not getting to the meat of the hatred though. It's got too many layers. For some, they let things foment for years and pick some random instance to call crossing the line. That's the girls who fell for me that I didn't turn into husband material for. That's friends who, in lieu of a discussion about their relative debt and poverty and creative or collaborative ways to address it, savagely horsewhipped their hobbies and became overtly sensitive to a perceived critical tone where it didn't exist. Some it just takes seeing even the remotest confidence in yourself or how you go about the world to seethe at the idea that they'd be the one finding themselves while you presume to have figured it all out. It all speaks to that either/or ignorance where “realistic” is equated to “negative” and you're not allowed to voice (or even not voice!) something resembling the contrary. I've literally run this experiment in deliberately remaining silent or picking moments to interject explicitly affirming things, and a friend, unprompted, claimed “I bet he thinks such and such damning thing about what we're doing.” I fail before I begin!

There is of course something to be said about your reputation preceding you. There is considerably more to be said about a propensity to lock people into little boxes and treat them unfairly after you feel you've been burned. I feel wholly disrespected, judged, and explicitly hated by people who, when you break it down, I struggle to feel how they're justified even remotely for that level of response. It reminds me of when I had my Ipod taken in high school by an assistant principal whose car I subsequently planned to blow up. I still kind of want to, but are any of you going to get on board with that course of action? Does my lingering years-long irrationality deserve your respect and understanding? Don't you understand? He took it while I was doing homework in an empty hallway outside of my 2^nd period class because I was so smart, I didn't have to go to school the whole day! The nerve of his targeting one of the best! Fuck his car!

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

People consider that line to be about kindness or charity. They don't follow it. Moreover, they don't take nearly as much shit as they give. You know what I would not hold against you? Everything you already do that I don't. AND YOU HATE THAT. That's the heart of it. I genuinely understand you as weak and fickle, and don't take too complex a route in explaining what that looks like. Then, I proceed to pursue my dreams, live like a king, and maintain the creative and demeaning edge that confounds and belittles. Even when I'm hurt or “offended,” I understand those as weak approximations of incorrect thinking. Even when you throw years of shared experiences under the bus, I detach and conceptualize, and pat your head and say it'll be over eventually. I own where I'm failing, or again, it's not that hard to understand what I can and can't control and you don't have any answers as to how to move faster or smarter. And arguably, you can't hate so dramatically that which you don't understand as something you're intimately familiar with. You know when you sound dumb. You know when you lied. You know what the apology should look like. But that would only strike another “win” in my column for the game I'm not even playing.

I make the same “bad” jokes about myself as I do you and talk about my own life in “harsh” terms. I take the literal most “private” and embarrassing things about myself and break them down. I can't stand when people invent things to hate me for, so I don't do that about you. I wish I was invited to as many things as I've put out invitations for. I wish people were offering me opportunities to save money and create and live sustainably. I wish I had a 3 page blog to read about every one of the people I wanted to keep in my circle (Bezos requires his top management to write essays). I don't want to be lied to, so I try not to look or sound like anything more or less than I am in the moment. When it's your turn, you ask me to be as facebook-promotional and Insta-famous and picture filtered and as “positive” as the donations I'm asking for instead of a birthday present. You want me to justify, not actually be justified. As long as the moral ambiguity of our actions can be maintained, we're all safe. Stop rocking the boat.

Fuck you. I tell myself “fuck you” when I feel I've sat and complained and not done enough for too long. I say “fuck you” to the idea that I can dwell on how hopeless it feels to be at the mercy of car debt, the weather, or a strained capacity to deal with the creeping rotten air between us. If I'm so bad and all I am is the rehashing word pile of things that either plainly exist and shouldn't be controversial, or sentiments that don't even register in the minds of the adults or Europeans in the room, maybe you're more dramatically fucked up than even I'll ever be able to speak to. You want me to kill you, because you're responsible for why everything's dying. The meth-head gets that, so please authority, sublimate me. You refuse to acknowledge the bullshit you're addicted to. You hide your shame like you're wise and capable enough to handle it alone.

