[848] So Close To Scoring

I've finished two thought-provoking books in the last week that I want to riff on.

The first, The Body Keeps The Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, is basically the pinnacle of what you ever could know about our current understanding of trauma and how to treat it. The second, Can't Hurt Me, Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds, by David Goggins is one man's story of overwhelming amounts of trauma both inflicted upon and self-inflicted.

Goggins' book I like because it transported me back to the obsessive focused place I was in when I decided I was an “entrepreneur” and had to “simply do” whatever was in front of me to get to the end. It didn't matter if it was ten or two hundred phone calls. It didn't matter if it was early or late. It didn't matter if I didn't have the money or got hurt. Goggins ridicules the word “motivated,” which I understand. I wasn't motivated. I was convinced. I knew the end and what it had to look like.

Living like that is analogous to the faithful. It's an irrational endless push towards an end that is hardly as defined as you'd like to claim. It's the infinite well of justification. It's a pious position on top of your hill. And, as physically manifested in Goggins, it will eventually knot you up until you die. It's an invigorating and intoxicating drug and mythical place where your goal is the only goal. If you occupy it, you are practically guaranteed success. The catch is the narrow definition of that success and a craving for your next fixation.

I appreciate how Goggins discusses things in intimately personal terms. He's talking about his literal psychosis and uses the verbiage that works for him. He doesn't want you to become a Navy Seal or beat the shit out of your body. He wants you to understand that there literally is no excuse and the fear or laziness that permeate all of the little things will run you if you don't run yourself. You have to orient yourself to what is difficult. You have to sacrifice comfort. You have to organize around the things that speak to your deepest insecurities and honest desires. When he was on the verge of death, he felt at peace reflecting on what he had achieved and why. We should all be so lucky.

I think recognizing that capacity in yourself is important. I don't think you need to be cranked up to 11 at all times. I don't think you need to destroy your body and relationships. I don't think that even were you to achieve world domination, it matters much if you were in a blacked-out haze awoken only by the license you give yourself to describe your position at the “top.” I grew more zen about the idea of being “better than everyone.” I can be me. I can't be you. You, absolutely, have important things vitally important to me being the best me. That calloused mind place about you and your effort alone has no room for other people.

Modernity is born of countless calloused minds. Before we could flirt with horrid ideas like “safe spaces,” every single one of us knew there was no such thing, and we knew it because the death and pain and struggle of survival was playing out in real time. Arguably, a huge portion of impoverished or targeted groups kept that “real” spirit alive, while the comfortable and entitled among us pretended the world ebbed and flowed with our first-world posture. For those not markedly defined by, or interested in getting a handle on early trauma, the rest of the world is going to look like a very foreign and hostile place.

That's what we are. We are traumatized by life itself. There are many languages to describe it. There are a dozen schools of thought currently competing on the best ways to treat it. And, frankly, we're babies who've just babbled out the concept of trauma, and are struggling to translate its true consequences.

Just like you can only know the conversation you're having with yourself, the varying kinds of trauma and how or who it hits are infinitely complex. As such, when people tell you to de-escalate, be kind, or otherwise find the “love” for your neighbor that you might for your dog if not yourself, it's an appeal to actually learning what it is you or they are mad at or hurt about. I might be able to reliably predict a handful of pathological behaviors or conditions associated with certain kinds of trauma, but that doesn't mean I appreciate the holistic environment that would lend itself to healing or preventing further damage.

This is where we wade into the undulations of culture wars. We disregard the trauma of being raised Black in The United States. We eventually get the violent disregard thrown back in our face. Ironically, even when it isn't violent, we're fascinated with those who are, almost as if a guilty conscience is trying to keep everyone on the same stupid playing field desperately justifying.

I've had the thought that as the world seems to be burning down in a more countable and palpable fashion than all of the “war-on” rhetoric could ever convince me of, I feel more stable. I don't know what to make of this. It's almost like the turmoil around me is giving me a chance to prove that the way I've attempted to organize my life is proving vital and important. When the world shuts down, where are you living? When the food goes bad, what can you grow? Where the streets are filled with violence, what's the refuge? When you're feeling stifled and looking for a way to express or create, do you have the money, time, room, help, or visible reminders that you're making progress? I used to stare out of my security cameras and see a dirty block path in overgrown weeds. Now I see a driveway, airstream, and recently laid out floor for a home extension.

I regard my place in life as less a description of “progress” though, and more a vibing on a personal theme. My anxiety about ever experiencing peace and comfort notwithstanding. I have a level of person I desire as company. I have a nature of conversation I prefer over others. I have an assumption of work in service to a kind of life I want for myself and others. I've said several times over years, I'm already at the top. I was at the top when I had all of my time during drug study life. I was at the top being able to drink and whore around in college. Hell, I was at the top having a Mini Cooper in high school and in every instant that resembles when I heard on the marching band field “Everyone play this next section but Nick!” because I was loud and clean and setting the bar. I was less interested in how to get everyone to my level, but I was also 16.

I try to walk the line of comfort and appreciation for where I'm at, while throwing myself into the next challenge. Tomorrow, I have to start deconstructing a shed I got a killer deal on. It'll be hot, dangerous enough, a bit of a drive, and involve problem solving I hope matches the tear-down I did for my shed-turned-bathroom. Then I get to remember that with one primary tool, an almost perfectly inept and dramatic stranger, and two days, we got that shed moved the same distance. Oh ya, I can say to myself, it's been worse and also confusing or complicated, and I got a bathroom out of it.

I don't know what the analogous road is for you, mostly because I never really hear people's desires anymore after they've been self-shamed into complacency. The forever-point will be that you can literally start today. I always need help and want to enable you. It will not necessarily be easy. It won't happen overnight. What I gather from the most prevalent story though is that it isn't going to happen at all. I hope things like protests and pressure and the anger and resentment that drove/drive me make their way into the story of why you're operating the way you are in any one moment. You don't need to be irrationally faithful to hold yourself accountable, speak honestly, learn where to fit, or turn and face a fear.

My “fears” for lack of a better term are as straight-forward so to be rendered pointless (like, not wishing to be sick or hurt) or abstract enough I struggle to know where to begin a description. I fear “not proving.” And to be sure, I mean to myself. More than afraid though, I'm curious. I'm obsessed. I'm convinced. The fear is missing out on the game. I've got FOMO for my own life. The intellectual part of me knows it's going to take years, the experimentation, and learning how to fill in where I fuck up, but I can imagine tackling the “better problems” of having “more fundamental” pieces to my envisioned future. How many “if only I had!....” sentiments can your mind ring out when you've already been given the world?

That's where I probe for peace in the infinite now. I already have all the pieces. I'm living in the future. What I “really” want is probably something simple, like to pour concrete and see the wood and dirt look a little different. I want to ease the stress and drama for those I care about and share memories and food (or be willing to buy you more food as I don't really like to share food). I want the “mildly-drunk Nick P.” sensation to rule most of my moments and remain open and flexible and challenged to creatively solve before mindlessly venting. I want to perceive the changes in service to feeling better or living, and amplify them. And when the memory or violence of trauma can be utilized, viciously defend my creation.

But right now, the vast majority of my nows, are very good if not for a great many others. I hope I can be part of translating and building a perpetual better now.

[847] Chains

I am not free. It's an excruciatingly obvious thing to state. I am bound by some mess of internal moralism, physical limitations, and every practical reality of my setting known and unknown.

Freedom, for as often as it is invoked, is extremely complicated. The naive wish to “be free” summarily dismisses the negative consequences. If you want the freedom to be an asshole, you are free to take a punch. Interpersonally it's easier to understand, adding to the irony when you hear a young person on the beach during a pandemic say “fuck em.”

I'm thinking about freedom right now because I don't feel free to enjoy my last night of vacation. Tomorrow, I'm back to using the vast majority of my time and brain space mitigating poor, ignorant, and stressed out people's problems with the handful of meager tools allotted to me. I get to dream about figuring out a way to automate Word forms to exponentially increase my time doing even more sideways and fundamentally inadequate ways to be a part of the system. I get to wake up earlier than my body positively responds to to field questions like, “Are you happy to be back?” yuck yuck.

While I was “free” this last two weeks, I read exactly 0 books after ordering 10 from Amazon. I got my concrete pillars installed this evening, finding one reason or other besides the weather to prevent me from doing so sooner. I played no video games if you consider Rockband actual guitar practice, and while I'm not filled with absolute dread at the idea of returning, I know I'm going to be working very hard to play into my “take over this organization” vibe so I stay out of the realm screaming “none of this matters and isn't helping.”

The kind of freedom I desire I don't think I've ever had. When I had money in the bank, I didn't have land. I have land, but still bills. The projects I add to my plate are supposed to be in the name of fun and experimentation, and let me tell you, it takes doing it, stepping back, and reflecting on what you're desperate to forget how hard it was to learn, before that fun and experimentation feels like a wise decision. My time this last two weeks has been about finding a resting point and continued escape from thinking about work. It wasn't about enjoying what I had, it was about running from what's coming.

