[804] Everywhere A Sign

I've been trying to write this for weeks. More, I've been trying to write at all. When you're not overflowing with an idea that's bugging you, or some resounding quote only manages to ring for half a day, but there's still something there, you force yourself to start writing, as I am now, and see if you can piece together a dozen themes and lines into whatever place it is you're looking for.

 

This has been a very long week. Even when I'm doing nothing at work, I'm at work, which increasingly is becoming a chore to bother with without some tactful distractions or pinches of aberrant behavior. I live 45 minutes away. I didn't leave my house until 7:42 on Wednesday, and technically, work starts at 8:00. I'm naughty.

 

But, of course, work doesn't start at 8. Work is understood as this thing we all barely make it to by 8:30, and even if you show up to safety staffing late, you haven't missed something vital, and you're going to be given that benefit of the doubt. It doesn't hurt to use the smoke screen of everyone else feeling tired and being late as well. We're all in this together.

 

I'm hitting that, “This is too easy, wrote, dumb, and impervious to changes for improvement” groove. I get flickers of hope of getting more responsibility or aspiring to do or create something new, and then I sit in a meeting ran by our district manager with endless placations and “state speak” that amounts to, “Don't blame me, we can only do so much over so much time.” My initial back and forth with the literal head of the agency has been dutifully sidelined for over a month at this point. Important people are very busy, don't you know. You won't have to dig far in my writing to find out how much I hate and disagree with the idea that things “just are that way.” And if you're a manager of anything, and reduce yourself to managing away expectations and accountability, you're nothing.

 

Gear shift. I stopped feeling terribly guilty about debt. It feels like a dangerous place to be. I'm slipping into the mindset that, on my worst day, I couldn't be even close to the norm. The money I spend turns into a month's long frustration and guessing game anyway, so why not just try to enjoy the food or toys that help me refine my space and mood? I hung my guitars, and bought things like cables and hooks. My concern for my environment has grown as I've gotten older. I can handle the garage-aesthetic as a matter of being practical, but you know what? I really enjoy seeing my instruments hanging from the wall, and the easy access to switch between them when I'm picking differently tuned songs on Rocksmith. The analog cord so the audio doesn't delay will be worth the $12.

 

I've said it before, but it bears repeating, I work best with someone. I go to the gym when someone's there. I create a coffee shop. I get to crack jokes and discuss options and delve into a perspective I'm not locked into. The things I do alone are always, basically gratifying, but not enough to provoke the endless energy impulse anymore. I've felt the pain of headfirst into walls enough times to at least remain mildly ensured that my enthusiasm and drive means nothing alone, and they are considerably more alone than I had the ability to see.

 

I have a strong personality new girl at work who's rounded, intelligent, and can talk endlessly in a way that doesn't provoke frustration. I barely know this chick and it's kinda insta-friend material. That's what got me intrigued about the office in the first place was finding people who provoked that impulse. The amount of truth in the idea that I don't come to work for the work, but the people I work with, holds as true as it ever did back when I got my first job.

 

It's not a secret we're relational and exist with respect to other things. When I'm out here, alone, playing my guitar or dancing like a nutter, who cares? The hours I could spend on the treadmill or reading won't matter until I take that information or beach bod into the streets and extract attention. I still believe in the exponentiating potential of brains focused on shared goals. I still think some version of the big dream I have for how my life might flow is possible, and possible quickly. I have every day to day reason impressing upon me how much older I'm getting and how I'm barely cobbling together what a 20-something might've half-assedly put together out of college when they dreamed of being a hemp farmer. This perspective informed by my inability to conceive of my life as anything but marred in debt, regardless if I was 3 months or 3 years away from paying it off.

 

Gear shift. One of the themes in my day to day is always about responsibility. You catch cases with DCS when you have no ability to take responsibility. You didn't beat, touch, smoke, whatever it is you absolutely did, and every imposition we make on your being is another affront to decency and example of the fascist state. It's not, simply, meth isn't good for you, and especially not your child.

 

I talk a lot about the responsibility foisted upon me. I was reflecting on my friend who was in a downward spiral with his PTSD. I gave him acid. He'd already had a bad episode, the next was worse. Everyone got mad at me, probably reasonably, not him. I try to frame it by stepping back some. He's old and mature enough to go to war, ship bullets out and ship bodies in, but not allowed to take responsibility of how or when he's going to consume acid, at least around me. There's something to be said about not enabling your friends and knowing better. There's something to be said about the kinds of responsibility towards each other we don't really want to take.

 

The same line of thinking applies to the parties. Camille Paglia pointed out that girls used to have to be home by dark and the boys could go be boys. When girls got their freedom to party, the consequences of drunk hookups became the rape culture of toxic masculinity. Which oppressor do you prefer? The administrator locking you up, or your own hormones and well-sung songs of debauchery related to drinking? Who gets to make the choice not to go? We certainly don't believe rapists can't help themselves.

 

Reverse. I'm comfortable in my space. Even when the power goes out, the air conditioner was running, so it was still comfortable and eerily calm to not even have the frogs making noise. I actively look forward to getting in my chair, sitting in front of my 6 screens, getting distracted and turning on my other big screen to play a game, or reading a few more pages in my book, or rearranging furniture for the 15th time. This place isn't just very me, it's as close to an approximation of the kind of active function-over-form yet packed to the tits with shit to do or find utility in. When I get a chance to organize my tools and have a workspace, it'll be an even sweeter walk between my dozen interests. Even if that takes 6 or 12 months or basically forever because I want it now.

 

I think I'm learning how to “enjoy being” a little better. My drive isn't gone, but my “this couch is niiiice” has definitely increased. I don't scrutinize every dollar if I know I'm going to enjoy the meal. I buy the second Chick-fil-A sandwich at the same time as the first. I think I'm at a record 5 or so days of not having my jaw painfully clenched. Part of me worries this is the consequence of something important dying that I'm unaware of . Part of me wonders if it needed to die.

 

I find it interesting, and telling, and proof that I really do know myself, that I still just wanna hang out. I don't want to pretend to be keeping kids safe and negotiating petty office nonsense. I wanna wake up and hang by the pool until I'm bored, and we go play with this truck engine or 3d model and print something. I wanna watch every single movie I've downloaded, and rewatch movies I claim to have enjoyed, but can't be bothered because no one's said, “I haven't seen it yet!” for me to watch it with them. I wanna have the people on hand to save 2 grand and dig our own damn pool, and to spend the 2 hours studying the parts manual for my riding lawnmower so I can figure out how to repair it. I want the kind of fluidity between interests that takes an incredible amount of work to look so simple and “obvious” a way of conducting life. I want to reinhabit the space farmers and journeymen were before wage slavery.

 

Right now, I am principle resident in situ. I'm carving, by my lonesome, out the pieces that anyone could appreciate and see worked into the psyche like the stripper pole did for the parties. Instinctively, you knew what you had to do. That's what I want this to become. I want it to draw out your inner stripper, and when the field is full of flopping tits, you'll look at me and go, “I get it now.” When I think I'm losing my mind or things are never going to get better, I look around. I remember how I never felt I'd be doing this, typing, in my air conditioned space, with my instruments mounted, books half-read, and growing number of tools to combat the animals and elements. These cumbersome and heavy things that have survived the travel, theft, and weather so arranged as to speak to my vision and will. A command center in Starcraft.

 

I think I'm going to start cold-calling for people looking to rent and dropping in at places that seem like land is where it's at. There's a tree-growing place on the way to Solsberry and different landscaping companies I want to try. It occurs to me that, as far as I know, I still get everything in life I ever truly want, and maybe I just haven't wanted “ the simple ask” to work as well as it might. I'm taken back to when I worked for 2 days at the IU call center. One guy just said, “Yeah, sure, $50 then?” or something to that effect, no hesitation, as if he'd been waiting his whole life to hear my scripted bullshit. I've called hundreds of people just to see if they wanted anything to do with a planter my neighbor invented. I haven't called a hundred people on my own behalf for anything, mostly because I like to present it as I'm working with it, not so much trusting a cold-caller to carry out their half of my vision.

 

I don't know. Can't hurt? Can't damage a brand that doesn't exist but on paper. I've read some entrepreneurial posts who say flyering is more effective than you'd believe. I could create the kind of flyer only someone like me could create, field some calls, explain the vision, draw up some contracts. Reaching out is horrible and everyone's a failure, and, almost as if GOD WILLED IT, I got a job where reaching out to failures has gotten associated with a paycheck. How is that not a sign?

[803] Phat Head

I need to figure out what's on my mind. I've thought about writing for what feels like weeks. I'll get a line, think it'll stick, and then after a day or two I recede into my TV shows, or get distracted and take a nap. Today, I was thinking I'd start my reading adventure. Make it so there wasn't a book I owned (save the 12 boxes I got for free to list on Amazon) that I hadn't read or at least skimmed earnestly through (looking at you cook and massage books). I've been distracted the last couple hours meticulously wiping things down. I'm chasing each spec of dust away, one wipe at a time. I'm genuinely starting to feel like the space looks more like something someone could consider livable, comfortable, and not piled with trash or “stuff” to be sorted like so much excess.

I'm finding it curious that I'm cleaning and organizing, and now writing this, as opposed to jumping into the reading, because my thoughts are occupied about what happens when I get back into “it.” I'm flirting with something bigger than occupying my time. I'm flirting with becoming “me” again. It's slowly occurring to me that what I am, and what I've done, border on a kind of “incredible” dedication and effort that I routinely short change. I look around at all of this effortful organization, and as the picture comes into focus, all of the money, the ticks, the sweat, the frozen treks across an unkind landscape, the trips to and from moving each piece, and the words I've used in service to bringing my ideas into the world, are now manifest.

That's amazing.