There's never any one instance of “waking up.” “Being present” is standing to be counted for the eternal war over the forces that would tell your story for you. The fat people who wanted to lose weight started when they were genuinely inspired on a Wednesday in August; they aren't the ones rushing to the gym today. It pains me to think about what becomes of the person who never finds the reason to stop turning me into the enemy. It's pitiful to not understand hatred as a fear-ridden fluke from more evolutionarily dramatic times, and it's not a righteous platform for dictatorial policy. I'm not saying “it” or “you” can't get better, but you won't. And as long as you keep letting me retain the dialogue describing the ongoing consequences of that truth, you'll maintain it was my rules and my faults all along that destroyed everything. So be it.

[768] Feel So Real

I anticipate this being such a bad, boring, and redundant blog, I'm not even going to bother sharing it to facebook where anyone might actually see it. If, by chance accident you've clicked your way to it, it's your fault if you try to suffer through it.

Thus we're brought to our theme. Blame. I certainly feel blamed for nearly everything. That's a great and ignorant way to start. An “everything” statement. Whether people have fun or not. When I have “friends” or not. Whether I decided to “mature” and take responsibility for the path my upbringing set me on. When people say things to the effect of “it boils down to the individual,” I think they mean it boils down to the handful of people “everyone” feels comfortable blaming for “everything.”

Elected or monetary leaders take a different kind of blame. That's too easy and prescribed. Of course, it's their job, if not explicitly, than as a natural end of their wealth and notable consequences they wreak. Billionaires deserve blame in similar measure to politicians. You can feel and see changes, for better or worse, as immediately as any over-arching conception of society can.

The other kind of blame is for people with clashing dispositions with norms. They get the emotional blame. They don't claim eminent domain and destroy your land. Instead, they describe the shared space or relate to that domain in ways that makes you feel as though someone has slashed and burned your land. Sometimes, it's antagonistic. Sometimes, it's just a survival strategy. The world is out to kill you, after all, and it takes a specific and small percentage of people who can play with that fact every day without breaking.

I've re-read a few blogs from the last year. The constant theme is me feeling less in control, being “broken by the system,” as I capitulate to jobs I don't want or time spent doing things “beneath” me as I wait, and wait, and dream, and wait some more as excuses are offered about why I can't move. In this instance, I mean literally move. I've said it before as well; when I had time, I had no one care to help. When I had money, I didn't have the space. Now that I have the space, my time is further occupied, and I was compelled to eat up more of my money than I cared to in needing a car or in doing necessary house fixes I was ignorant of.

If I had a ton of motivated energy, it would eat me from the inside. It's got nowhere to go. I took acid over the weekend at 2 in the morning out of boredom. I put together a little schedule of “minimal standards for engaging the world” like reading 10 pages, 1 news article, 1 comic, playing and walking for 10 minutes, and stretching, just so I can squeeze in a remote semblance that something “productive” is happening in my otherwise killing-time posture.

I know I desperately need to go out and make new friends. No matter how much I don't like people at large, the general strategy of meeting everyone and picking out the 2 who don't suck isn't the wrong one. It still results in generally good times more often than attempting to beat the dead horse of who I've surrounded myself with currently. Do I blame them for never wanting to do anything? Or, can I blame them for leading me on that it might be they just don't want to do anything with me? I feel like I'm thrown bones here and there. I'd rather be alone.

The line I appear to be stuck on, from those past blogs and what still rings in my head, is that I miss believing in things. I miss having the hope I could maybe have a life with someone I cared for. I miss thinking that your time and effort equaled what you could expect to take out of it. I miss writing with a sense of ignorant passion that it was going “somewhere” if only to a mental place that would allow me to keep outputting the intensity it would require to learn everything and take over the world. Now, it's like pressing my back against the seat of a roller coaster, pretending I'm making it go faster.

“It's just a ride, it's just a ride. No need to run, no need to hide. […] It may feel so real inside. But don't forget it's just a ride ”

I have a trigger happy startle reflex. It's a piece of the reason I have to focus on things like not clenching my jaw or experiencing spasms of grinding teeth. Long ago, I was trained to always be on alert, and the feeling of impending doom and danger has never gone away. I was shopping for mouth guards because I'm tired of the unnecessary tension in my temple. I was envious of a monk I read about who was given a test to not jump at a loud noise (he knew was coming) and he stayed cool. I bring up this reflex because it's an example of me being “primed.” When I jump, it's not something external's fault. That is, it's my mom's fault, but today, you'd hardly get points for “scaring” me anymore than you would a squirrel.