I don't feel bad insofar as I got caught up on a ton of shows and actually did accomplish a fair amount of pretty strenuous work. If anything, starting vacation having provoked myself into the takeover mindset probably set me up to “fail” at vacation regardless. I'm returning to a field that is still far and away the easiest thing I've ever done for money. I, occasionally, actually help people and provide a reasonable and calm tone with good information to a situation that, even after dealing with us, never managed to find its way. The work matters, but still not to me, or at least not yet.

I'm exhausted and invigorated by the work I did today. I look properly Peruvian with the amount of sun I've gotten. I go to Lowes almost every day. We actively discuss the dozen things we want to create every day. The reality of a consistent paycheck keeps sounding the alarm. The “practical” fact that insurance, and debt, and health matter bookend every consideration. My model is still built around money. I still have not separated my physical presence and engagement from my ability to collect. I don't want to lazily invite anyone to park and rent, but freedom to waste as much time on a video game or getting really good at clean picking technique does not happen until I don't have the harbinger of “labor for someone else” hanging over me. Not labor, just for someone who doesn't care, who will never care, how efficiently or smart I can be.

How do I get to prove it to myself? Taking over DCS would hint at it. These home improvements are reminiscent of the efforts it took to get the coffee shop going. Sooner than we both think I'll be making statements like, “Oh, you can't build a home extension in a week? All you have to do...” I spend a lot of time thinking about the under-considered expenses and investments of time before I run headlong into things, but there is something invigorating about making a snap decision and drilling down until it's done. For all of the effort it's taken to organize these free books for Amazon, I didn't spent my break listing them. I suspect it's an almost impossible to profit endeavor. I'll truly be “free” when I think it's a good idea to knock something like that out.

I really think I'm going to have to be obnoxious in my takeover. I need the thing above the thing to focus on, like an overwhelming desire to embarrass or shame and spite impulse. You think I'm trying to make things “better,” while I chuckle and go “No, I legit just hate you that much.”

I'd be remiss if I didn't at least nod my head to the idea of how haughty this whole sentiment and blog might come across in the midst of what will hopefully be a cultural shift in ensuring Black Lives Matter. I want to live freer of obligations and search for “fulfillment,” and black people would like to get around to being allowed to live at all. This isn't lost on me.

Maybe I need to explore why just saving enough to last a year or two wouldn't work either. I genuinely want to say my bills are paid for a year. There is little reason, it seems, to do so. They can get their money when they bill me. But, the act of billing me is nagging perhaps? Like, fuck your monopoly. Fuck it taking 5 days to process. Fuck me for not being off-grid yet. What would I do with a year of vacation that I didn't do in two weeks? Property taxes aren't exactly rent, but they are due just like any bill, and can't be paid in advance. Of course there are a dozen things I want right now that are also $1000+ and interrupt the thought, and I'm definitely paying off credit card purchases in service to all the new tools and toys instead of car payments. Why bother sending my internet company $1,287?

I think I still desire to be the kind of person who can, and say that he did, because I know people aren't. It's the pretension. Who pays their bills for a year? Hood-rich people? Mind you, I could throw it on the credit card too, and still use the cash from a paycheck to do whatever. I want more indications of my fought for status. I want people to appreciate the organization and time spent in service to statements like that. I want them to want that for themselves so maybe they'd free up their time and help me make even bigger statements.

We can circle right back around. Saving time to have it to do with what you please. Allowing your brain the time to think about anything besides the next obligation. I fill the void with at least consistent acknowledgment that I'm surrounded by books I haven't read and instruments I haven't learned. I still look forward to being a trumpet student and feeling comfortable spending the grand it would take to re-pad the tenor saxophone. I suppose I don't understand how that isn't your goal if you “want to live.”

If and when you actually have a goal, which I struggle to believe about most people, you don't get it usually without the focus and time and struggle for something just beyond your reach. If you've vocalized it at all, and it's something like “ I want to learn to dance!” and you're not taking dance classes, clearly it's speaking to something deeper. The collective goal-orientation of Black Lives Matter is encouraging, but does it have the habit of achievement or the incidental luck of the country being on lock down so the protests look super cool?

I've watched most people with stated-ish goals do exactly the things that would obligate them to their version of The State kind of environment. The paychecks allows for higher-end feasts to tear through more voraciously than any day-in-the-life otherwise, but was the goal fancy dinner? I think this shit is incredibly important to talk out too. I don't begrudge someone having less than the whole “take over the world” kind of language I employ, but is it unreasonable to point out that taking over the world involves the exact same skills and perspective required to even get a handle on your own life or social circle? How do you get the time without being more efficient? Where do you grow without connecting with those with knowledge that compliments yours? What heights can you climb without sacrificing a series of common comforts?

We all get to die and be free from daunting praise or harsh criticism. In the meantime, we're not even free to feel good about things that are good because a large enough portion of how our lives are organized is catastrophically bad. What do you think it really takes to address that situation without habitually taking on more and more responsibility and intending to dominate it?

[846] Vroom Vroom

There are several mini topics that I mostly just want out for posterity. Let's get organized.

I start back at work on Monday. Another one of my hasty schemes, maybe starting a moving/salvaging operation, was foiled by a lack of information regarding the severity of the damage to the truck I planned to use. Also, the world closed down, and every rural get-by person is collecting scrap and pallets, so I suspect there's more competition than you'll find accurately measured in online researching. I applied to one job, of course that I don't want, but that I trick myself into believing might be a good thing after I fantasize for five minutes. I got an immediate rejection which I then used to elevate my indignation for the dismissive, inadequate, and condescending place I believe most “managers” are coming from. I vowed to give my future applicants the courtesy of at least 5 minute conversations if they were timely, polite, and provided an extended context of their competences.

As long as I'm still working at DCS, I'm plotting to take over DCS. I'm planning to do so by being overwhelming in the amount of work I put in, and reformulating the flow of information and task-management through something that cannot be denied without severe repercussions. I currently do the work of at least 5 people, and I'll be shooting for 25-30. I won't be claiming undue or exorbitant overtime. I plan to collect data in a way the State is unwilling or unable to do so. I'm going to try incredibly hard to keep the generally broad and all-encompassing task balanced against my otherwise cush circumstances and continued work to escape the gravity of the normal world. On vacation I've managed to field 2 phone conversations related to work that I feel aggrieved by, but remind me that the integration of the task and my life is going to be thorough and I need to be very zen about how I conceive of it.

I was talking earlier about drive and what all there is left to achieve. It's a cliché to mention that after you achieve something, what comes next is the new series of plagued thoughts. I read old blogs wishing desperately to be able to shower and shit in my own home, wash my clothes, and walk on something besides a tick paradise. The idea of who you really are underneath and what you could really stand for does a lot of work in destroying your ability to appreciate right now. As a function of getting a paycheck consistently, I think about the next thing to buy, not how amazing what I just got really is or how much time I could spend appreciating it. This is a bad habit. What's important to maintain is the willingness and desire to move “forward” significantly more than retain guilt that right now you're doing pretty good.

This got me thinking about the singular focus I've exhibited from learning about religion, to creating and running the coffee shop, to making my home an appreciably comfortable spot, one hand-mopping session of drywall dust and violent curse for insects at a time. My goal of “taking over the world” is severely hindered by how much I enjoy my present company. This is a good thing. As much as I want an engine for change and accountability on my terms, I want to enjoy building it, talk intelligently about how to get there, and keep the nature of sacrifice out of the realm of martyrdom. That I've used the good majority of my time off to simply not think about working for DCS verses things like reading, playing video games, or even building reminds me how much I like to do what I want to do when I want to do it. I need to make a mantra out of “I'm not actually that hindered by money.”

I helped spread and pour concrete and put together a deck on a hot day, and it was more fulfilling than my last several months at work. If I don't find a way to make it mine, whatever the task, it becomes insufferable. If I can't put it in my context, hotly negotiated and bulging at the seems, it doesn't matter what it is or how hard or easy it is assumed to be, I cannot carry on without withering. I want to be exhausted in service to things, but not stupidly. I don't want to be pinched until I pop, make excuses so that I no longer appreciate the meaning of words, nor pine and moan as though I'm not fundamentally a radical force capable of radical decisions. I can always give or take.

This makes me think of the protests. I want them bigger. I want them meaner. I want them smarter and to be of consequence in a way I believe we're broadly still too dumb to know how to do. I want the power taken, because it will not cede on its own. If I only fussed and wrote signs and witty facebook posts until my blue face scared the cows away from home, I wouldn't be voting for a better sheriff. If I wanted others to appreciate the different eras of protest and revolution, I might provide free text for people to learn what's gone right or wrong. A fuck ton of people rallied in Bloomington, just like every other integrated civilized place for something the vast majority want and can absolutely get. Do we wait until peaceful protesters are getting gunned down en masse by shadow private armies?