I don't know why I have such a hard time appreciating what I am, and how long I've been giving myself to the things I earnestly believe in. There's myself. There's the idea of play and experimentation. There's the ability to be loud. A willingness to be “alone,” and temping of fate in marooning myself in an unfamiliar space removed from so many conveniences. Days like today, I thought would never come, and fuck you, they have. My space is actually mine. My music plays whenever at whatever volume. I reorganize in the middle of the night. I set as many traps for the daring rats as suits me. My things stay where I set them. I can expand in any direction. I can put myself into debt to the tune of 2 months of pithy effort, and be back to safer than I expect many will feel the vast majority of their lives.

I freak out about time because of the expectations I set for myself before I had any grasp of what to expect. I didn't respect the “working world” pace. I don't think it's something you have to adopt, given the pace of technology and the examples set by the biggest brands, but I do think it's something to contend with very seriously. I had no idea how hard it would be to create even a “tiny” space, with the majority of it prefabricated. I didn't think about the rain. I didn't think about brain lesions on the only person I could find to trust in months of searching, nor of being attacked in having my shit stolen and work feigned to be worked or money scammed from my ignorance. I didn't want to believe how not me the rest of the world really is, and the endless tumbling consequences of tripping on my own dick.

What I am is aberrant. I am alone. I am different. It's okay to say it if even the numbers on every personality test affirm it. What I have in common is certainly more than where I differ, but what I differ in is dramatically and emphatically different to tip the scale. I have a dick big enough to trip on, even if every part of me is still human. I've also tended to believe this carries with it a higher level of responsibility and scrutiny. If I want the world, and settle for the moon, I can only seek to continue to admonish myself for the thought of ever “settling,” circumstances be damned. If I have all of my books to read, and manage to finish only a dozen, it doesn't matter that I read 12 books in the time it takes a “regular” person to get through a few chapters. It matters what I could have done, or that I failed my goal. Changing the goal would make me regret “moving the goalposts.”

I don't know how much of this is pathological, and how much of it is functionally necessary. I won't just seek to win, I will seek to make myself indistinguishable. I don't want to be “me.” I want to be the churning out of an organizing and accounting process that can spit it out with the charm and tact that rarely if ever accompanies presumed autism. The problem comes in continually proving it to myself. Then, I will exponentiate, and become what I have to believe will be, as I've described before, insufferable. Aren't I already? Don't I have Wendy, Hatsam, and my dad as the only people who might catch a blog anymore? Have I not chased the rest of the world away and adorned my hillbilly mantel, ready, set, and going off to do whatever it is I'm going to do?

I know I can write this, read an entire book, get practically no sleep, “do my job” to a more than passable degree, get to the gym, eat better, and recycle the process cleaning, practicing, and fitting in my shows on so many drives. I know I could turn it right back on. And then what? How much farther away do I move from the world? How engrossed in my activities should I become? What kind of “expert” at my various crafts will serve my ego? This is the rub. I got a taste of being human. I also enjoy laying in bed all day doing nothing next to someone I care about. The other half of me can't abide. I don't know how to balance both beyond a kind of stasis reflecting and daring myself to pick one.

I have an incredible amount of nervous energy. It's not the kind of whiny anxiety that's so posh and nu-millennial. I persistently worry about my potential, because I literally don't know what I'm going to choose until I choose it. I know my long-term kind of vibe and place I need to be subconsciously, but there are days I'm genuinely surprised I haven't managed to get fired for my mouth or willingness to break things. My spite flame burns eternal there, because god forbid I go down in too tacky or cliché a way, but there are days that push my patience for playing along, and I don't get to just have a good cry and beer and pretend it's getting better. I watch my internal world mold into a grotesque acceptance and coddling trying to cope with the naked shame for what I've become.

I watch the types that I think over-do it, Tom Cruise? The Rock? The term “celebrity energy” that so excited me has another side. They'll die too, even if they look 40 at 140. Do I want to be remembered? I still don't really give a fuck what people think. Here, I consider the company kickball game, where I was fully prepared to drill my new manager in the face pitching the ball if she couldn't catch or get out of the way. I'm not afraid of things in the normal way, only my capacity to indulge, influence, and react to them. “The only thing to fear, is fear itself.” In my experience, I've embodied people's fears. Said what they can't say. Pressed on the one unpressable button. In spite of my endless reservations, poor judgments, and useless opinions, my world is still becoming manifest. Can you say the same?

I seem to find myself wholly unable to even recognize it until I glance at the cleaner and cleaner corners of my garage-turned-homestead. Who knows what liberation I'll feel when I can actually take a shower and do my laundry.

[802] Crack That Whip

What else is new, I'm in a weird head space.

I've spent the last 3 weekends away. I've gotten more back-to-back time suggestive of my layabout and chill life than I've had in maybe a couple years? I miss it. I like having “nothing” to do considerably more than, as Fountains of Wayne so eloquently put it, a desk full of paper that means nothing at all. I can't escape the idea that I'm being punished. I'm not trying to whine or claim a victim narrative, but the nature of the circumstances I find myself in feels personal, and I begin to speculate about who might be behind it.

I'm the king of offering different explanations or finding an out. I can frame all good or bad as good or bad. What I can't do, is persuade myself to embody the feeling of either of those judgments. If I feel bad, I feel bad. If I'm tentatively happy and vibing with the moment, far be it for me to say or do something to try and bring it crashing down. My longest moment is that of the discomfort and unease. It's the “negotiation” of constantly trying to remind and persuade myself that what I have, and where I'm going, are considerably better than they were in the past, and while I might remain perpetually naive as to what it takes to get what I want, I'm still inching along that story line. I'm nowhere near the degree of suffering or depravity I witness daily, skimpering mouse above my head be dammed.

I already claim my corrupted spirit or damaged capacity for a kind of “regular” emotional or otherwise investment in life or other people. There is no secret rotten core I'm trying to keep out of the sunlight so the infection can spread. I still pull myself out of bed and into the office, and slog through what I'm supposed to be responsible for. I do the work. I've never, for a single day, been under the impression that I “deserve” anything that I hadn't worked my ass off for, and I attest to my exhaustive drive to do just that endlessly. I beg those with more power or connections to enable me. I'm piling on ever more debt to solidify my basic level of existence. I've spent the better part of two years in a recliner or on a couch when I'm not at work. It doesn't take me a sprawling mansion and swimming pool to bitch about things with a show on in the background.

Mostly, if I'm being punished, I want to know what I did. I trust the depths of my potential for darkness or aberration, but there aren't any hidden bodies. I don't make a game of trying to make people feel bad throughout the day. I don't “give up” and allow myself to lose my mind or start treating people like I see others do. I don't double down like you might on a terrible drinking night.

So what is it? What loose end am I neglecting so badly that things only seem to move when I'm driven to cut myself a little deeper, and little faster, and with a dirtier blade? Is it unreasonable to think estimates should fall within hundreds and months of what were offered? Is it in poor taste to expect an answer to questions that will determine my spending and budget for several months?

Maybe it was presumptuous to think I could find anyone else remotely capable and trustworthy in the first place. I don't know what the fundamental fuck up it is that I'm making, but I'm convinced I'm making it, and it manifests as little middle fingers and knots in my back throughout the day.

What do I even want to do? What do I want anymore? Someone to help that doesn't cost as much as I make a day. To be able to shave and shower somewhere not public. A fridge would be cool. You see how once I got little things, the asks kept creeping along? There's always something more. Some new “essential” to fill the gap. The flaw in my being then could be the attachment to anything. The want impulse. The investment and desire for a kind of permanence objects simply don't have could be corrupting my whole game.

This would jive with the theme me and my dearest in Lexington spoke of recently. I was wishing I had something more permanent, noting how even the things I've tended to almost my entire life have been stolen. She's more adventurous and takes it as given that things aren't going to last, so why bother getting that invested? There's been a series of past boys who bought in way more than she's been about, she's been all over the world and country. My lens could just be corrupted by an inconvenient pull towards “attachment” to what's otherwise basically sand in the winds of time.

Whether I create or inhabit the environment that's less than fluid, I'm still anchored to my sense of self and certain expectations. My “realness” or “curmudgeon” or “negativity” or “really angry person,” as I was recently labeled, still know full well what a “perfectly flowing” day feels like, and I can do the math on what it would cost to take earnest stabs at what concerns me. Time still feels like it's running out. New and exciting pains in my “good knee” remind me how dead I really am already.

I know the difference between spinning my wheels, and soaking up what I want from myself and other people in our time together. The foundation of my house is questionable, but manageable.

Maybe what I did there's no atoning for. Maybe I'm under a life sentence, and part of it is about not being allowed to know why. It'd be the kind of crime only someone so different as me could pull off. The kind to follow me across lifetimes. That's comforting. At least I could relax the reigns a little bit.

[801] In Tent City

One of the first jobs I ever remember an adult telling me I should do was to be an architect. I like to build things. I dreamt of the day I'd be able to buy my own box of blocks we used to have in daycare, so I could spend all day creating new castles and not be compelled to destroy them when my mom came to pick me up. Me, her, and my brother putting together Legos are some of the few times I think we ever really got along.

I was just trying to build something now. I had an idea to put a tarp up on poles that I set in little buckets of cement. At first I conceived on them as being in full-size buckets with PVC. I started to consider how heavy a bucket full of cement would be, and thought about it breaking or the PVC not being able to stand up to the weather. I discovered metal rods that were cut to the same longest lengths that they sell PVC. I found smaller paint can-like buckets. I bought a couple bags of cement, and 2 PVC pipes just to run the experiment, and to create a taller middle pole.

You may have noticed, but it's never going to stop raining. When it accidentally stopped, I poured water/gas residue (as I only had a gas can to carry water in and forgot I had an unused one in the moving truck), and set the poles down in while pouring cement over the sides. I discovered less water made for a more “cementy” look and feel, and adjusted the recipe down the line of buckets. I set them against the house and they all hardened appropriately over the next few days.

I got home today, and thought on the way that I might grab the giant tarp, and finally see about setting it atop the poles. I sit and watch a little TV and dick around online instead. A couple hours later, I get the urge, and head outside. Me, not thinking things through, thought I should thread the grommets on the tarp with the string and create a kind of running line around the edges. I thought, I guess, that there would be a way to tighten the rope around the poles to secure each corner, and allow me to leisurely walk each one to where I wanted. It took about 30 variations on a “slip the fuck right off” theme before I got the bright idea to wrap the cord around the tarp itself and secure a little knot that fairly-enough reinforces itself as the pole gets tugged.