I think people at-large are similarly primed to react. Instead of facing how and why, they blame whatever scares them. They blame the “negative” influences that refuse to perpetuate their delusions. I think there's a disconnect between imagined circumstances and worth, and playing dress up. I think you can engage with the world, and everything about it that wants to kill you, and not be “negative.” I think my disposition is old-hat and cliché in different cultures. I think if I ever manage to find the right pocket of people who use language and recognize, both on and off paper, what I have and am preparing for in the future, every lazily hurled scornful sentiment will one day register as a fleeting memory if remembered at all.

I've wanted some version of the same things for 15 years. I want my own thing. I want my own space. I want to be loud. I want to have a sense of independence and autonomy. I want to pick my friends or at least the people who I'll give the chance to fail at being friends. I want to be able to have the time to focus on things that could grow to be more than hobbies. I want to experiment. I want to discover a resting state that isn't half concentrating on trying not to be tense. I want extremely first-world selfish freedom and access to pursuits I bought into related to the story of American Exceptionalism, and I have an array of wholly unexceptional masses to navigate through on my way there.

I want those things because I want to find more people like me. I want to create an environment. I want to prove that there's nothing “negative” about being realistic about the degrees in which things suck and the amount of work it takes to make them suck less. I want to protect a space that works overtime in disabusing the excuses and lies that protect useless flitting-about existences. I still retain the power. No matter how despotic of spirit I get, the land is mine, the house is getting complete, and the car will eventually be paid off. I can budget. I can choose to work more. I can force myself into finding new disappointing groups to interact with until the one-in-a-million person clicks for a while. I can record my effort and be as redundant as I want to be until I find the line or sentiment that keeps me going one more day. I will eventually remove myself from suffocating mediocrity.

And that becomes an alienating thing too which people will resent you for. Forget aggression. When people see you excited and enthusiastic, knowingly or not, they find ways to pick at it. They know you like them? Time to cite the depression and not answer texts or come hang out. They know you had an idea to save money and eat better? Better blow you off at the time and wait 3 months so they can implement your plan with someone else. They know you have a few solid things you like to do that are fairly inexpensive and low effort? That's okay, I'd rather go out with people I've had more shit to say about than you ever could.

Is it better to hate from a distance? Is that genuinely a “good” thing to have a looming resentment for everyone around you as opposed to voicing concerns or opinions? People seem to like it this way, even if they hate each other. They sure get to appear in more pictures together. The “negative” kept at a safe distance. I think this is more an American thing, and I think it's horrible. Just like you can't escape either, it's a million piece puzzle with numbers to match where they connect how we got Trump. Don't face your racism, elect a white nationalist. Don't tackle your fear and bigotry, beat your chest with your gun. Don't admit you're stupid and poor, blame the poorer and desperate. Don't help and believe in things, find poster children to blame, endlessly.

I think I'm tired of being blamed for making sense and pointing out inconsistencies. At least I don't lie about my circumstances. When you want to bemoan the circumstances that have me sleeping on a couch at 30, that never erases the house waiting for me and land I'm begging to occupy. When I finally got pushed against a wall, I used my degree. Whether I practice for 8 hours a day or only read 10 pages, I'm a composite of hundreds of books, thousands of articles, and achieved some technical sophistication that's outpaced the majority. I am an exception to many rules. I have a good reason and good history to believe as much or more awaits me.

When do I ever hear this from anyone else? Or, they do something in secret and save their struggle so there's more room for the social media story. Or, they keep their goals contained to more “realistic” and palpable responsibilities. “Why, yes sir, in 5-10 years of slogging along, I'll have quite the 6 month travel fund, huzzah!” Maybe that speaks to an important distinction. A sense of urgency. When you “know” a certain path, say the collect a regular paycheck path, is going to work for you indefinitely, you adopt a concept of yourself to match. “Oh, I could never achieve that without at least another 6 months!” Not so much doing the math or theorizing other sacrifices or experiments, just spit-balling you're “stuck” for another safely anticipated period of time. I can't operate like that.