Context, big and small, must be persistently navigated. I wish to change the world by getting a firmer and firmer grasp on my small corner of it; whether it's my head, the exercise of my time, or the goals I attempt to adopt within the confines of my jobs or hobbies. Right now, my context, so often tightly focused on “me” and “my budget,” innocently enough didn't cut my yearly bill obligation in half now that it's being split. One paycheck now equals about 6 months of security. Do I still have to work 4 months if I want contacts, insurance, a gym membership, and to overpay for tires or car repairs? Sure. But I can survive on Ramen, books, and keep the lights on for 6 months every 2 weeks. The options to explore remain open, the trend line is in the right direction, and no matter how insufferable any given day may appear things are about as objectively good as I can account for without adequate health insurance.

What's next with more help or organization? Who's in the quarter of an acre next to us helping pull saplings, stashing away their cash, and realizing that $50 just bought them a month of time they'll never get back? Whether it's the self-actualization and incidental ego-stripping that hopefully comes with working, growing, and increased perspective and connections, the question is whether or not we're going to figure out how important it is to focus NOW on the things we should have been doing 10, 20, or 200 years ago. A revolution can return you to exactly where you are if you don't keep control of the wheel.

[845] Chat Attack!

When it comes to communicating, seemingly, there are no rules. This is not the same thing as saying there aren't physical limitations, tendencies that appear across languages, or shared history and similarities. What it means is that there are no guarantees that what was invented in order to communicate isn’t as incidental to the time and place as anything. The intentionality doesn't matter, and the verbs and nouns imprecise. The fact that this is written in English is almost perfectly for arbitrary reasons that you could list indefinitely. What I put into it, for all of its words, will be what I get out of it emotionally, psychologically, or what you can take away from it in your own organization of messy and incomplete understandings of yourself.

Communication at all is a miracle. To be understood is divine. I heard some quote somewhere that equated “true love” to being understood. Don't we have myriad depictions of what we consider perfect love stories and couples who seem to “get it?” There's a world of built-in implications and expectations that, for different people at different times in life may or may not be reasonable or realistic. I say I often relate to the old women who've been through a few husbands. There's a broad attached/detachment and joy you try to bring into the moment and your partner, and a lot of pre-sifting when it comes to things you're going to bother worth considering a problem.

I've written nearly 850 blogs. If we averaged an hour per blog to write them, you get about 35 days worth of crawling around my head and attempting to find where I'm at. There is no consistent theme to them. I'm just in the moment, the words springing up as though they were there all along. Often enough I get done writing and a headache will go away, or my heart will slow down, or my stomach will quiet. I didn't know what I needed to say in order for those things to happen. I don't know even that I needed to say anything particularly specific, but I needed to talk. I needed to anchor. Right or wrong, achievement unlocked, special badge for “clarity” or “calm.”

I don't know that I ever expect to be understood. I reiterate how important a single line in a movie or song can be and how it can resonate. Stream-of-conscious doesn't mean automatic coherence. My deepest moralizing or good-will might soak the page until it drips helplessly at your feet while you don a befuddled look at “what I was trying to do.” I write and analyze the ride. I deconstruct where I think a hiccup in thought or how I'm relating to people or the world took place. I certainly don't trust that what I'm saying is perfectly clear or unable to be misinterpreted, and it's why I offer the only thing that can remain constant, honesty to the moment.

I realize now that for most of the stress in my life it came from an inability to inhabit the present moment. Often enough, my present moment is very frustrating. Or, I haven't taken a hold of it to decide that it doesn't need to be that way. When you discuss past trauma and it manifesting in a dozen ways throughout your adult life, predisposing you to health issues, mental problems, and attachment difficulties, it's because your current brain is still traumatized. Who wants that to be their present moment? Or consider someone on the verge of relapsing. Work they've done to stay sober didn't “fix” their brain. They didn't communicate the severity of the consequences to a brain that's in disrepair. It needs tools and an environment to distract and build upon.

My community dwindled, my prospects zeroed into a work life I'm not crazy about, a remote living environment, and a habit of semi-compulsively watching, reading, or dreading the moment the awareness of how good it might be feeling is going to go away. So I anchor and continue to explore. So I talk to myself, because I don't think your brain needs the entirety of mine to cope with as well.

I don't consider it a bad thing to be misunderstood, but an opportunity to find shared language. It can also be the line you come up to and realize you don't want to cross. I know what my boundaries for acceptable communication are. I know the difference between processing and flailing, and even if they might both need to be engaged in sometimes, I'm not going to contribute unless we're going somewhere. My experience “debating” religious ideologues prepared me for the futility of honest exchange arrested by ideology. We don't assume we're under our own spell of assumptions though. It's easy to point at religion or fascism and see the deadly consequences, smug looks, and broad scary cringe. You, though? No no, you're reasonable. You're being as clear and specific as possible. You can be held harmless. You don't even raise your voice.

I know that I have my own superimposed mythology to cope with life and my place in it along with everyone else. I try to formulate that mythology one line at a time. I try to recognize when I think I'm getting something right, count the times I'm getting it wrong, and weigh actual values of engagement and achievement. I try to read old blogs to see if I'm keeping a common thread of progress towards stated goals. I try to remember the frustrations of my present moment that existed back then and that I might still be carrying. It's an incredible amount of work that you can start to take for granted if you forget where you've been or built better habits over time. I still suspect somewhere in my life I'll rock a solid body that starts to feel “normal” too, and forget I didn't “just go to the gym” or “just eat better.”

One of the biggest disappointments I have with regard to my old friend group was the inability or unwillingness to relay the actual problem at the time. This building resentment grew until everyone felt the time to air grievances and disassociate could be relegated to facebook chats and comments. This prompted people to pile on after a rape allegation. So far, one person has apologized for “how that all played out” and recognized the unfair and impossible circumstances that were created. Does it take away my responsibility to try and understand where people were coming from or how I contributed to how they felt? Absolutely not. Is it fair to expect me to change for the better, acknowledge and respect where they're coming from, or feel particularly responsible when I'm not given the same chance to be understood or respected? Absolutely not.

As such, I can understand about myself that I'm willing to be continually misunderstood. I'm willing to maintain an open disposition and discuss anything, but it's going to come with conditions of specificity and measurable metrics for success. I write until I'm done, therefore successful. If you need to talk just so someone will listen, I'm down. If we need to talk to come to an agreement on chores or expenses or whether a party can be held without things getting out of hand, I'm there. If we need to closely examine physical boundaries and how we speak to each other or hit on each other, sign me up. Never will it be acceptable though to attempt any or all of those with your mind already made up about who I am, who you are, and the congeniality of your position over mine. We're probably both wrong and should figure out how.

And I suspect, once we get over the major hurdle of our assumptions and held-harmless positions, it'll be the littlest of things that need adjusted, and the work of doing so will contribute to built-in better habits. They have to be built, because again, there are no rules. They have to be reinforced and reintroduced. If you can find a better thing to apply an anxious or compulsive mind to, let me know.

[844] Give A Little Bit

I don't know that there's anything really on my mind, so I don't expect you to follow along. I've just read a few old blogs written a few years a part. I still occupy the vast majority of the space in which they were written. You might call this consistency or obsession.

I guess I'm in a good place? I have tangible, affordable, physical goals. I can go outside and dig holes to proper specifications and likely frame my home extension over my vacation. That's pretty cool. I have the money in the bank to pay for the parts and labor of my, hopefully drive-able now, moving truck. Also, way cool. I'm absolutely killing One Piece marathons, eating slightly better and saving a little money doing so. Despite all the craziness of the virus, I've remained healthy, I get paid hella bucks in mileage working from home, and it's been coming into focus the reality that, despite my “a paycheck is coming!” habit, I don't actually have to spend it all at once, and that “security” I've been pursuing to breath a little easier is here if I can stay out of the hardware store.

A lot of what has motivated me in life is based in anger. For the sake of brevity, I'll say I still “hate” everything, and wish to be in charge. I don't think people do enough in service to their language or purported morality. I don't think we're even remotely oriented towards a survivable and sustainable future, and I don't need to use out-dated Michael Moore statistics to think so. I think I want to use this likely brief period of “calm” in my disposition to own the future I continue to see coming. I'm forming tangible processes to build and replicate and hopefully get exponential. How does that money, time, and energy get directed?

I'm not that interested in digging in now, because the landscape is always changing. The plan can change with the rain. Maybe we get compounding disasters on top of what we're poorly holding ourselves accountable for already. Maybe an idea just no longer excites me. Who knows, in a way, I'm just along for the ride.