When I finally decide to apply that method to each corner, I begin to actually see the thing rise. What I've left out, is that it's been raining the majority of the time I'm attempting to do this. This means muddy and slippery escapades hanging off the back of the moving truck, where the tarp is also setting, and slapping myself with the wet and muddy paracord I'm undoing and redoing. I got a brief sense of what it will be like to be able to open my door, and not have rain pouring in. I dug holes, deep enough ones the 10th time around, for the buckets to be dropped into, and now it'll be a matter of inching and reinforcing and resetting where I want the corners.

I discovered I could tuck two of the poles under the mother's attic portion of the truck. I found my newly extra-secured camera is in exactly the wrong place and the kind of internal curse of good intentions from my builder struck again. I saw a small frog living in my bathroom roof. I realized I'll probably need a few more poles, and will have to spend a concerted amount of time securing a tennis ball to the PVC so it doesn't rip the tarp. I've got all kinds of scratches and bug bites. I can see the tarp drearily hung over the truck as two other poles couldn't take the amount of water coming down. But it's a start, and I learned a few things, and I got dirty. I was playing, and building, and not clenching my jaw as I suffered a hundred different defeats.

I think the spirit in the kind of fun I have in building things is lost on people. I was chastised for not wanting to approach some of the land projects “properly,” and not “simply” renting a machine to do some trenching, or not sitting down and putting together a whole plan to ensure we'd be done exactly on the hour necessary. Do I think you should be particularly ill-prepared and wanton in your approach to landscaping or otherwise projects you're not familiar with? Of course not, and I see the reasonableness of estimates and parts lists and working theory of how you're going to approach. But also, for most things in my life, that hasn't been my experience as working...basically ever.

I've sat and put together business plans, and then I ran a business. Nothing matched, and my main take away was a handful of new excel calculation tricks I've since forgotten. My day job would love for me to have “100% timely initiations,” and guess what? Everyone I haven't seen in 2 weeks wants to meet between the same 3 hours at the end of the day Friday, or to push what needs done until after the, of course, holiday weekend so it's extra late. This house is, literally, less than a week's worth of effort with 2 people and fair weather conditions, and it's taken me two years to bring you this message, and I still can't use my water.

You have to do. You have to find the value, joy, lessons, and pain while you're doing. You have to get rained on, and find the resolve to try again tomorrow. You have to be told, a hundred or thousand times, “we'll get to it tomorrow,” and figure out what you can get done in the meantime, because tomorrow never comes. Am I itchy and trying not to think about how I'm not going to get to shower until the morning? Sure, but I've slid another small piece of the puzzle together as to what I want the land to look like. I want to be able to work in the never-ending rain. I want to know how deep to dig, how much cement and water to mix, how to tie better and smarter knots, and to know every moment that went into making even visually unimpressive things functional triumphs.

That's what I'm inviting people out to the land for. It's not to necessarily “help” me in random or seemingly arbitrary ways I may go about things. It's to find people to play with. It's to see what you might create with a little too much time, money, space, or someone to help you hold something up while the rest falls down.The point is to have fun with it, to experiment, and to be so engaged that you don't think about how wet you are or the bugs. Most of my experience is otherwise dominated by varying swarms of bugs.

I'm reminded that I'm a kid. I'm a 30-year-old child who would rather play in the mud than necessarily pick up a paycheck. You need balance, and I like to eat, but even getting consistent positive feedback at work, and knowing I bring a calm head and respectful influence into a field wrought with hammy emotions and power trips, I need to work for me. I learned my general cool disposition for me ( I was even told by the quintessential “cool black guys” hanging outside of Millennium Station, “Now there goes a cool dude, I'd like to hang out with him, smoke some weed”) in case you thought it wasn't official. I own the fun I had at the parties everyone grew to resent. I retain the positive memories with every long-lost friendship or fuck buddy. I know where I need to be in order to offer without expectation. I still don't know what people expect from themselves, but it hasn't been to try and enjoy what I've put on the table.

I hope you're having fun, because without this giant perpetual mess to fix, rearrange, and point to as something that exists outside of my head, I rarely am. If you find company in the general misery I think my writing suggests, consider that creativity, productivity, and muddy also enjoy company.

[800] Different Peaces

There is a vast and deep difference between “selfish” and “personal responsibility.”

 

I think we're a severely scarred country. The open questions that plague me center around what I see as self-centered and destructive decision making by and towards people who would otherwise be your allies. It's a very familiar story, and I've yet to wrap my head around the degree in which I see it happening, nor have I attempted to offer a comprehensive story about the different levels I see it happening.

 

There's the classic, my family cannibalizing itself. Grandparents die, kids fight over what's left, eventually you start planning holidays around who can and can't be in a room with each other. I see it in the “everyone run for president” game with the Democrats pretending they aren't mostly aligned and have much of anything new or individuated to bring to the table. I've seen it play out a dozen times in my “friendships,” that have proven to be, if nothing else, a lesson that alone in the field trying to figure things out myself at least allows me the room to breathe without getting blamed for taking up all of the oxygen. I think it's familiar enough with married couples who get passive aggressive and bring up things from years past to levy when they feel insecure or backed into a corner.

 

My dad and I were talking, and he recalled knowing what it felt like to be a part of the neighborhood. The neighbors looked out for each other. They all knew each other's names. They stood up for the kid getting fucked with at the end of the block. Today, my dad, one of the most giving and nicest people on the planet, recalls that he's had neighbors who hate him, for presumably, being him. He keeps his house in order, and will wave to you when he gets home. But, to them, fuck that guy.

 

What is this? Or, why haven't I found a book with the language to help me understand it? If we look to the past, will we find a contagion that infected our parent's generation? Is it easy enough to blame on technology and the internet? How are 25 year relationships broken in a flash? How are some relationships worth therapy and conversation, and others accusations and isolation? Why does no one believe that the guy or girl next to them, with the same ethics, worries, and desires is qualified enough to run things and make a decision in your best interest? Was it a little corruption having an undue effect? Was something lingering in our cultural system waiting for our immune system to take a hit before it could be unleashed?

 

I think about this as I'm standing in the rain for 2 hours waiting outside of a concert venue trying to see one of my favorite bands. I was in front of a group of fuck-you drunk Milwaukee assholes. One had a cross tattooed on his arm. One walked up and down the line several times soliciting high fives. When the couple in front of him didn't want to, he said, “All I want is a high five, all you have to do is touch my hand, and I'll leave you alone.” This persisted for a half hour. I figured he was both a likely rapist and Trump voter. One of them screamed at me, “We're as miserable as you!” as I spoke up and said their chant, “Let us in! Let us in! Let us in!” wasn't working. He was incorrect.

 

Getting drunk is a selfish act in which you can take personal responsibility by not excusing your behavior while drinking, but perhaps using it as a window to reflect on why you did something. You can choose better the next time, if there is a next time. You can discover things that need to be worked on, or conversations that need to be had. But all of that work is as much a personally responsible choice as it is to drink in the first place. One of those is considerably easier to do than the other.

 

I know that I have the capacity to suck up all of the oxygen in the room. I think I'm on a lot of people's minds very well independent of if they actually want me to be there. I think I speak to the personal responsible impulse that I don't see happen in life as often as it needs to. I think when I speak of demise, it's not that I just cherry pick the worse news and hope it self-serves. I think I describe in detail the thought, or lack thereof, that leads to catastrophe, and I attempt to root it in the most persistent observations. You won't talk to me. You won't respond to facebook messages sometimes. You can't be wrong, because your lives are carrying on in the sensitive and selfish place that you and you alone can deem worthy. It comes with all of the judgment and “maturity” about what brings you joy and what you need to just get through the day. It's a hill you're willing to die on.

 

I genuinely don't like how many of my ties have been broken. I don't like that I'm plugged into an environment that I don't believe it's possible to really plug into. But I will break every single one of the fake ones I can while I continue to search for people who actually believe relationships are worth protecting, cultivating, and relating to honestly. I'll keep handing out chances because I don't believe in you, and it's not my desire to create the same kind of black hole of resentment. That doesn't mean I won't continue to have my harsh words. That doesn't mean I forgive the bullshit. But it does mean I'm going to try, in spite of you, and keep attempting to define out why and when I'm wrong, so I don't end up like you. As predicted, unbearably slowly, my dreams and perspective are leading me to precisely where I predict and desire. Given that I see less and less social media celebration, I suspect life is starting to sink in a little harder for the vast majority.

 

For all of the things I believe are genuinely out of control, you can trust that my engagement and challenge and struggles are not on that list. I picked construction area tiny house. I pick statements speaking to the severe lack of care or candor I've started to feel about our dynamic. I pick to lavish rewards and completely withdraw. I don't do it lightly, and I don't do it for fun. But if you're unwilling to be a part of the process and conversation, I'm turning it into a story I can stomach telling. Anymore, it's not that I won't play your games, I'll just show you how bad they can make you feel as you're attempting to do to me. Because I'm no better or worse than you, but for my capacity to call out my own self-destructive impulses, and work to combat them. 

 

I don't even have a crowd, or collective, or friend that I can rely on for more than scraps when it's convenient for them in my immediate day to day. Not really. Because the story for them is about what I've taken or they've sacrificed in service to being in my presence. I don't need to be mildly appeased here and there to be kept as an insurance policy to hopefully be exploited later. I don't want to be in perpetual negotiations about things that were never a problem until insecurities provoked them to be brought up. I don't believe the world is acting in good faith. I don't think my “friendships” survived the hijacking of our minds. I want my power and momentum in life to come from me, and every drop of sweat I put into tearing out my conception of the world and making it real, not the negotiated M.A.D. nonsense of everyone trying to row their own boat across the ocean.