I don't have the money or level of health insurance to get “seriously” sick. I don't have the resources to rebuild if everything burned down. That friend who's about to die unexpectedly in the next 2 years I'm almost certainly never going to find the time to visit if I keep at the paycheck-to-paycheck pace of modernity. Not to mention, I don't want to just visit, I want a working and consistent relationship with my friends. I want my time back. In many many ways it was better being bored and alone awash in study money than it is being mildly engaged and ensconced in a regular work environment. I'm getting more stories, and everyone isn't the worst, it just simply isn't “me.” It's another game and procedure I find distracting and haven't figured out how or if it speaks to the whole in a more helpful than harmful way.

I don't move enough. I fidget, and toss, and drive, and tap, but I don't flow. My moment doesn't carry into enough breathing examples of what I should be doing, so it feels stuck. I'm left to be airily amoral waiting for a cue from a god I don't believe in. I've every excuse to lounge and enjoy and excuse and blame, and when I get up and look for agency, I take myself down errant paths evading the feeling that it's more and more seconds eroding in service to fluff. I appreciate relative stability. I like being fed and warm. I'm trying to set my house in order. It's as messy as I'm letting on, and I'm trying to deal with it. Don't be so negative.

[767] Lines In The Sand

Convergence! Too many things all tying to a theme equals, gotta write. You may or may not be familiar with Chris Gethard. I'm not, but for my constant immersion in media. I clicked a random episode of his show I've never watched. Then I clicked somewhere in the middle of the episode. Then I watched as a caller from Bloomington, Indiana did his betting game on air. That's what brought me here. Of all the gin joints in all the world, people literally call into that show from all over the world, I found the one serving Bloomington gin, on a whim, while I'm arguably in the middle of 3 entirely different things to watch.

Next thing. I had a dream that was straight out of Interstellar. I was doing something innocuous, like brushing my teeth, and at the same time, doors were opening on a subway, a bird was flapping it's wings, and some other picture I can't remember was moving in sync with my movements. This, I take it, is because I started reading a book called “Now” about how science is trying to understand what that means. We have particles that can flow backwards in time, we all agree on the lengths of different things no matter our individuated frames of reference, and we all pretend to have a grasp on our butterfly-effect waves we send into the world. It was almost like a mini-acid trip dream that felt oddly reassuring that I was part of the machinery.

The third thing is a meme picture a friend I haven't really seen or talked to in a while posted about getting better at dealing with stress. It postulated either she was getting better, or just not giving a shit anymore. She's posted another one about one day having the money to actually live like the person she really is. Massive red flags go off in my head any time I relate too closely to what I consider “throwaway” sentiments and cliches about life. I promise, if you dig through blogs I wrote towards the end of high school and start of college, I say constantly how often I want nothing to do with the regular struggling Joe narrative and pull-cord sentiments of the old and lazy.

The fourth thing is just me recently musing on a kind of ethical style. As of late, I'm realizing my ethics, so to speak, have morphed a bit. Anymore, I wait to consider something as ethical or not in the moment. I have some loose standing presuppositions, like don't murder perhaps, but otherwise, I'm kind of waiting to see what I see or feel what I feel before I allow something I'm doing to register one way or another. It's not amoral, but it's not specifically speaking to a moral either. Sometimes I feel justified in driving like a dick. Sometimes I want to throw the gum wrapper on the floor. Sometimes I want to be as polite as can be while you unload your pointless and boring life story. I didn't know what I was going to pick until it was happening.

The more I find myself under the “rules” of normal society, the more I find myself wanting to play with boundaries in other ways. I know, barring everything, what kind of person I am and what I need to be doing in order to not lose my shit. It is an impulse I not only refuse to try to kill, but one I revel in as a kind of personality drug. It's the levels of obscenity or pretentious air. It's the complete blunt disinterest in things you purport to care about or find funny. It's a harsh boundary, but it's my boundary. But this raises old questions in a new paradigms.