This has been a semi-compelled semi-pursued disposition shift. I'm so rarely a passenger. I plugged myself into a system that forces you to be one by design. I'm not trying to be deliberately ignorant or short about competence hierarchies or the fact I made it through school, but I tried incredibly hard to buck the trend of conforming to a narrative befitting my on-paper statistics or description. Those two things, the rigid and disingenuous structure of the State and my fairly unpredictable and excitable disposition, are still at odds, but maybe not violently so. I don't know if I feel particularly good about that, or if I've just found a psychologically protective hole to exist in until I can revolt and burn shit down.

I've got help. More importantly, I've got the kind of help I described several hundred blogs ago. I've got self-motivated, reflective, and accountable help who plugs holes in my knowledge and creates and pursues on her own behalf. It's pretty indescribable what can happen when you have help, so for me it's just going to look like a series of landscaping tasks for a while until the whole operation kind of speaks for itself.

I don't know man. I want a perpetual calm. We were talking the other day, and I said I still have strong images of people I've considered “cool,” and would think a ton about how to be like them when I was younger. Anymore, “cool” has transformed into a more measured approach towards what I think genuinely “nice” people might be like like a handful of athletes or celebrities that I jive with. Or maybe I just want to be “enthusiastic” towards something that isn't predicated on simple self-satisfaction.

I'm losing the thread though, like I said, I didn't think there was really anything on my mind.

[843] The Only Way

The broad theme of this is communication. I'm going to try to not shoot too high in how I connect the scattered lines I'm hung up on. The major question is whether or not there is a right way to do something.

We make the argument, often enough, that there is only one way. Implicitly for most things, but explicitly when the danger is more immediate. You are silent in a theater. There's a correct and incorrect side of the road. Jesus.

The deliberateness or explicitness of the task is a dependent variable. It depends on the abstract frame you use to decode the world. If you have nowhere to be except to “transport” yourself, you may walk, ride a bike, be carried, send yourself through the mail, or take mushrooms, and the goal - transportation - is achieved.

This very blog has the goal of quieting my mind as its largest abstract framework. I define what “quiet mind” is. The next layer down is the careful word choices that hopefully you can digest. Together we might frame and conclude if anything has been translated. I hope you can identify your frames and see how they bump into others. I hope to provide resolution to how you and I orient ourselves and decide on goals.

I want “security.” A knee-jerk fear-based response might mean buying a weapon. This boxes “security” into the two hero-story scenarios everyone defaults to when they pretend they are a “good guy with a gun.” A model U.N. participant might regard stabilizing an entire region of the planet as the just and proper means of attaining “security.”

We know the ambiguity in communication so well that we tend to disregard the perpetual pain and consequences of misaligned meaning as “normal.” We settle for “different ways to skin a cat” sentiments instead of digging. We beg to be understood for what was “plainly said” with “common sense” and plead with people to tell us “what you really mean!”

I find business books constantly alluding to psychological studies on why your pitch or good idea doesn't resonate with a big boss's lizard brain. Relationship and self-help books prompt you to define your personality and style to categorize and depersonalize what your frustrated partner might have regarded for years as, “That's just Bill!”

Politically we bicker beyond the point of feeling sick about the ways to “defend the country,” and very often decide there are “sides” that cannot be resolved, somehow both perfectly reasonable, moral, and with their own kind of “rationality.” The consequences, often excessively felt by those hardly represented, serve less to teach something we later correct for than to punish those we disingenuously regard as “merely disagree with.”

As with most positions I try to take, the idea is not to bemoan the very circumstances of life to make some fatalistic throwaway comment. Yes, you can be right and wrong across many dimensions or layers of focus. Yes, we're always seemingly in some form of contradictory position. No less, I think there is a right way to do things, and a wrong way to do things, at the most abstract levels I can imagine. Specific is easy. Right side of the road, or crash. Eat, or starve.

Abstract is whether you should drive at all. This is a broad historical story predicated on the ethics, ignorance, and selection pressures at the start of the combustion engine era. There were angry environmentalists in those days, but it could be easy enough argued that the prosperity from working in a car manufacturing factory at that time, contributing to the boom and technological development of vehicles, and being an earnest part of modern society outweighed the impact of the pollution.

Can you be right about this issue? Immediately, the impulse is to cite individual justifications and get defensive. “How else can I get grandma to the hospital!?” The effort to lose the point makes itself known. I ask myself, if I were offered another means, a sustainable and reliable means to stop driving grandma to the hospital, would I take it? Yes, that's the right way.

This is a huge hurdle. The way we do things, talk about things, and orient ourselves in the world is our entire world. It works, for better or worse, in “maintaining life” as miserably as we conceive of it in any moment. What are you introducing that's more reliable than my car? What problems does it bring? Where's your proof it works as well? While we lose ourselves to the details and fight, poor grandma is left with all the time she has left to contemplate if, in the abstract, she was really the kind of person who should have had children.

Individually, we don't spend a lot of time attempting to frame things for other people unless maybe we're a parent or supervisor (and even then who knows). The trend of recent human history is to cultivate individual frames and feedback loops. Without ever thinking about the consequences of doing so, we start to regard this as the correct mode of interacting and obtaining information. After all, “information obtainment” and or “being entertained” are ends unto themselves, right? What's being communicated doesn't matter as much as that it exists at all. Thus, naturally, it follows we should compete as entertainment or for other resources.

I think this is a wrong way to be human.

Humans are conscious. Consciousness is awareness. “Awareness” is abstract. How to be “abstractly aware” the “right” way? This is the junction where people default to prescribed religious doctrines or a hodgepodge of mangled philosophy with “ist” and “ism” monikers doing the work of lived experience.

Claims of awareness abound. Pastors are aware of what God said to them. Environmentalists are aware of the impact of fossil fuels. Situational awareness is bestowed to the most paranoid or trained. Reliably though, we find ourselves only just-so aware and often tricked by those who understand the underlying forces at play. We'll be able to fool people with the monkey dancing between people passing a basketball video indefinitely.

It already feels impossible to be aware correctly, no? Even the phrasing feels weird.

This is where the humanity comes in. You qualify with acts. Immediately, your awareness coalesces around specific acts. You can arrest other's attention. If and when you become aware of something, you can choose to act in service to your understanding, or lack thereof.

We're about to get in trouble. What do you know? What kind of understanding doesn't beget a feedback loop of isolated self-satisfaction and justification? For before you can get to whether or not you are behaving in the “right” way, you have to find the impulse for truth and honesty.

Uh oh, I did it again, didn't I? I offered two exceptionally boundless words that we routinely treat with every possible interpretation as bedrocks. I didn't put them in quotes, though. I think they exist as far as you can throw them, sure, in varying degrees of focus and relevance, but also as an indomitable consistent base in each of our hearts. Absolutely none of my indignant posture towards other people makes sense without this broad abstract assumption I lay across everyone.

The thing is, I don't know what it is to be human if I ignore that impulse in myself. When I lie, it's disorienting. It's in service to something impersonal, primal, and probably reactively and unduly destructive. If I approach all of our interactions like you're perfectly understood and honestly relaying your experience, I betray the lies in you that I recognize in myself.

Practically, this means I occupy two very different conversational, social, and emotional worlds, and from the outside, they're impossible to differentiate.

You don't have to believe when I write that I'm being as honest as I can muster. If a part of you knows that I am, and you refuse to believe that, we're occupying different plains and I find it impossible to conceive of you as “doing human right.” This is not the same thing as struggling to contend with conflicting information or holding two competing ideas in your head at once. This is about whether or not I have the capacity to speak to, and you have the capacity to hear and recognize, whatever it is at bottom that connects us. I'd like to call it a science without cheapening science.

So you make the decision to be honest and tell the truth. First, impossible, hurdle and footing is done.
Next, you start denoting what you're aware of and stating where you exist relative to it.
Last, you act to change your relative place or in service to consequences the study or science of your experience can reliably predict.

This is doing human correctly and being aware in the right way.

When you hear an “intellectual” tout a series of catch-alls and vagaries that tangibly and reliably beget death and destruction, don’t get lost in their weeds, as they deliberately lead with lies. They pick untruths. You have to believe this about people, just like you can believe it about yourself when presented with the magnitude of your mistakes all at once.

People will deliberately choose death before they will choose honesty. They will do this because a life suffering the consequences of the reality of their decisions would be worse than death. Ironically, they only know this because their bottom-line communication science that understands blogs like this tells them so.

The problem, as our coronavirus times can no doubt attest, is that their choice to die in service to their demons, when scaled up, kills us all.

Thus, you need to return to the exercise. Is it honestly hard to believe people are willing to die and kill those around them, so recklessly, as you consider our violent past or watch them do so every day? Are you allowing yourself to be corrupted, in so many ways, by sympathies and physical or emotional burdens that have entangled themselves to those who are going to get you killed? Can you move in a way that maximizes your chance to survive?