 

And maybe I never get there. Maybe I slowly turn into a country bumpkin with a little too much time and money on his hands, who dies in a freak accident with too many expensive toys on his half-cultivated land. At least I'll have come by it honestly. At least my picture captured at any point in time will be of a clear conscience for leaving nothing unsaid. I think our demise is locked in, and if I could do something to accelerate it, I would. I wish it didn't have to be that way, but what it really means to feel the consequences won't kick in until the last moment. You're not the kind to get out ahead of things. You're just human. You just want to do you. Who am I to judge? Because it's always about me, right?

[799] Survival of the Fittest

I feel like I don't matter to anyone.

There we go, first blog from the land, and that's the line that caught me earlier today as I was sitting in Planet Fitness, waiting for a coworker who was never going to show up.

I'm so far down this “my own home” line. It never ends. That's honestly never something I really anticipated. I expected to find myself picking and choosing little vanity projects and “for the sake of killing grass and bugs” things. I thought I'd find myself motivated to push that boulder just a little bit more up the hill when I got home each day. I thought I'd nailed a cement sign named “patience” into my skull that would keep me even, as I navigate the fallout of my house being not-so.

I have to be detailed, at least for a paragraph or few. What happens is that you budget for $300 in supplies, and maybe 2 days of labor at $125 a day. The project might be able to start this weekend, and be done by Monday. It doesn't get started this weekend, a truck is broken. In earnest, you offer to drive, pick up the supplies, and help in the afternoons. You offered to help over the weekend, but they won't need you, they'll be able to knock it out. Keep in mind, these are the good, reliable, honest guys. Life is just happening to them in ways particular to them, as it is to us all. Each day that goes by is attributed to the broken truck. But wait, there's more.

Your reliable builder is having a hell of a time. He's getting divorced. He's being denied access to see his non-biological granddaughter. He's got brain lesions that cause him to get wildly nauseous. His guys disappear on him, and the people he's looked after in life throw things in his face and threaten to play out scenes from Western shoot-outs. He's visibly constantly dealing with the stress of what's going on around him, and he wishes to return to his former glory of doing things quick and “perfect.” This means when I get home, late, because country traffic is as real as city traffic, I see him spending time shaving edges and reattaching drywall that was attached yesterday, because some cosmetic imperfection was getting to him. Have I said dozens of times it's about function over aesthetics? Yes. I'm watching the labor tally rise as more days get added.

I've got yellow spray foam hung like tacky Christmas lights all over the place, soaked foundation and open water and mud pits around grass that needs whacked. I can deal with the mess, it's an active construction site. But there's no way to predict the future, apparently, until half a job has been done. Need 5 2x4s? Okay. Actually, it's 10, or 12, or 15. And let's get them from the most expensive place, because it's a little closer. Oh, actually, the truck is down, so you could have gone to Lowe's, picked up what we needed, brought them at your leisure, saved money, and tuns out that could have been calculated 2 weeks ago when I first looked at where x-thing lined up with y-thing. You bought caulk? I bought caulk, and forgot this stockpile I've been creating, so guess we have double! I just picked up the order that was put in, but also, I could have picked it up cheaper, and in bulk, and everything extra has been sitting in the exact same place for months.

I'm here now, on my computer, downloading well in excess of what any major internet provider would allow me to. My main structure is so tightly sealed, I've changed the temperature 3 times and felt the impact before I could get through each paragraph. I have, at least snack food, in and around my mini fridge. The toilet can flush, albeit with iron-rich water. I have about the space it takes to sit in front of my computer and half of my bed that I can truly occupy, but there is a slice of heaven here.

Everyone's got a story. That's the horrid cliché I threw out to the coworker who never came. She made it 5 days. But her “real” motivation, to be a bird floating about the wind never knowing where life will really take it, she wouldn't share with me until the severity of the disappointment and hollowness started to sink in. She's one of the few I like at work. We started going because she was wearing plastic wrap under her clothes talking about how it was supposed to help her sweat and lose pounds. She's gregarious and take charge, but when pushed, steps sideways. I thought I had a chance to start a good habit, and good basis for ongoing conversation and friendship. I got another person to tell me my influence doesn't matter, and I need to keep my distance.

When I talk about not having real problems, I mean it. I don't even know what to call how little I feel about the endless void that is attempting to “solve” things. I revel in my absence. I need water. I'll need to eventually sweep out and mop up the drywall dust, sawdust, dirt, kill the bugs let in from the garage door being open, because, “it's nice weather!” In that way, the space still doesn't really feel like mine. The country music and touch of cigarette smoke. I'm still not alone alone. I'm still not learned enough in the ways of building things myself. If it were up to me, I don't know that I'd go back outside. My pool is going to be indoors, and if sun makes it in through the roof, bravo.

“Life isn't meant to be lived alone.” This, some line from some show I can't remember. I don't know that I want to live “alone,” as much as I can't take the heartbreak of trying, and not being able to find people anything like me. The ones who resemble me, capitulate. The one's who like me, overwhelmingly, find the reason I become “too much,” whether they want to bolster that opinion with a rape allegation, or stick to more traditional ghosting behaviors. You see stupid fucking memes, I may start only calling memes by the proper title “stupid fucking memes,” that speak to being judged whether you try or not, whether you speak or not, so do it anyway. Victims puke aphorisms one speculates are meant to inspire. Let me tell you, you're full of shit. You don't want me loud and proud. You won't engage with meek and contemplative. Ra ra rally around your bullshit, but it's no secret why I'm so eager to shove your little parade off the list of “people” I care to paint my brain with.

What's left to do but watch? My TV habit feels less like an occupying of time or analogy, and more like an imperative. When your plans come to fruition, maybe, and well-independent of your goddamn opinion, why continue to make them, or believe in your capacity? When your relationships aren't merely superficial, but perpetually excessively and painfully so, how do you approach them with anything but a kind of reserve and cynicism? It doesn't mean you don't like people. But they're people. The gym is there when they won't be, so can you fall for it? If everything I own gets destroyed, the shows are out there. There's a billion guitars I could play. Hell, my supervisor referred to her house burning down as, “Well, there's our spring cleaning,” and hers is a strong point to be made.

It seems like the list of things I don't care about grows longer all the time. I don't care that the coworker blew me off. I care that she, a dozen times, lied about her enthusiasm or willingness to do it. I care that the story of my life is more often meeting people who don't want to get through to the other side unless it's on their horribly, if-at-all, communicated terms. Their picture of our mini-adventure has to stay in tact, because, god forbid they catch something I write, and the illusion of their self-deceit be laid bare, as they have to acknowledge there's another person over there.

I'm home. The quiet hum of my computer. The even quieter flow of air. I can see the bugs flitting about in my security cameras. Everything I need to pack up for the day is in one spot. I was tired, and maybe just a touch short with my builder, swatting away bugs and finding the first tick of the season on my jeans. I want something to feel complete. I want to speak to something growing that matters and is worth building upon. I happened to watch the first half of Wild Wild Country about the cult in Oregon in the 80s, so many people on the same page about starting a “new” society where people would be taken care of. Naive to the corrupt soul that is man. Naive to the other minds in the surrounding towns with their own ideas as to how to respond. Am I in a cult of the remnants of my personality? A cult of one, pursuing “truth,” so discussed in the pages and pages amen?

The happiest point in my day was hearing my darling friend only got house arrest instead of 2 weeks imprisonment for her 2nd DUI. In some bizarre coincidence, she's the 3rd or so friend of mine to be a girl, with a, let's say nuanced relationship to alcohol, who won't be driving for a while. The people in my circles have their own foibles. I'm always curious why there's stories like that abound. I get it, cultural and social decay and whatnot, but, back to me, if I mattered, if my ideas were compelling. If I had a thing or two worked out about budgeting, or sacrifice, or honesty about the nature of the investment and commitment to changing things, not for the sake of it, but with meaningful intention, maybe I wouldn't be out here, alone, tip-toeing around my proclivity to dismiss feelings, and begging my hollow frustration not to say the wrong thing about the progress made so far.

I don't know fighters. We're still in the #metoo era, right? Survivors is where it's at. I know people who “survive” the harsh environments they leisurely travel to. I know people who cling to their job after the initial plan might've caught snags. I know people happy to play along and play adult. They won't make any more or less waves than they have to row over or hold their breath until they pass through. I doubt that's how they see it. They have a cause, or a vision, or a worse-off that they can advocate for and donate to. Heroes, no doubt. Nothing says stirring up things in service to the good more than facebook donations. Maybe make it $20, or $50! I'm getting older, and they let me have a “real job” for 2 years so far!

Ugh, I just want to complain and shit on everything, but the hole is still there. I'm not that invested. I'm indefinitely indefinite. When I get what I want, I'll still be hungry. When I find a friend, they'll be house-arrested, or dancing in every way but aerobically.

I'm home. I'm alone. I have my shows. I have my dusty-stuff waiting to be wiped down and given orders. I have the scent of no-frills plywood, and musky blankets, who speculate about when they'll get to see the washer and dryer in circulation. I don't think the world has anything on this royal baby. Inching along, always whining.

I put Byron's gun to my head the other day. I had no intention of firing it. It was arbitrary, and 1 beat Taxi Driver because his mirror was near by. I have plenty of desires and things I look forward to. I like myself. But I do, legitimately, persistently think about death, where the idea is just this dumb little plaything that prompts me to do dumb shit like that. Do I want to be a person who would never do something like that? I'd rather be the person who knows he's not going to pull the trigger. I wish I could have as good a handle on anything or anyone else.

[798] T.B.L.

Here's one where the title came first.

I want to describe what I'm deeming “The Big Lie.”

The Big Lie is a shifty beast. Its defining character trait is an ability to become literally anything. It's practically a fundamental force of the universe. Colloquially, you might understand it as a grand illusion tantamount to “we're all gonna live forever!” Its quality allows us to persist indefinitely in (a) direction, independent of external qualifiers attempting to describe the nature or moral of that path. The Big Lie is a tool, perhaps a necessary one, that acts as a defiant buttress against the onslaught of indomitable Truth.