What's got me here? Why is there little to no emotional investment in the grand standing narrative example I might be setting for the world? It's old news me calling myself an anti-particle, villain, or self-indulgent loon. Have I truly been shaken hard enough that I can't conceive of the “proper” thing anymore? Is my restraint more a hamstrung choke than wise and measured practice? Can I refrain from floating too far away from anything making sense?

I've had several opportunities over the last few days to lay into people who've objectively mislead me or had me on the receiving end for the consequences of their unforeseen circumstances or disorganization. I've been letting it ride. When I thought my job was going to get a leg up on me in monopolizing my thoughts, I picked a “morally equivalent stress relieving” course of action that seems fair enough and has me continue to get the job done. I think that just gave me the insight. When you start to scoop up points of corruption into your perspective, you're forced to make little negotiations. Why not eat more sugar when everyone's got so much candy and cookies and donuts they bring to the office, and why, you didn't have breakfast! That last call was super annoying and technically cut into your break. Better sit in the parking lot for 20 minutes and talk or smoke it out.

Perhaps what I conceived of as my morally backed insistence to work outside the confines of normalcy is decaying after being subjected to the regular world. Recall, I have a job paying me more than I've ever made, just got a new car, have spent kind-of wildly on some things for the future and in eating out so much, though not so much lately, and this is the place I've always conceived of as “losing.” That car is debt and a substitute for the rent I was trying to escape. Those indulgences I'm always and forever going to be doing alone, and my job, for as noble as it exists in the minds of those around me and for the odd amount of power it grants, has nothing to do with where I saw myself at this point in my life. I don't have it “bad,” but I don't have it “me.”

So if you're not you, what's the moral? I'm the walking embodiment of unrelenting revolt and provocation who plays dress up and juggles crazy stupid people's lies. Play along? Remain patient? Stay in the moment until the next check comes? Go overboard in giving handouts to the dumb and needy that you know in advance they're psychologically incapable of figuring out or sticking with? That's the rub too. I've been reading more about people. The dirty facts about how we treat ourselves do much work in tempering my will to chase “helpful” impulses I might have to pretend inform people. It doesn't mean you can't try, but it does mean if I don't feel a genuine impulse to try, I'm not going to. I never believe the show I put on for myself.

[766] Deuces

I'm searching for a car. This entices many things I do not like to happen all at once. Leaving aside that I know next to nothing about cars, brands decide to shit the bed for some years and certain models have fatal flaws that you can find if you want to dig through 7 quasi-reliable ratings pages per each make year. They all basically resemble the same few things to me. I'm the same person that thought I might get a used but reasonable beater when I turned 16 who's main concern is getting from point A to B. But as you're no doubt aware, many cars, of all shapes, ages, and sizes, occupy a wide array of potential in that space between.

I find it default overwhelming and frustrating. Not least of which because even the people who I know who seem to know the most about cars differ seemingly arbitrarily. Ford? Shit, but such and such model from x year can be great! KIA? Garbage, but totally affordable and 2013 wasn't terrible if you can stand to look at it. I had a Mini, right? BMW! Oh...you caught them on those junky corruption years, so your brand new car will blow the transmission, have its back hatch rust off, and 7 other things you'd never believe should go wrong with a car less than 5 years old. I've legitimately only ever believed in Tesla, in big part because I think Elon Musk is the kind of obsessive autistic type that couldn't produce total shit on purpose or it would kill him. (edit 2024: Oh, how people change.)

I think about the slogans. “Built to last!” “Built Ford tough!” “Unlike any other.” I recently watched Russell Brand's latest stand-up show, and he reiterates how we're perpetually beat over the head with bullshit wording and advertising and politicking to the point where any degree of sincerity, even the world's biggest fuck up like Trump, we'd be ravenous for. It's my inbuilt disdain for anyone who's forced to be put into a “lemme sell you something” posture. Let things be for sale. Let me buy them because they're actually good or useful. You can take it a personal route and think it dishonest and disingenuous to flout all of your best traits and pictures on a dating site while you lure someone in to lie to them for a few months before the cracks start showing.

I crave a form of stability even while occupying an intellectual attitude that everything's always changing and nothing is forever. At the same time, I occupy, as this book I started on the physics of “now” points out, every waking minute of my conscious existence. This remains constant. Each ounce of pain and pleasure trapped by my choice to hold or capacity to relish. I can build environments that persuade this persistent moment something is more stable and consistent that I'm otherwise exposed to and enagaged with.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

New section days later.