Only once you frame the game and its different layers can you play it. If you're unwilling to do so, it's hard to consider you human. If you're unable to do so, you're likely the kind of person that needs protecting. If you're unable to find protection, you'll be the first to die. Maybe you don't care about who dies, but then again, I reflexively call you inhuman and a liar.

[842] Would You, Could You, Be My

I'm so small.

For reasons I can't define, today has maintained a theme. The theme was “neighbors.” I move to the middle of nowhere, already exists a neighbor. I stay for a year or two, several more move in. You've been told to “love thy neighbor.” Depending on which side of the fence you sit, you might be the Ned Flanders, or the Homer Simpson.

What does it mean for me to call myself small? I'm a distant memory in the mind of a college acquaintance. I'm a petty fool with indignant statuses to be written off as though they were inscribed on toilet paper. I'm 1 in several billion who may or may not die in some horrifying way tomorrow or lend himself to the infectious chain that takes down someone else. I'm the conscious blip, delirious with ideas of free will, taking infinitely ironic stabs at immortality with every new goal and mangled sentiment.

The smallest speck of dirt in your eye can irritate indefinitely. The smallest bump on your skin can engorge and get infected. The smallest comment of encouragement or scorn can imprint on one who overhears. I'll watch 6 seasons of a show and replay one scene or one line for years. What does it mean to be small? It's an opportunity to persist and move in many directions. Tardigrades can live basically everywhere, including in the vacuum of space.

I am small. I don't feel small. In fact, I feel like I have an over-sized impact on the lives of people I interact with. I feel people remember me, especially when they don't want to. I think how trashy reality television is perceived by me is how people hate-fuck ideas about and from me in their own lives.

All the world's entertainment and horrible examples of how to conduct your life haunt, taunt, and flaunt how much attention and money their branding and berating can garner. The language to escape and justify is an inexhaustible well. I think I share in the egomania which for surely nefarious reasons is compelling by default. Insofar as you aren't interested in yourself, that is. Crazy tiger people, like burnt Jersey trash, mean nothing to fellow egoists.

For the power and purpose of my self-delusions, what's the end, or even the current goal? Why do I practically salivate at the prospect of opening my social circle to people I know want nothing to do with me? Why do I want 100 invitations, gas or flights paid, to be turned down by those who never signed on? Why do I want to reduce myself to an annoying little stain on the mind of people who know I look down on them and resent for not manifesting beyond formative memories described by some smug Oprah's book club blurb advocating for everyone you meet to be a brick in your humble-bragging home about where you're at in life?

Do I need to always be in that opposition space? Do I need to keep jettisoning myself away from the “past” and carry on as if the future won't be the reshuffling reanimated corpse with different players? Do I turn off, genuinely enjoy doing nothing more than trying to have everything at that point? Do I wish the speck of dirt memory to matter to them as much as their, seemingly positive, impression left on me? Am I just in the business of turning a lot of shit into a much happier and hopeful story than could ever exist?

I suppose, I know what happens when I act like that's true. I know who I turn into. I know the impact of my words and behavior significantly faster and with more credible blame. My impact doesn't come with a butterfly-effect convolution meandering the winds of meaning. I know I don't feel right, or think something akin to karma is going to “get me.”

I like to minimize. I don't wish to erase, but I like to keep in context. I like to find the hundredth iteration or true nascent point to a sentiment that made you feel light and bright all day, but is basic as hell. I want to find the utility or point. I want you to use your anger, or disregard it. I want you to contemplate and build on your trauma, or just be quiet and suffer irresponsibly until we're forced to deal with you. I want to fluidly believe each step of my life is a “simple” act of putting the right shapes in the right holes, and not unleash a torrent of half-baked philosophy, anxiety, and tattered hatred imploring to be understood. I try to not feel my hands and wrists as I contemplate countless redundant incidents of manual slavery that belay the comforts of my existence.

Little can be understood. Little fits in many baskets. Big is open to endless interpretation and remixing. Little can pop right out of existence the moment you try to get too hard a grasp of it. Little decisions you make early about who you want to be and how you're going to understand the world compound. The little idea remains the same, and all you can't control is what spins out. Little acts to remind yourself of who you are and how you're oriented keep you true. Little negotiations in your foundation invite cracks. Little plays to ignorance incite death.

I'm a small collection of ideas in a small state on a small spot of land. I make small amounts of money which let me buy up the small tools it takes to dig small holes, walk small paths, and dream for ever more small comforts. I wouldn't invite my Confederate and Trump flag waving neighbors, and yet, they've carried out small favors and offered to help me in my small endeavors. How big of them.

If “the universe,” what have you, ever had a reason to slow me down, it would be for the same fear that my worst impulses would take over with the right momentum and influence. I'm different. It's a small difference that has compounded over time into something beyond me. It can get bigger and wily. I want the world filled with people better than me, better than having been crafted by the selfishness and indulgence, and better than begging for death amidst abundance. I pursue a future I can't conceive as the last interesting story to unfold. I don't want to shed the characteristics that make me small. I want to recognize and respect what they turn into unchecked or ignored.

I make small decisions over time until something big exists as order or chaos. I watch my creations as though they had been there all along or were inevitable. I see what work is left to be done, move a stone, dig a hole, and huff a new engine fume. I keep inviting. I keep celebrating. I keep posting the world's weakest landscaping pictures of the inches we add. I watch my language evolve into more “we” sentiments. I wonder what we will resolve to as the world continues to burn. I wonder if when I've crossed over some superficial mental or cultivated environmental line I'll forget about what drove me there. We'll have so much left to do and think about.

[841] Game - Set - Hatch

I don't know about you guys, but I'm having a wonderful time.

Yes, in spite of my many years of complaints, things going on lock down, and general wave of fascism and ineptitude killing many things, I'm on a bit of a high. It's not manic, it's not a swell in my chest of deep appreciation or joy, and it's not the kind of schadenfreude you might expect from someone as spiteful and riddled with hatred as me.

I'm happy because reality is creeping in. Once you get past boredom, you're forced to stare at the nakedness of your state. Once the virus reaches your door, you're forced to look death in the face. Once you're hungry, can find no place for recourse but the increasing fear and violence from your neighbors, you're provoked to act, even reflexively, as if there's something deeper motivating your survival that's been ignored.

At bottom, we're a confusing set of contradictions, if only at least verbally. We want to save the planet while maintaining the edifices that give us wasteful and destructive things. We want to "love our neighbor," but mostly as long as it is in the form of a Facebook like for the guy who's going to be delivering them groceries. We believe in equality when we perceive an injustice is being done to us or an entertaining Netflix documentary highlights the plight of poverty and generational neglect.

The day-to-day vocalizing and struggling with life's circumstances are expressly avoided, distracted, or denied. As such, being a person who prides himself on trying to vocalize "at bottom," I find myself in perpetual opposition to what I might describe the "insinuated or seemed life." There's a form of communication that is perpetual dog whistles of different pitches. There's politicking and passive aggression. I, almost always, stay silent or just call you a cunt.

So what does a cocky cunt like myself afford himself with this access to what may crudely be deemed a better approximation of "truth?" In a crisis, I have affordable land and the ability to grow food on it. I have solar panels, so even if I had to dramatically scale back my energy usage, I could stay warm or filter water. I have a calm and deliberate disposition when faced with change. I accepted things were hard a long time ago and picked to sacrifice the appropriate things to be better when times got tough.

This kind of stuff makes me mildly smug, but also resoundingly hopeless. I gave my group of friends credit they didn't deserve, because I thought we all understood the times we were living in and what was coming. I thought we all could decode the implied language, and translate it into being deliberate and accountable for all of the pitfalls and failures we were expected to deal with. I thought we could look at our funny, pretty, intelligent selves and cut out a place to be together.

What I'm increasingly learning about society, or the human animal in general, is that it does not give itself the credit that I wish to. My friends don't believe in themselves like I do. They don't believe what they are capable of. They don't trust when I admire them. They don't believe they can change literally the entire world to meet their ends. You still can. I'm still working to.

Yesterday, I was in a conversation about the harsh words I have when I see a certain kind of "fat bitch" or just ridiculously clothes or haired person that just gives you pause. I put little stock in my sentiments. The superficial cutting people down is as weak or strong as you want to make it. It was making my conversational partner uncomfortable that I might be derisive of the idea that "really pretty" people might have the same shit to talk about me.

What's key in our conversation is the discussion that spun from it about creating your own reality. If I got ripped over the next few months and was still regarded as less attractive than Brad Pitt, it doesn't matter. I'm no thirstier for anymore eye-fucks than he might be. I don't regard attractiveness as a qualitative measure on which to judge someone. I've never needed to be ripped to be a whore, and I struggle to understand the person who would tear themselves or my partners down for their looks to try and humble me. Attractiveness can be accounted for scientifically, but the psychology of what's attractive is significantly more complex and nuanced. Take over the mind, and the body follows.