The Big Lie is polite, because, what if? What if you slam the door on an opportunity? What if they got the wrong message? What if you betray your motives and disclose something you never intended? It's okay, sweetheart, everything will be okay. You're a fighter. You'll figure it out. Don't let your story end here! We believe in you.

The Big Lie is romantic. Its love will last forever. Its butterflies can fly straight through the sun. It's anticipating the ending of a movie you've seen 1000 times, with a refreshing tear and sigh for what's nowhere else reflected. It will wine and dine, carpe that diem, and burst out in song at the chance to be here and now and with you, where nothing outside matters, and we're in this together.

The Big Lie is pragmatic. You gotta pay the bills. The kids can't be left in such a state. I wouldn't dream...

The Big Lie has so many plans. 3 months from now, abs. When this debt is paid, relief! My grandmother didn't find my grandpa until she was 36! With this election, we'll right this ship.

The Big Lie is pretentious. How dare you phrase it that way? Don't you understand how much I've given and how deeply I care? If only you had my perspective, things would really start to get better. There is no “I” in “team,” but let's not forget who brought us all together now.

In order for something to constitute The Big Lie, it has to lie at the heart of all of your insecurities. It's a long and loud bellowing you pretend is a whisper. It's the nagging that makes you cry for “no reason” when you've been pushed against a wall or otherwise triggered from stress. It's the argument you're not willing to have because you're not willing to think about the consequences of doing so. It reinforces itself as it gains momentum across lax disciplines.

I tend to feel like I sound dramatic with many things I say. I, really, don't want to live a lie. I want whatever form my Big Lie takes to blindside me and burn the lesson into my skull. I live by the contradictory or contending thought. I breath the counter-example. I turn every best thing about me into a story of my failure to utilize them properly, and I shape every shitty misstep as a piece of the broader contextual whole.

I think the constant dance of not adopting The Big Lie is literally the voiced, written, and acted out consequences of the world. The responsibility is yours, to suffer or accept. I watch meth kill people and destroy families. Don't you know it “makes them feel better” and “isn't that big a deal?” I watch as we STILL do not comprehend that extinction-level suicidal forces are weaving their way past our collective psychological mechanisms that pull up. We're battered wives, isolated, without agency.

I think every drop of poisonous deception you allow, covers the surface and penetrates deep. A battle for hearts and minds so drowned in contemptuous seas is not a battle worth fighting. To even look for land, let alone a moral high ground, as the security The Big Lie provided proves an inadequate buoy induces panic. Feverishly afraid, we reach for heaven before going under.

We were asked today to go around the room, say who we were, and why we loved what we do at our job. I was the only one who led with, “I don't love what I do.” Was everyone around me lying? Only they'll know, but I suspect from some of their answers, it was easier to play along. This kind of thing happens dozens of times a day. How much do you like that blouse? Do you think you can do what's best for this family? Are you really that friendly and invested? The one note, played until you're dizzy with glee. If I never see you sad or angry, is that why you think I'm “negative,” and can't see or understand what makes me happy?

We're trapped into some form of illusory experience. Our brain takes shortcuts. We reinforce biases and fill in blanks meant to be blanks. This isn't The Big Lie, this is just the consequences of biology. Biology set conditions, we laid The Big Lie on top. Biology gave us many many pitfalls, and we celebrated them. The world bred us through death and sacrifice, and we called it GAIA, put Gods in the clouds, and worshiped the sun thinking it all eternal. And in our fear masked in deference, and praise scarred by resentment and scorn, we practice the rituals with withered shreds of dried hearts, for nothing beats. Music played for our ears only.

I'm going to continue to testify. I'm going to show what it means to be primed and prepared for everything to change in an instant. I'm not someone who should ever be believed in, just watched. I even hate that song, and now it's mine. The truth happens, and The Big Lie allows it to.

[797] Don't Mind If I Do

I'm hung up on the idea that I would ever consider myself, or call myself, “crazy.”

 

For me, “crazy” feels like a temptation. The better things are going on around me, I feel genuinely compelled to, mostly say, something ridiculous. For reasons I'd like to believe have to do with an appreciation for easily seen consequences, I don't. I flirt with saying crazy things, and to be sure, I try to push it when it comes to getting a laugh, but this annoying curiosity is a persistent devil in my ear.

I suppose I think about “crazy” because of how often it's used nonchalantly to describe aberrant human behavior. You'd have to be crazy to threaten to burn down your mother's house and hijack your kid to California, right? It's crazy to think about the confluence of forces that elect ignorant fascists. It was the craziest thing, he just swerved and I was almost run off the road!

 

Crazy suggests, at minimum, doing something unexpected and often destructive. Banal crazy is a bizarre song or off-putting set of noises and gestures that you can't make sense of. Crazy people “lose their mind,” suggesting it's a random assortment of behavior that could only result from dropping the responsibility to be coherent. That's what I find irrational compulsions to be. The gut “instinct” to burn something down, or be inappropriate, has nothing to do with talking through the feeling, or attempting to figure out if it can be eradicated.

 

There's a weird discussion about personal sovereignty and intention I could try to get into to muddy the waters, but I think it's enough to say, I like options, and I don't want to be too predictable. I like the idea of being the 1 in a million to do something, or prepared to do something, at any moment. That spark or creative energy runs both ways. While you can do something fun or goofy, like run into the direction sign while all the “normal” mall-walkers dutifully avoid, you can also scream bomb on an airplane, or opt for racial epithets in lieu of perfectly good four letter words, because “they're just words, man.”

 

Here seems to be where you distinguish between antagonism or provocation, and solicitation. The idea that you shouldn't be a dick seems rooted in the obvious idea that you don't like to be provoked. Solicitation street-walks a finer line, because maybe, just maybe, you're in the market for what someone is selling. People often want to laugh, and will forgive the bad taste if you acknowledge your pitch was sincere. People will denounce and avoid someone who gets off on the idea of everyone around them being angry.

 

I don't like the impulse. I think it's one of those unintended consequences of the strive to individuate your personality. Options, even bad ones, are just that. But even still, logically, behaving within a set of appropriate conversational and behavioral contexts will beget more options, so those can't be the pull alone. I'm pressed to ask, what is the impulse to destroy?

 

I think about this when it comes to eating like shit, being a little too loose with finances, and even picking at my skin. What prevents me from just “doing the right thing” all the time. That song still haunts me. Why would you ever seek to tarnish a legacy or identity?

 

I can speculate. One, you fundamentally don't believe in what truly constitutes a legacy or identity. Somewhere, not-that-deep down, I'm as fatalistic and “already dead” as they come. My infamy could get quoted in every book unto the ultimate heat death of the universe. And I won't even have to wait that long to stop caring. No matter how well things are going in my life, I'm pretty much always thinking about death. In that context, very little seems to matter.

 

More speculation, I'm afraid something may work. I'm deeply distrustful and very exhaustively tired of getting fucked by dumb foreseeable things. People who want to be my friend? People who want to show up? People I can talk to about anything indefinitely? I've fallen for everything before. I know I came out the other side touting my own openness and capacity to be a whipping boy, but why can't I protect myself and crack the whip first? I think of a video we watched in one of my job “trainings” of a kid who has experienced trauma and continues to do weird angry shit at her foster home. The parents don't understand her triggers, and the kid doesn't know how to cope. They all hug and still love her at the end! The message being the suggestion of unconditional love and the moral fortitude it takes to be a foster parent. They leave out how often kids like that rarely, if ever, get placed, and that trauma generally follows them the rest of their lives. This traumatized kid has resolved to go it mostly alone, write it out, and reduce things to dollar amounts.

 

Even further speculation, I resent the amount of responsibility I've taken on. Every new badge is one I watch people I'm endlessly frustrated with ignore. Why is it the responsibility of the few to carry so much weight? Is it literally the simplest explanation with math and Bell curves? Smart people have to carry the water because 60 million are ready and willing to Trump the place to hell? Motivated flirting-with-personality-disordered weirdos have to pass along the encouraging words and live to the fullest so the onlookers stay alive with half-hearted smiles and basic bitch dreams of their own? Where do I get off ever wanting “the world?” And why do I discover you're all exceedingly happy to let me try and take it?

 

Now, “crazy” for me looks like a test of my lashing out for sovereignty. That's right, it looks like we couldn't avoid going there. What's more different than what destruction looks like at the point all signs trend a single direction? Healthy relationships? Good habits? Money in the bank? Respect from your peers? Stuff galore? Looks good? Girl on your arm? It's tempting fate, so if you can bring it down first, you don't have to be surprised by the heart attack or car crash. You can inject death in a manageable way. Typing that sentence made me feel different.

 

While I respect and accept death, I don't really think I'm looking for it in any greater measure than it already occupies my thoughts. Occasionally, I even refrain from killing a bug and opt to let it back outside. I suppose it is noteworthy that at some level, I would like to be able to control what I see as inevitable destruction. Do you know how many times I've thought about my house burning down? Me creating an inventory is half OCD-adjacent fun, half hoping to make it easier to get my things back when they're gone.

 

How would this manifest in relationships? I actually do think open-ish relationships are natural and healthier, but would I press my luck with my ex knowing somewhere she wasn't really about it? I mean, that's arguably the relationship where my propensity to “get it over with” reached its most absurd and dangerous point. Housekeeping my facebook contacts is me not wanting to navigate the nonsense conversations pretending we still have anything in common besides drinking months or years from now.

 

It's such a cliché to be self-destructive like that, and I don't think I've gotten to the point of abject pathology for precisely that reason. Watching the idiots beg for punishment in my day job doesn't endear me to that behavior. I suppose in my language, I recognize them as wanting to die, they're just going about it in sloppier ways. Show up with a drug screen and 3 month backlogged therapy appointment to that environment...

 

Perhaps more innocently, I'm just bored with my own thoughts, and remain perpetually curious as to how they bounce off the things and people I like. If I like you, it's either because I exacerbate some level of pathological thinking in you, and make it fun, or maybe you're desperate to talk to someone who can't be triggered and needs to rush past the creative muck in order to get to a mutually understood exchange. You never find that place talking nice. You never share “the worst,” because, well, duh.