I've spent the last 3 hours looking at and playing with my finances. No matter how you shake it, If I can escape the specter of rent, I'll have 50% of my income to do whatever the hell I please with it. Well, that's not precisely true. I'll be able to pay in advance on my car loan, or the same with back taxes, or make 1 kinda-large and unnecessary purchase each month with little to no repercussions. My finances are dead even in me being able to work for a year at the “normal” pace of eating and drinking what I like and enjoying some moderately priced entertainment and paying off all the bills and becoming debt free, or I can hardcore mode it, spend every penny on bills and Ramen noodles, and be done in like 8 months. This also barring any pursuit of extra income.

I need something real to look forward to. I like playing my guitar and reading. I like to play some video games or moderate exercise. I NEED TO CREATE. Or, at least, I need to trick myself into thinking my expenses are speaking to my creations. I can't tell you how many times I've dreamt of digging holes. Why? Because a big enough hole is now a pool, or a fire pit, or a drainage system. Instead of my sitting stupid with too much energy on the couch while I debate whether I want to waste money on seeing a movie for the sake of leaving the house, I'd be blasting one of the thousand I have on my projector while I kill so many itch birds one shovel-full at a time I'll hardly be able to believe it.

I started looking for a different job, as if I don't basically enjoy this one, or like there was something “better” than the “even” state I'm in now. I don't plan to leave. I just wanted to see what my disposition might be situated for now that I've allowed Lifeline and DCS to pound me into this glob. I was also inspired by a story from Jennifer Lopez, or it happens with plenty of celebrities and famous-adjacent, about lying about their credentials and getting the job anyway, making some change or endearing themselves as one more in their infinite series of positive loop footholds. I can't help but think I'm “hindered” by my sense of...morality? Fairness? Wisdom? As if my current, arguably great state, was handed to me, and I've been searching for and missing some gimmick this whole time. I know, very well, better than that, but it feels that way nonetheless.

I'm increasingly sensitive to the idea of our capacity to zero in on the negative and have it allow a disproportionate affect on our attitude and well-being. I feel like I've exercised against this generally for years by writing, but even more, I want to tap into that next level, “Who do I want to be like that I'm not” when it comes to seeing people who seem to have something figured out. Patrick Stewart comes to mind. I struggle to think of who would follow him.Tom Hanks?

Part of what makes me insufferable is my ability and willingness to bear down on the present moment. That was the motivation to get all my shit done “now” and independently. That's reading past eyestrain or depression levels. That's playing until your fingers fail. I repeat, NOTHING ABOUT LIFE IS LIKE THAT. You get your paycheck every 2 weeks. Someone's not going to call you back for 3 days. A miscommunication or 12 will see the month-long task take over a year. I can't. I can't operate like that. You have to go to a place that zens-out and rides along in order to survive, but holy fuck, when I reach for my shotgun posture, I mean, I'VE BEEN 30 FOR ALMOST 6 MONTHS. And while that's sorta-true, but at least a month off, it's that mind frame that presses you to get shit done BECAUSE DEATH IS WAITING.

I have nothing new to say. This was told to me during a drunken verbal battle I have no idea how it got started. It's true, but the problem isn't that I need to reiterate. The problem is that the underlying problem never gets addressed. The problem is that efforts to address it bleed out over months and make it look like I don't have a goddamn clue. There's never anything new to say, from anyone, save a few physicists. But it does need to be constantly addressed and rearranged and brought into our collective consciousness. I certainly need to see myself dying to climb out of my bowels and stomach as I waste away on a couch pretending I'm not allowed weekends.

The reality is such that once something takes off, it shoots to the moon. Some stupid idea, some experiment, some trendy blog post. If you've laid the groundwork and prepared for all the coming potential, someone's begging to discover you or collaborate or exploit. The tools for gaming the systems of attention and marketing are as detailed as you could ask for and dirt cheap. But you have to be on the move. You have to be paying attention. You have to say, over and over again, who you are, what you're about, and what you hope to achieve, and then get to work.

[765] Clench

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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