We construct reality, and to parts of the brain, dream-like scenarios don't differ from being awake. This necessary construction of being conscious does not negate the reality of viruses or math, but it does leave a gaping hole at the center of how we're to understand ourselves and place among others. The reality you construct can be a series of choices informed and encouraged by the facts so-discerned so far, or it can be a painful contradiction that manifests as continued problems impeding your movement through the world. If I thought I was "so hot" that it prompted me to approach everyone "under" me with derogatory comments or an inability to engage them with respect, we'd have a major problem. My meager concept of them would Trump my capacity as a human to empathize or act better.

The psychology of the realities you can inhabit is up for grabs. It's not a single choice in the moment of intense feeling, but a series of decisions over time that embed themselves into your core and mold your instincts. There are a great many misconceptions I've been under that I trained myself out of, and it enabled my ability to navigate the world with a degree of confidence that might seem harsh, naive, or needlessly scrutinizing, but is the giant Band-Aid covering all of the screaming, crying, or confusion that used to be there.

I don't care if it's a crisis, a bump on the head, or a triggering line after years of reading and contemplation, I want as much or more for you as I want for myself. I understand that as perpetually working and reminding myself how and why it can actually work. I live in spite of the abject failure of the scientifically accounted for math of our collective fuck ups and immaturity. I live in service to what I have accomplished or believe I still can and the people I want to do it for. But first, I chose to do it for myself, blame myself, and see how in some way it was my fault or responsibility all along. My sole recourse in life is the piling on of things I'm responsible for. This doesn't mean you have none, it means it's that much more I'm continuing to expect out of you. The chasm between us will grow or shrink along that understanding.

I hope the time alone, or the brushes with death, are the right kind of exhilarating and opportunity for you as they have been for me.

[840] Corona Made Me Do It

I don't know what to say.

How long have we lived in the 24-hour “news” cycle with everything “the war on” and “breaking” from Justin Bieber entering the country to how so-and-so “slammed” and “eviscerated” so-and-so with their legendary commentary?

How long have we had to study the various eras in how civilizations thrived or fell?

How long have we known that we've lived beyond our means, in selfish isolation, screaming “fuck the world” with all of the jaded wisdom of every teenager?

How tired have we been? How fat have we gotten? How many “School of Life” videos and existential memes have been shared?

How many times has “Get out the vote!” been parroted? How many silent wishes for death upon generations of those not as “with it?”

First, I was indifferent to the coronavirus. Then, I went to Wal-Mart and felt the low key panic of people's shifty eyes and odd choices on what to stock up on. I'm not panic buying, but I wanted to make it a couple weeks for if and when the shit really starts hitting the fan.

Next, I'm a touch curious about 1 out of every 50 articles that pop up about it. The prevailing theme is that we're, obviously, unprepared, defiant, and going to make things incredibly worse before they get better.

Then, I want to exploit the crisis. I email my investment guy. I tell every single person I can find in the office, now is the time to lobby for work-from-home and more money. I'm energized to do a little more land walking and mapping, because space away might cost a premium.

Now, I'm “generally angry,” that for all of the hullabaloo, for all of the cries about how things should go or the ways people are “stepping up” in a crisis, it all feels like bullshit. I subscribed to some “we'll get through this!” groups for central Indiana where pleas to find ways to get food, rent, or even cars towed stream in.

FUCK. ALL. OF. YOU.

As we speak, the neoliberal mess of Joe Biden wins Florida by a landslide. The narrative on Trump's response is morphing from his general perpetual lies to the handful of reactive and scared shitless plays he's making to appease anyone and anything that resemble “the market” or “his base.” The edifice, even while crumbling, is dedicated to the shine. The mouth pieces stoke the fear. The half-truth minute by minute scare pieces flood in. Catch-phrases repeated, finger waving the moral turpitude, and self-promotion acts of solidarity abound.

We've lost even the capacity to recognize it as an act. We used to have location-based relationships, or short and incidental ones. We might've built “professional” verses “personal.” A “brand” was something independent of the things you did in service to making it profitable. Now it's just this all the time everywhere. Wait until you hear someone a little quicker on the take say it or do it first, shop it around. Don't create or plan in service to the genuine betterment of something, “make a statement” and tell people to follow a dead link and flooded, incorrect, phone number.

This is how it ends. Probably not with coronavirus, but with this sheer inability to ever recognize the real again, even as death stares you in the face. Trump is death, and we voted for him. So was Sarah Palin. So were the celebrities and lobbyist narratives and daily capitulations we made in service to keeping our own heads above the shallow waters we were still allowed to swim in.

What kills me, what floors me to no end, is that for all of my constant and perpetual bitching, I've struggled so fucking hard, not to piece together a house or cope with one meaningless waste of my time after another in trying to get a little more of my indulgent American dream. No, I've fought and fought and fought to speak as though there is something better to be doing, and you, me, us were not doing it, and even during a fucking crisis, I can't get the conversation, the plan, or the disposition that can treat this shit LIKE WE ALL KNEW IT WAS FUCKING COMING.

I don't feel like I exaggerate when I claim people long for death. I don't think that the emotional burden of the silence is overstated. I don't think the ho-hum, literal fucking shoulder shrug I got today, is less deadly than the deadliest virus. Our minds are poisoned. Our spirits don't bite. When the panic truly sets in, there won't be enough news outlets to cover it. When the ship really starts taking on water, you're gonna feel hungry, starved, from all the bullshit we've been feeding on. There won't be land to swim to as we cramp up and drown.

When we come out the other side with 2 whole extra days of half-paid sick leave, that's when you kill yourself. Don't do it as you lose your job, run out of Hotpockets, or think too hard about how sick your grandma got after you came back from spring break. Do it when you realize it's never getting better, and you don't even know how it could. Do it because you're already dead, and there's nowhere left to go. The virus seems like it's trying to force the issue, but at least it wants to live.

[839] Come Sail Away

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, and no one who's written less than me should ever start anything like that, but I'm a king.

Yes, I am indeed a king. I have regal hair with the softest curves. I have attire that causes people to call me “sir” and move out of my way. I eat incredibly fancy food from all over the world which I pay a premium for, because I can afford it. People smirk and chuckle at jokes I make, even the less than funny ones. I control the very air of my living quarters. Millions of people conspire to keep me entertained. I'm in considerably better health (indicated by my plump but not obese stature) than those I generally interact with. I'm skilled in different sports, hobbies, and am as learned as the books I complete every few days (which I even have people to read to me). The finest women have, and continue, to throw themselves at me. (Mostly as they drive.)

By all accounts, I've peaked. My realm of one is as good as it ever has been or could be save the grandiose immortality-seeking posture of vast structures built to honor me and the formation of leisure gardens. But rest assured, vast structures are commissioned and various gardens will be populated with the freshest foods and flowers.

Where, then, to go but the grave?

In one of the newer episodes of Cosmos, Neil deGrasse Tyson discusses East Asian sailors who, after populating islands and growing isolated from each other, forming different dialects and words, they all maintained the pronunciation of “sail.” Something moved them into the vast expanse of the ocean, and by way of urging us on, Neil wants us to believe we can traverse the stars. They had their kingdoms, luxuries and problems, but familiar and safe home, but were compelled into the unknown.

I think the psychology of most of the “West,” is that of the self-satisfied king. What ever could be the matter? So much abundance! The idea of there being something better, someone else to consider, or something beyond was lost. The gripes of baby-boomers about people my age not working hard enough when I never knew someone not working multiple jobs or destroying their youth in service to desperately struggle. It wasn't too far before them things like the steam-engine were invented. Our species’ recent history had an actual life-threatening amount of work to try and improve upon in order to shape our decadent conceptions.

We stagnated. We defeated the Nazis (yeah, right). Everyone got a car, a modest dwelling, vacation once a year, and smart enough to know whether or not they wanted to go to college. When the temperature got turned up on the water we were floating in, it was easy enough to ignore it. Cost of living going up? Environment signaling danger? Sick, but not too sick just yet? Slowly, daily, one person's mind at a time went blind to the cost of living each day like a king. Living like someone with no subjects to account for. Living like someone who can't be held to account without violent revolution and a good beheading.

The grip of how you anchor yourself is practically insurmountable. My dad seemed to have a really hard time hearing that our ancestry was more Peruvian than Italian. My dad is someone who takes an incredible amount of pride in my grandparents and how they grew up and what they went through. My dad has read an insane amount of history and things related to his heritage. A “simple” fact displaced his roots. I don't blame him for being upset. I was happy to figure out how my hair is curly and people habitually think I'm mixed or Hispanic (my dad regularly has people speak Spanish to him...)