 

I'd still rather lose the thought to destroy and maintain the creative energy. I don't know that it can happen, but that I even wish for that makes me think I'm a centimeter better person than I considered myself before I thought to call myself “crazy.” I don't know that I really wish how my brain operates on anyone, so if you managed to get to the same places as mine all on your own, the possibilities between us are endless.

[796] Friendly Wager

I'm purely writing because I have a headache. Stupid thoughts about the future crept in.

I can feel how I've anchored my thoughts to the paycheck. I think to myself, “I can't do anything until...” or, “In 3 paychecks I'll be back to 'evenly broke.” I don't look for things to spend money on in between. I don't try to distract myself. I've zeroed in on paying off the credit cards, and then paycheck number 4 or 5, right around my birthday, I'll have “profit.” I'm hyper-obsessed with the dollar amounts at this point. Always in theory, I can start blowing money on nearly anything in the relatively short term. Here's $500 for more website work, why not? Here's a shit ton of supplies for the next room, or deck, or $600 to play on an excavator for a weekend.

My head is rushing to every possibility at once, because I haven't chosen. Part of me knows I'm perfectly content having what's “functional.” My clothing is an impressive assortment from things I got when they were too big to fit me right, to free and handed out at rallies or bars. Just like I never needed to bother getting a six pack to get laid, I never had to bother looking particularly fashionable. And then there's the whole impossible struggle with ever really giving a fuck what people think. You know, insofar as that can go for us normal adults.

Is there something to be gained if I were to just stop? Say I pay down this debt, and just pay my bills at the normal rate, and concentrate on stomaching the comforts as I've been enjoying them. Mind you, that's eating out and not thinking about the price of movie tickets, but it's not nothing. Is it enough? My mind and body say no before I begin typing the sentence. Why isn't it enough? Does it matter? Don't people tend to envy the drive (compulsion)? Don't I still have something to prove? Am I not still an indignant spite-filled ball of fuck you?

Of course I am. And any time I write a series of nonsense questions I don't intend to answer, nor have anyone address, it's because I'm lost in the sea of all of the things I'd be attempting to do with an ounce of access and dash of boredom. To not be able to help yourself to the creation of the future you imagine is not the same thing as an addiction to smoking. I mean, similar brain regions may be at play, but theoretically I'm not stressing myself out to the point of courting cancer in equal measure.

Maybe I'm just feeling exhausted with trying to account for it all. It's truly an impossible task to try and capture what happens when my mind hits “go.” It speaks to doing a dozen things at once, every drunk rant, and every brief glimpse at happiness for having pulled something off that seemed a world away. I'm surprised I don't routinely break out in tears every time I flip on the lights and adjust the temperature in my house. They were some of the smallest and relatively straight-forward things to account for that contributed an entire world of relief and appreciation I wasn't anticipating. Every ounce of mental satisfaction I ever discover, I will have desperately clawed from the abyss.

If people are the answer, I don't know what to make of finding the one's nearest me so...wanting. I don't know why I'm expected to pick up slack, but when need done so, I'm unreasonably insisted upon. I don't know why the sins of the past get erased for those with expectations of me, but my memory gets to be faulty and not trusted. I don't know why it felt like my duty and joy to entertain those who only grew in their resentment, why it's someone like my dad's obligation to forgive, or why those who seem to give and care need to feed the void of endless sacrifice.

Check the tapes. I was hoping for an oasis where all of the desperate, depressed, broke friends could live cheap. My first instinct was to build a house bigger than I needed so I could retain the people I had under my roof. Byron recalled, “Sometimes I think back and wonder, what went wrong?” Half joking, half not, when we went to the land to drop of the TVs, wondering what drove me out there. The story is written in excruciating detail. I don't know how you can miss it.

I want to retain or put my money to work. I want to be able to invite and account for those I claim to care about. I want to live the example of the kind of people I'd like to know more of. Those willing to sacrifice, and work, and focus, and live for their actual dreams instead of their negotiated realities. I want people who revel in their discomfort, because reprieve means victory over a worthy foe. I want people to believe in themselves and what they can accomplish as much as I do. It was supposed to be a reinforcing feedback loop and launch pad. It was supposed to be chances to safely testify and contribute to a shared future that wasn't marred by our hellish politics and doom for the future. There were many secrets and things to learn in pursuing this house and land. I always knew I could “work a job” and get paid to dress up and pretend.

I feel I've been in this shell for so long. The realities of doing the coffee shop in the mall crashed into me. The reality of having people who give no fucks beyond their next meal and digital racecar soccer match in my life. Increasingly, I feel totally removed from the arbitrary grabs at power Byron is pursuing, seemingly on point until he gets as bored as I do and casually adopts a new uniform or agenda. But I'm supposed to take him more seriously than he takes me?

Yes, buried in here is frustration for him as well, as his insistence regarding my move-out timeline and progress for nondescript “plans” is making me feel, well, whatever is less connotatively impactful than “mentally abused.” I'm pretty sure he somewhat resents how much I want to get away. (Every girl I've ever dated and offended friend to the point of broken relationship has their jaw drop through the floor at the audacity.) He's turning bully, I'm turning him into the litany of people I've had to learn to disregard. It's crass to reduce a 20+ year relationship to the last task you needed help with in moving TVs right? Here's to everyone forgetting my floor is what happened between me and my mom. Obviously, I was broken early, and none of you are safe. But feel free to look back through the record on which of us deviated from the reasonably predictable mean. Shit, more irony, he's as predictable as me.

Meantime. I need meaningful time. Lucky for me, even if I don't have friends, I'm going to get to see friends on Thursday and over the weekend. I'll get to do the mentally placating thing of “taking back” my agency by calling in a sick day (oooh naughty!). #fuckingkillme. I'm craving the day to day of physically chopping away at the challenges the land presents me. How many holes there are left to dig! I have a giant pile of shit I need to light on fire and not let get out of control! I need more bathroom, less dusty mud pit! In the (mean)time, I'll keep chugging along at work. Turns out, I actually am perfectly suited for this kind of gig in everything but driving philosophy. Collected crazy can commune with crazy in a tone that isn't condescending and with an underlying threat that doesn't provoke lashing out that wasn't coming anyway. It's still weird to be so perfectly and ill-suited at the same time.

If it's any consolation, I don't know why it would be, I feel less “rushing all over the place to nowhere” than I did before I started. My head still hurts and I’m still clenching, but, you know.

[795] First To Last

I'm pausing halfway through one of, if not the, best episode of Game of Thrones I've seen. I don't even know if this will have anything to do with the show, but this is feeling like the thing I need to do before I finish it.

I went to a bookstore today. I looked around and then eventually asked if they had the two latest Firefly books. The cute hippie-adjacent girl said they didn't have anything by the author, and then said, “You know, if it's meant to be, it'll be.” She smiled, and settled back into her, what I take to be generally chill life and work task at hand. Of course, as pleasurable a sentiment as I'm sure that is for her own life, I'm moved to disagree. Before she offered that sentiment, she said they could order it if I wanted. I'd also bet that she's heard of Amazon. I also already have the books on Kindle.

Nothing, to me, is “meant to be.” The essence of the drama and perpetual confusion in life is that things are indefinite and indeterminate. We're watching. We're watching our favorite shows, and watching the stories play out in our books. We're fictionalizing our past and present in order to cope and move past and generate “Hang in there baby!” sentiments to usher later generations along. You weren't meant to find your spouse or have your kids. You weren't meant to find a lost kitten and nurse it back to health. It wasn't written in the clouds that I was to walk out of that bookstore without hard copies.

If it was, “responsibility” wouldn't be a thing. “Justice” would be a laughable notion. “Progress” would be impossible. That is to say, all of that could also be true, and I'm flatly upside down on your God's vision for us all. Fine, but then the conversation's over, you don't get to lament either of us ending up in hell, and you've without irony robbed your savior of the reason to forgive people. That things aren't meant to be is what makes them special and worth fighting for. That things could go in more directions than you could imagine is why we continue to watch familiar themes in different worlds. Even if it's an old joke to consider which Game of Thrones characters are going to die anymore, you still don't know. Even if I know which Firefly characters have died, I still don't know what's in store for who's left.

What you don't know is what keeps you going. The fork interaction where someone you meet wisps you away. The state you find yourself in after enough new or difficult experiences. I was reading old blogs. So much of myself is still right here in what I wrote 7 or more years ago. I'm still hashing the same fights, carrying the same stress, still befuddled beyond befuddlement at how so much could go so wrong, while I otherwise seem to enjoy a regal, albeit with the loneliness of a king, life. I don't know what tomorrow brings. I don't know when I'll find myself no longer clenching my jaw. I don't know how quickly things can shift to dramatically worse or better. A car swerved into my lane today as I was coming back from the land. The driver completely ran me off the road in order for me to avoid getting hit. Her, teary-eyed and shaking, I catch up with 30 yards up the road and learn it stalled and she lost control, my initial anger immediately quashed.

It happens that quickly. That's the kind of danger and death scenarios always at play in my head. That's how I stopped getting “shocked” when one of my favorite characters dies. We're already dead. We're already living the high-stakes shootout depicted a thousand times. We're screaming out our battle cry with every painful experience and doubt, and defying the gods by continuing to exist. When you invest yourself and your experience that dramatically, you can let everyone die around you, because the larger war with death is here.

I almost got it perfectly wrong the other night. I thought I was going to write my first blog from the land, annoyed that I couldn't get moving as fast as I wanted in dropping off my TVs. I wanted to arrange and pay out the ass to do something “unnecessarily now.” And I wanted to take the indifferent posture of those around me as a deep hatred for me. I forget that it's never really personal. However selfish and insistent I think I might be, I'll never compare to the world around me. My battle, my story, has to remain that. My war is how I'm killing myself.