Where are we currently anchored? I'm 31, which means I occasionally see a friend of mine who has mostly or finally paid off their student loans. They've raised several cats, had half a dozen jobs, a few first marriages, maybe 3 or 5 kids total if I go back and count. The vast majority, and remember, I knew a lot of smart, hot, middle to upper-middle class white kids, are not married, 2 car garage, 2.5 kids, cliché conception of the past. Most are meme generators playing adult-ish cards in service to not being destitute. They've found a balance that lets them do a series of mid-life crisis things, now prepackaged and Grouponed, every couple of months.

Kids? Maybe by accident or if their spouses had them from the previous relationship. Work satisfaction? Hey, at least it's not that guy's amount per hour. What's the future look like? Honestly, in asking myself that question, when trying to adopt the character of my collective conception of what I've watched from my online feeds...I don't know. I drew a blank. My personal conception is the freedom to move away from the increasing number of disasters I think I see coming. It probably has a few hastily built rooms with a dozen quasi-businesses. Hopefully I've roped back in Hatsam and haven't scared away Allie Cat.

 

I've found myself coalescing at work. What does that mean? I'm finding it easier and easier to shine, get cocky about it, and speak with a more demanding and daring tone. It comes out in an email I shouldn't have responded to. It has me making sure you notice I went above and beyond in manipulating the stupid or crazy person into doing what I needed. My “future” in doing something like this is the same as it was for me when I behaved that way in school. Extra shit to do. People giving me that look like they wish they could destroy me, except, dammit, I really did help them with something or actually know what I'm talking about. It would be a safe, prescribed, future dictated by the inadequate expectations and pace of a system that stagnates by design.

While we're all holed up in our homes coming face to face with the immediacy that catastrophe can strike, revel in the opportunity to reflect on what's been stuck that, ironically, can be unleashed with the right compelling force. You have to will your way into the future, attack problems worth your skill and attention, and define the indefinite unknown as something for you to shape. You can get fatter, richer, older and more complacent. You can be a cliché king from a forgettable child's fable of folly and excess. Or, you can mark your era by the continued conscious decisions to behave your way over another. To speak to what you actually want and believe, over what's been handed to you, wilted and wrung dry.

If the bug kills you, what did you leave? Your nice-enough personality? Your impersonal out-of-context Ikea quotes and art on your walls? Was it anything someone coming after you could pick up and take even further? There's a kind of king I wish to be that I'm not yet. I have my solitary kingdom, cut from the wretchedness of circumstances imposed upon me. But I still dream. I still wish to design the mind that makes it hard to stop but for the chance to stare and wonder about all that is or will be.

[xx-17] This & More

Just a collection of lengthier statuses and ideas I’m grouping/saving for posterity:

Unfortunately, I think the democrats are going to remain the party that forsook taking responsibility and leadership for so long they allowed the consequences of these republican administrations and they're going to continue to fuck with even the idea of hope for making things better.

Joe Biden winning South Carolina is indicative of the old adages about familiarity and "electability" and the deep-rooted sense that people get about those things. It's anchoring and psychological pacifying.

I live in nowhere Indiana, have shit health care, shit food options, shit prospects at my job and nothing begging me to switch where I'll be appreciated or make more. I have no belief there will be social security when I'm old. I have no sense of community or camaraderie with my own generation let alone the youth alleged to save us all with their cancel culture and "problematic" ideas about what constitutes morality.

"Revolution," to me, would constitute basic living standards, not feeling on the brink of a mental breakdown every day, and believing this was a world worth bringing anyone into. "Radical" has come to mean whispering the very means of survival and reason for living. I can't point to a single thing besides Sanders who has remained so consistently speaking to the inside-out and poisoned heart at the center of our concept of being a country. That it's even a question or a toss-up in the minds of millions of people is as horrifying to me as the amount of people I saw supporting Sarah Palin in ANY capacity.

You can't be forgiven. This is what is lost. You can't be forgiven for giving yourself to fascism. You can't be forgiven for allowing people to get sick and die because your "leadership" doesn't believe in evolution or disease. You can't get back the lost years, wages, or sense of dignity and self-respect unless you're looking for a pseudo-convict story where you're undyingly grateful to have your job as a chef after 30 years behind bars.

I've been thinking a lot about when you throw in the towel. When is it worth it to fight, and keep pushing for as long as it takes? How do you recognize the cause worth championing? Ever more, I don't believe there's a point. I think the people in power get there for reasons that don’t have anything to do with merit or worth, and we have a linguistic and emotional culture that spins fairy-tales as to where we belong and what we deserve. I can't save DCS. We'll get eaten alive by a virus and die before ever admitting the depravity that is Trump. And there's nowhere to go but in circles.

All I have is the ability to talk about it as earnestly and honestly as I can. And that won't be enough to change or fix things, and it will disappear into the feed of so many memes, and I'll piss back off into my field attempting to squeeze what I can before they/it comes for me.

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What does this mean?!

"I think people break in this job after the slow creep of the reality triggers a yet acknowledged explosion."

A day at DCS is a lot like a roulette wheel. So many places the ball can land, most you're indifferent towards if you pick black or red, or have a disposition that sits safely and comfortably in your color of choice. There's still zeroes. They exist, and they'll blow up your even-enough odds.

"Like, one day I'm going to smell a cat box, blackout, and rip someone in half."

Triggers are individual to each person, but the smell of shitty cat boxes is at once familiar and all-to common, so I thought it most relatable.

"They're so cliché in their piece-of-shittery and indignation and entitlement and you watch them cultivate the suicide ideation in their elementary aged child."

People with the genuine problems are the absolute worst. They hate you for caring or trying. They talk out of both sides of their mouths. You can track the complexes they're building into their children, sometimes in real time. They are PROUD of their ignorance and hostile to good intentions or change. They plague the minds of the children in their care in modeling this behavior, and it rips kids to shreds.

" It's no longer "just" about the getting blown off or individual circumstance and presumed humanity."

Your elevated place in the hierarchy of all things becomes apparent. You don't get to tell yourself a "happy" or justified story about "mere humanity" and how it behaves. No, you get to put names and faces to the same kind of dropped balls and excuses. You get to imagine the larger world of kids under the same kind of tutelage. Your intervention becomes a moral obligation, religious principle, or spiritual calling as every decision translates into real fallout right in front of you.

"It becomes the daily equation of assholes and the stark realization of the depravity thusly emblemated in your moral breakdown and incongruity."

Your brain mashes things and tries to condense and understand. So the soup of different kinds of pathology play together in unforseeable ways. That overbearing asshole plus this pathologically lying mom plus those smug teens across 3 or 4 families can reveal hidden worlds of disdain and dejectedness. You're good, no? You show up, and try, and explain, and yet look them. LOOK AT THEM!

"There is no logic, no book, and no disposition for that visceral internal subconscious equation that can save you or them."

The cutesy way to talk about this is "burnout." You don't realize you're being eaten. You don't understand all of the things you've become attached to that are pulling all the time. You're coping, maybe, until you're not.

"Here's hoping if it happens it's to someone that deserves it. The odds are in your favor."

They all do, we all do, in some form or another.

[838] Need For Speed

I rarely do this (write at random? That's all I do...), but I've got some time before an appointment scheduled late and far away, and for whatever reason I'm a touch anxious.

I know this job isn't worth it. I know it's not worth my time tonight, waiting for an hour in the parking lot before I drive a half hour in the opposite direction of where I live. I know I have a project waiting for me at home I want to keep playing with that I won't really be able to without it being exponentially darker and colder. I know that I'm on another trek to waste my time in service to children who aren't in danger based on a call that we should never have gotten but for bad protocol at the probation offices. I feel less bad about this waste of time than I normally do, but I acknowledge it as explicitly a waste.

As well, I've been trying to find someone to go to this concert on Thursday. When I say things like "I don't have friends," I mean it took chance and rehearsal to get even a consistent bowling/trivia time set up. I don't have a "Yes, let's go" type person in my circle. So now I'm weirdly inviting the entire office to wing it at a band they haven't heard of at a bar that's less than ideal. The weird thing about it isn't my shopping around the ticket, it's that it's predicated mostly on my dislike for the idea of wasting money. I'd rather someone I don't really know or get along with have a mediocre time actually "doing the thing" verses have a ticket get burned? That's weird.

I've gotten a touch loose with my spending. That means I spent $200 on things I've been meaning to buy for months-years. The paycheck that will put me to within hundreds of being out of debt is submitted. I've picked up odd-jobs on Craigslist that might prove able to trickle in $60-$200 here and there. I'm feeling like I'm back in a kind of fervent swing that causes unnecessary tension and attempts to insert myself into situations that might prove more stimulating than whatever it is I'm currently looking at. That I'm even writing this blog right now is evidence of it.