For all of my words over the years, it occurred to me that I've never invented one. Everything about “me” is a collection of things, abstracts, grunts and sounds handed down to me. What if I didn't have language? Who would I think I was? What if every single “why” had to manifest as a course of action in the world to find out the result? It's a trippy place to consider. How many horrible words could you use to beat yourself up with if you didn't know them? How meaningful would your relationships register if you didn't have the story superimposed over what they felt, or didn't feel, like? What direction would you head if north, west, east, and south were as arbitrary a path as how you experience wind?

The warriors would excite you. The bold and beautiful would put you under a spell. The dedicated and reliable you'd put yourself near. The curious would show you where to look. The fearful you'd try to protect and comfort. It's as simple as the envy we hold for pets in their singular focus or expectations. I create a story along the direction I want to go. Whether it's as brilliant as a classic, or perfunctory as the CW, I'm going to attract or repel the cast best suited for the narrative. This fire-breathing dragon needs to keep incinerating the dead.

[794] Stapled Nuts

Let's start with the easy and “stupid” point of frustration: How do “jobs” work?

It doesn't matter where you go. Whether you are flipping burgers, or case-managing families, it usually takes 5 whole minutes before someone, somewhere, puts voice about how to do something differently. It isn't always clear that it's “better,” but dissatisfaction is always just beneath the surface. The burger place employee says they shouldn't be so understaffed, and it would help not contaminate food ping-ponging between doing the dishes, and assembling orders. Well, yes, you filthy idealist, but the company is concerned about the bottom line, and yours costs a lot.

Invariably, you'll have the person who's “been doing it” for many years. They actually have more than a few good insights on how to do what they do better. Some, I would say exceptionally few, companies have open-door easy communication up and down the chain. Moreover, when the idea is actually a good one, they may put it into practice in days or weeks instead of years, if at all. I've never worked at a company like this. The status quo, in my experience, is to not or never bother to offer some kind of improvement. No one there is trying to improve, they're trying to get paid and move on with their lives.

This posture I feel is part of a larger frustration at the base of lesser-worthwhile existences. If and when you can identify the better thing, and what's stopping you from its implementation goes beyond personal preference, pragmatism, or access, and you don't, I think that lived damming contradiction eats away at you. At least, for me it does.

Little things. We live in the future. We're accessible. Email should be responded to sooner than 10 days. I know you're not that busy, we have the same job. Just as you should respond to texts and abandon the memory of the word “fax.” Pretending people are reading and digesting ever-changing “policy.” Destroying your leadership and promoting people out of desperation instead of value and vision. I guess that's a big thing because I don't fret too often over the small stuff. You'll spend millions on software that functions worse than pen and paper.

It's not just that there's no real question about why I feel compelled to create my own thing, it's that this is the new categorically imperative thing. You have to do better than this. We have to talk to each other smarter than this. We have to react quicker. We have to be held more accountable to our downtime and the reality about what we can and can't pull off. It HAS TO exist. I don't care about the mean. I don't care about the happy stories here and there meant to prop up the artifice of value and morality. Every venture has it's peculiar problems and nature? No, you only develop specific kinds of problems when you allow things to be build around the wrong focus.

This is why, practically, you can never fix things. Large organizations exist as a confluence of forces well beyond your initiative and do-gooder spirit. They mean too many things and the rust can't be buffed away. The question for them becomes whether they are more living or dying. The “change change change” is rarely accounted for as good or bad unless it meets a target set relative to what many started to consider “too far.” We're down 34%! Okay? So, that's good? What if tweaking this instead of that, it would have been 70%? Should we be proud of running a quarter mile on broken feet, or decide to put away the gun we've been using to shoot them?

Thank me I've never quit. Thank me I found the land and had mind enough to save up for it. Thank me I've never stopped working at things I hate because I revel in the ideas and future that will account for them all. Thank me I can still recognize what I would never ignore if I had the means, method, and opportunity to fix and do better NOW. Increasingly, that “better” wants to get selfish and ignore the irony, no doubt a symptom of the system I'm entrenched in. The better idea is there, and captured, and struggling. When it gets its day, I hope to erase the stain of what existing like this has left on me.

[793] Oi Oi Oi

I'm going to try to account for why a few lines I've heard recently are stilling ringing around my head.

My builder and I sat down, and he discussed some of the things going on with his family. He had bought and improved a space that he said was one day meant for his granddaughter. “A kid should always have a place to come home to,” was his line.

The next one came from a TV show I can't recall (Russian Doll?) and amounted to the idea of attaching yourself to people because they're all we have.

Finally, an oddball character I met at Beerfest said, “You have celebrity energy.”

I think when you have reciprocity, many of the most endearing messages about what people are supposed to be to each other are allowed to come into focus. The routine taking advantage of people who look out for you is what has shaped my broad pull away from romanticizing “the provider” kind of narrative. The idea of having someone, anyone, to do things with is a compelling drive. Surely, what turned my talkative endearing drunk phone calling into “death would be a relief” blog narrative was ruminating on the futility and idiocy of drinking alone.

Where do I bring it back to? I've felt for a long time like I didn't really have a home. My apartments always an array of roommates with ever-worsening excuses to leave me hanging. My dad's house filled with stooge step-children and annoying hell-beast dachshunds. This couch sleeping saga has only normalized to the level of my deflated “everythingness” that's matched my particular story of over-worked and under-paid. 12 years after leaving “home” I'm poised to finally start establishing mild roots in something I'd flip in a heartbeat if the money were right.

Part of me is always in a detached floating place. I had a coworker tell me, “I can't read you,” seemingly defying every time someone's told me I wear everything I'm thinking on my face. I can't read me until I put words down. I'm in a constant pursuit of a mild self-assuredness. I'm in the business of mental condensing. I want loose ends tied or burned. I want to exist in the place that doesn't feast on some hidden room of self-loathing or unresolved question when the alcohol takes hold. I used to black out and shower everyone around me with praise. Now it's kind of a toss up with which dumb idea or conversation is going to grip me.

I'm going to take a sick day tomorrow. In drinking, I basically sacrificed two days in functioning and feeling okay, so Monday is going to be my do things that should have been done over the weekend day. I'm still finding it harder than I'd like to persuade myself that my job means anything or is going anywhere. You have to understand too, I couldn't do anything more or less. As is my custom, I've even emailed the head of the entire agency about where I could fit in to “do more.”

What would a celebrity do? What does it mean to have that kind of energy? Is it confidence? I mean, I didn't see anyone else catching raindrops on their tongue from cracks in the ceiling. Why am I still fascinated with the amount of people I can recognize and build entertainment relationships with in all of my show watching? Should I be like them? Disappear into role after role. Will all of my depravity unearthed in writing just testify to my celebrity persona one day? Built into the lore of something to be endlessly caricatured? What's celebrity mean in this modern environment anyway? Aren't there teenagers on YouTube who are treated as bigger than Beyonce? I guess, at least I don't know those teenagers' names.

What was the theme of this blog again? People? Attaching to them? Building roots where your offspring can always feel at home. The more I think about the idea of pairing up or kids the more I feel sick. I feel like I'd be doing it for my own entertainment or experiment. I don't know that I would pick large-enough portions of my life and relationships to suggest signing up someone new to it. I'd want to have the semi-insulated space to cultivate out the things that worked their way into me to no positive end. I want to give a touch of hopeful naivety more time to instantiate.

I think a lot about how I have changed in that way. Why do I shoot so high? Well, that came first. All of my damning sentiments and despotic takes only came after a very long series of shitty interactions with way too many people. That's hard to process. Where do you go when people don't want honesty? How do you respond to cowards? Where do you hide what people are trying to steal? What language do you build when you're talking to yourself because no one seems to understand you, and if they do, they never respond with anything but derision and judgement? Or, they act like silence isn't as much of a statement as anything.

It makes me rough. It makes me indelicate. It makes me insist, and grind my teeth, and look for excuses to emote after drinking. It keeps me looking for things I've already found but left me or got disorganized. I think it also makes people look for ways to tear you down. There's nothing like the secret dramatic irony of rooting for people to fail and win all at once depending on the degree of your own success or failure in life. Maybe there's my pocket celebrity claim. Some of you have perhaps been watching this humble blogger ride the crazy train for many years.

[792] Sick Son of a Bitch

I really, really, don't now how to write this blog. If it's any indication, it started on the second line, as though I hit enter before I began. What a mess, what a mess indeed.

I might just wait until tomorrow.

--------

Here we are, an hour or so later, and I'm incredibly annoyed.

 

First, I just feel sick. My head is flirting with explosion. My stomach is wrenching. I'm in a bad, bad way physically. If you read this like a nice little skip along, just remember, I've puked before, and am constantly considering puking again, while I try to capture my thought process.

 

I just texted an old friend. This old friend I'm fairly sure “hates” me under the presumption that I've raped one of her friends. This is the kind of place I'm occupying. I'm just fucking sick of things lingering. I'm tired of old prejudices and assumptions and really shitty justification defining the back rooms of my head or defining how I engage with the world.

 

She hasn't responded, of course.

 

I'm perpetually dizzy. The mild to intense pain in my temple serves to stir my stomach. I go in an out of feeling like I can deal with it with the world's most pretentious show paused in my peripheral. The Story of Film telling me how camera angles and story-tellers helped define eras. I can barely hold back the vomiting. The “revolutionary” wide-angle camera lens can eat my dick.

 

I'm in an impossibly conflicted space right now. I've met half this town through the course of my job, and none of them were at the Beer Fest. I occupied this space of upper-middle class people pretending to zero in on their beer tastes. I paid $55 for the privilege of getting there an hour early. I tossed the excess I felt was offered in over-pours.

 

I haven't really been in the mood to drink for years. What are you to do, by yourself, when you buy the ticket months in advance? I don't have friends, so it's not like I got to discuss the nuances. I didn't get to crack jokes or turn it into a shared memory. What was the point? Why is it midnight, me having slept half the day, me feeling like shit, typing this garbage trying to nail something fucking arbitrary to the ground?

 

I think the longer you live, the more you want to die. The baggage piles up. The floor of your relationships figures out a way to corrupt itself.The inability to recover reminds you bodily it's time to sleep very hard. It's a weird thing to say, but moments like this, I don't even want to die, but I do. I envy the endless rest. I wouldn't have to fight for my remotely noble space in the world. I won't have to piss and match. I could just die. I could just sleep and never wake up for work. Never take on the responsibility of all that with which I've tasked myself with creating. Never pretend as though my “impact” is much beyond the private ridiculous and personal eulogies whomever took to my page to let you know I'd died would experience.

 

Right now, things suck. They suck hard. They want to puke, again. They hate the idea of everyone they've ever met who isn't prepared to talk this instant about their shitty opinions about me. This moment is fucking dizzy and direct and just fucking angry. I can't close my eyes. I can't stare at the screen. Typing makes me want to puke up the pills I've swallowed. Just fuck it all.

[791] There Goes Gravity

Think I just wanna take a stroll.

It never ceases to amaze me. Now. I had a memory of turning incorrectly during a practice driving session as a teenager. Drifting into the next lane as I turned, thinking to myself, “I should probably just go with it, but we were taught to maintain our lane as we turn” and proceeding to “correct” myself before the teacher swerved me back to the “wrong” path. Even if there wasn't a car next to me, it was close enough that cutting back would have been dumb. Part of me registered it would be dumb. I'd been anchored in something I learned in class.

There's something of an infinite anchor list, no? Down to which of your genes bother to turn on and off. I wonder pretty consistently why I don't appear to be in abjectly terrible health with the amount of fast food I eat. I think my body figured out when I was younger, when it all began, that this was “food,” and figured it out. I'm not saying I'm in particularly good shape or anything, but I manage to not look at myself disgusted nor think I'm ever more than that 2 to 3 months of actual effort before I start showing off before and after pictures. My body is anchored to the shitty food I was raised on.

It might come as no surprise that anchored ideas I find the most interesting. The love stories. The cultural mythologies related to family. The specificity of different areas and time periods in what they're going to take pride in or be willing to die for. I think about how deep those anchors must go for us to be persistently flirting with totalitarian thinking. I think about the murdered relationships and never-weres because people never left the land of their first ideas. I think about how, if you're “now,” you've an infinite capacity to reside in the deepest joy and harshest pain of whatever idea it is you're observing at the moment.

I'm subscribed to a subreddit dedicated to asking women over 30 questions. Today there were stories about 4 or 17 year relationships, husbands dying, things fizzling out, and then people finding their current love and never being happier. There's desperate 30ish women looking for rays of sunshine in their lonely or heartbroken space that's just now beginning to realize the special connection with their boyfriend in high school wasn't the kind of healthy thing shared between functioning adults. Everyone's “now” exists one click away from the last. Your single digit years relationship went bust? HAD 4 OF THOSE SISTER! And the surviving guy is the best so far!

Reading that kind of stuff makes the problems that have been related to me about my relationships feel exceptionally petty. But then, I've been reading the opinions and offered wisdom of old people since I had internet access. The drama has always felt, fundamentally, boring. The work of tearing through your first love and constant reminding yourself of death just wishes people would get over themselves and have another drink. That's kind of the energy and perspective I'm always looking for, I just got there 30 or 40 years too early. I'm still in the bracket where people say without irony what lengths they'll go to have a kid if they aren't married and pregnant by 35.

I consider when I've said I don't really have a conception of “forgiveness.” My new best stab at what it, incorporating “now,” would look like keeping whatever the offense is in your mind while you do your best with the person in front of you. “You broke my heart....okay, can I buy you an ice cream cone?” “You murdered my son....okay, I still don't think advocating for the death penalty is the best at-large decision.” “You shattered something that will never be repaired....okay, here's what I have to say about it, and now I can take responsibility for myself and how I'll go forward.” Forgiveness as a function of a kind of resilience I could understand. Forgiveness as a measure of pragmatism is, practically, a cop-out.

I don't know how often I want to “be forgiven.” I want to be talked to. I want to be taken seriously. But when I think back to times in which people have offered “forgiveness,” it's come with that condescending or matter-of-fact string. “I forgive you, foolish animal, you don't know any better.” “I forgive you, for I am pious and perfect in my exercise.” “I forgive you, will that make you shut up now?” God forgiving your sins comes with the presumption of guilt. To the extent you want to keep blaming other people for what neither of you tries to understand, perhaps the forgiving instinct grows. Old, tired, people no longer willing to bother, forgive you your brash and ignorant youth. What a better time to let things go then as life beckons letting go of you?

I just feel weird. I'm still as present in some of my memories as I am writing this now. And given that memory is but a tool, I wonder if I'm still hammering away at the same project, or if there's a singular space we all inhabit. I wonder if that ability to inhabit it is choice or circumstance. I wonder if any, or every, message is being translated through it. I wonder if I clench my jaw because there's something wrong with me, or what I'm connected to. I wonder if our future or inevitable demise are determined in the infinitely indeterminate.

When I'm even more obscenely wealthy, I already know what I'm going to do. I'm going to invite everyone. I'm going to look for more lasting images and impressions of what “now” means, and I'm already coping with the letdown and the surprise smile or sentiment that tricks me into thinking it was all worth it. I'm gonna pause and look around, and briefly pretend to reminisce on every conversation and cost that went into making the picture look the way it does around me. I'm going to be as poking around in the dark and floating around lost “then” as I am “now.”

[790] Wish I Was A Baller

Dammit, I feel like I'm avoiding writing, so having basically just woke up, I'm forcing myself to.

Today, it's a mild temperature, mildly damp, and I am attempting to start a kickball group at work. I sent out the initial invitation on Thursday after an opening sign-up sheet and introduction email explaining our Midwestern pattern of “rain 2-3 days, spring 2-3 days, freeze 2-3 days” will result in quasi-short notice and potentially canceled attempts to trap a Saturday game in a good window of that cycle. I'm growing mildly obsessed with the “fallout” of this attempt. I'm having naive patriot who hadn't quite wrapped their head around what war means levels of PTSD.

This isn't the first time I've been the “event planner.” Inviting people to things and trying to be “extra” is a familiar space. I want to over-prepare. I want to buy bases in case the fields are occupied, I want to bring drinks, and Frisbees, or dodgeballs and baseball netting for an impromptu field and alternatives. I want to offer a dozen reasons for the decision to cancel or tough it out. I want to pretend like I wouldn't really only rather be out drinking or grabbing lunch with 2 or 3 of the people who signed up.

Starting things is hard. You have the initial “enthusiasm gap.” The same “We have to try your coffee sometime!” before walking right on by is the same, “Dodgeball sounds fun!” No one buys into ideas that aren't their own until they make them their own. The kind of twisted irony that would make me “like my job” is doing exactly not my job of my own volition, building a kind of coalition with people I would otherwise never engage with. I stayed at Showplace through horrible management times because they felt like familiar friends.

Now, it's even more complicated. These people are adults. They both extra don't give a shit one way or another, and they're DCS people. They're used to switching on and off in a moment's notice, persistent let-downs, and professional lack of sympathy or regard. This has to be an open door and be an easy option, or they'll be happy to dismiss something that feels like an impeding obligation just as quickly as the “budding adult syndrome” drained the old college crowd from giving a shit about waterslides and bowling.

So, wait a minute, maybe I've just stumbled into something positive by canceling on account of rain. I've led with, perhaps anchored, in accordance with the leading sentiment. This is kind of how it's going to be, probably too wet most of the time. By the time we ever get around to actually playing something, it'll have whittled down into the handful of people who've psychologically held up the prospect as worthwhile. I'll also get to demonstrate a level of “cool,” in projecting I don't give a shit one way or another, and not as though my entire existence and potential for friendship or companionship rides on the weather. (I'm hearing echoes of the panic and lament the impact from the weather has had on getting my house completed.)

I need to find ways to release the cobbled dust of my best laid plans into the wind more regularly. For reasons I've, for many years, been unable to simply “fix” or refrain from engaging in, I get deeply invested, at least bodily, to the point of the jaw clenching and stomach dropping and compulsion to run outside and crash test the grass and sand to really feel like circumstances beyond my control are the reason you have an hour or two of your Saturday back. To be sure, I'm probably going to make a drive-by of the park at some point today, silently praying it's too muddy.

Once you put all of the internal strife aside, how to address the kind of confusion and resentment for the people who sign up, but never respond to emails? In this scenario, you're literally across the aisle from them, and they won't tell if they're down to play. The hodgepodge of hardly-enthusiasm doesn't seem to bode well for the endeavor. I've seen as well people grow to resent “being included,” preferring you to have read their intentions in their lack of response or buy-in over time, grasping at the straw of their initial interest.

This is all really just reminding me why I've developed a kind of dickish tough skin. People compel me to walk into situations with a “no skin off my ass” attitude, hand in hand with the insistence, creative work-arounds, and over-explanations for how things could or should run. What's the alternative? Lazily accepting or dismissing whims of fancy? And to know that people broadly feed off your enthusiasm and organization while blithely projecting they could take it or leave it as just another thing! It's a mindfuck how to go about leading or starting something if you don't have the vision and coping skills. I don't want to look like I've given up too easily, aren't organized, didn't really mean kickball when I said kickball, or am not taking myself seriously. I also don't want to act like you don't care or have your own lives and concerns, so there's always a reason you're blowing off the email. Is kickball the arena where you're allowed to accept less from other people than you would from yourself?

Shit, there's another great hidden layer of conflict. How can you conduct yourself honestly, and not feel obligated to certain kinds of reactions and behaviors? If I “really” want people to play, shouldn't I find palliative ways to insist? If I “really” would rather cancel the whole idea and just invite a couple out to drink, shouldn't I send a frank and dismissive email citing lack of interest and naming those who've betrayed the whole endeavor? This is about not shitting where you eat though. This is extra credit once the homework is done. It can't be a necessary leg to continue what I'm doing. If I relegate it to after-thought status, I can cope with objectionable behavior. That's the coping secret and reminder more broadly. I'm an after-thought. It'd be more useful were I not forged of defiance.