I'm really starting to feel the potential life changing state of having things paid well in advance and being flatly indulgent. I'm feeling comfortable getting the tools and odds and ends to round out the kind of existence my Amazon wishlist has been flirting with. I'm getting a touch more callous and disingenuous in my commentary. It's a slow creep, but it's creeping. If there were some kind of cosmic balancing act regarding our individuated energy, it's clearly going to take more than 2 years of a job that epitomizes joyless slog to erase my underling impulse and drive.

I'm moving into the "taking" mindset. Nick P., so mythologized, doesn't haplessly beg for someone to accompany him to a show, he practically picks them up and takes them. This is the internal conflicting impulses. How to defer to a kind of "professional" tone and atmosphere, that dead-inside pleasantries of daily interaction, while your chest is raging to encourage the entire party to jam the fuck out. Do you know how often I dream about when I was called on stage at Warped? I need that insane attention and energy infused into whatever I'm doing.

I had the thought, which sorta prompted me bothering to write, that what we do isn't helping. We put "happily ever after" dialogue atop the broad picture of poverty or generally shit behavior. You got your kids returned? Cool. What horrors would we discover, on both ends, that spoke to why they were removed in the first place? Things that weren't fixed in 6 months of on and off therapy?

It made me think of the idea for "radical selfishness." There's a Jesus Freak guy in our office. Incredibly well-adjusted, personable, engaged with his families, nice as hell, but goddammit, he's a Jesus freak. The story about the strip club comes up. He's never been. What kind of booze are we going to give the homeless population at Shalom Center in order to get credible information? He doesn't drink. He says he drank all of the non-alcoholic beer at his bachelor party; I make the joke that's when his real dark side comes out and he pisses on the strippers. That's not a joke for Jesus land.

I still conceive of faith as a form of my so-named radical selfishness, but in its naive state. It's a prescribed story superimposed on the person underneath who might actually get off on pissing on strippers. There's the self-righteous do-gooder faith in this field from those who routinely think they can genuinely "always act in the best interest of the child." That they're the one acting is all they need; don't look too close.

But you still need to feel good about what you do. Or you need to couch what you do into the overall story about how you feel good about yourself. I feel good when I'm killing it. It doesn't really matter what I'm doing, I want to be the best, even when I think it would cost considerably more than it is worth to be so. (This was a big reason I stopped playing video games for a long time. Perfect scores and achievements be dammed when paired with an obsessive mind.) So I do the odd-job in the middle of the day for the extra $60. I schedule to meet someone in between wipes of my ass. That's above and beyond the call of duty. That's, until now, the story you tell yourself about yourself about the kind of person you are and how the "secret" to getting shit done isn't so secret.

I hadn't been clenching my jaw for what seemed like weeks. I had settled into something. I had figured a way of cycling through the vague anxiety and just powered through the day. The tension is coming back. That tension is "hope" for as much as I hate the word. That tension is acknowledging that potential inability to reign in the horse of jokes about pissing on strippers and the money to buy things in service to increasingly obnoxious attempts to show you what's going on in my mind. Part of me is just screaming non-stop from inside my chest.

I'm leaving for that appointment soon. It's going to be a late night. I'll probably stay up later than I should after making a meager attempt to assemble the first piece of my PVC tent idea. I'll think about showering and then figure I can just keep not standing close to people and pretend I'm going to get up early enough to go to Planet Fitness where it could last longer than 4 minutes. The mundane will hopefully keep winning (keeping me calm) until I've saved enough that were something to go critical it wouldn't register as a threat to my progress. Cross your fingers.

[837] One Day At A Time

What would be a mark of true genius? I'm not shy in referring to myself as a measure of “smart.” But I consistently talk a very large game about the very large game I consider life. I don't know if me making a certain amount of money or raising a certain number of buildings would be a good measure. Idiots make money. The laziest way to conceive of someone as genius is to watch the consequences of their power loosely slung. Trump isn't a genius, nor is anyone riding his crazy coattails or whispering in his ear. No one tagging along rises above opportunist. That's tagging along in the environment provided by your wealth, or benefiting in the wake of chaos.

If I were an ignorant mystical type, I would start to believe that any one moment in time was somehow something I was “destined” for. Like life was conspiring to put me at DCS, meet my band of coworkers, put me through the different stressors related to different clients and “leadership.” It would pair my inability to ever let things go with pushing 900 blogs of self-indulgent flame stoking indignation and motivation attempting to justify a degree of self-awareness and angst best embodied in the world of folklore.

Today, I was told I gave someone hope for the/their future at DCS. I was told by another person that they believe in me and are relieved that I said I might actually have a reason that makes me want to come to work. When another employee tried to phrase me as “cornering” another coworker, she clapped back and said no, I think he has a lot of really good ideas and I'd love to help. We talked for an hour this morning about what the trickling of changing hearts and minds mind look like in the crafting of an elite team to prove just how much can be done with the right process, paycheck, and mindset.

Would it be a measure of true genius to corral 18 different personalities under of higher-than-average functioning people with the capacity to embody and juggle the lives of dozens of people at once under one umbrella? Would I have made a dramatic and incalculable impact on the world if I forced the standard of behavior and direction from supervisors to match what's proven most effective for me? If I bent the hand back of a classically immovable and rotten institutional mindset, where would I sit then? It's a problem worth tackling. It's a problem worth taking the time. It's a problem that, having gone unaddressed for so long, literally, when we mess up in easy yet profound ways, we fuck children.

Who else can say that? If you don't do a background check, a child might get placed in a home where they literally get fucked. This has happened! If you don't answer your phone, a women in crisis is about to attempt suicide. That happened last weekend. If you don't leave to photograph a severe injury, a child can get murdered the next day. Of the 5 dead children cases one of our assessors has, 4 are murders. (Thankfully, not because we failed to act.)

Don't you want rockstars doing this kind of work? Don't you want people who feel like they're paid enough to not have to worry about the rent or car breaking down? Don't you want them to move fast, focus on the people over wasting hours smoothing out the kinks of bad software and lazily translated calls? Shouldn't the organization tasked with removing your children have a large and informative relationship with the community in which it operates? Do you want the person examining your life and relationships to hate every minute you're relaying your story for the 13th time because they can't process your trauma in real time having never addressed their own?

Realistically, I could work from sun up till sun down every day, handle 40-50 assessments, not resent being on-call, and collect all of the surrounding pieces which constitute a 360 degree holistic view of your family. I can't do that for $1200 a paycheck. I can do it for $2000 + overtime, and without the “place filler to up the numbers” person you hired to fuck things up before I get there. The people who attempt to belabor just how much you really really need to love helping the children try to hide the reality that this isn't so much a job as it is a lifestyle. When you're dealing with people, you are embodying, empathizing, and processing whatever random emotions they want to hit you with. Whether you got to eat at lunch, enough sleep, or have addressed the longstanding issue a dozen times or not, you're the plug that fits all holes. And you're paid less than a manager of an Arby's.

I have to build the template for turning a regional State institution into my bitch. I have two most experienced workers, an informed and enthusiastic dorky millennial, and my direct supervisor who want to see me swing as hard and as fast as I can at the edifice. I need to condense the pitch to something that can be tailored to every person in the chain. I need to codify the policy-compliant floor of expectations. I need to continue to insert myself as the standard by which people are trained to do the job, and build the wall between the lazy judgmental onlookers and the people I routinely make fall in love with me. I need to do it with the soft power of my jokes, smile, listening skills, and persistent help I've offered and engaged in towards damn near everyone in the building. I need to find ways for people to buy in, show them their place in the long-term vision, and begin to draw out the resentful shame of those who know they won't make the cut. I need to set traps for the State to trip over their own dick. I need to have a backup escalation plan for when they show their teeth. Most importantly, I need it to remain fun. No one wants to seriously consider the impact of what I'm doing, they want to move one easy step at a time and feel better about themselves each day.

 

I'm not exactly ambivalent about the prospect of hijacking a place like DCS for the better. I don't know that I'd have much of an opportunity to be more actively involved in the kind of grassroots organizing it takes to civilize any place and time for even half a generation. People never saw parties like mine, they can’t conceive of what I have planned for the land, so doesn't it sort of follow that I should have my own agency? Just think of the fun/fallout when it goes wrong. We're juicy drama target number one. Think I won't pay, with my hood-rich status, to have a series of Youtube videos artfully crafted to tell our struggle to SAVE THE CHILDREN!? Think I can't go viral? Or, more wisely, someone I cultivate without the online baggage? Shame is an incredibly powerful motivator, and if my experience in life has taught me anything, it's that my presence alone seems to conjure your shame. I actually believe in myself and the things we can accomplish together. I think I'll find support from everyone who persistently hides from their responsibility to rise up.

[836] Psycho Passive Agressive

I was thinking, maybe earlier this week, about how I had seemed to find a form of flow to my work life. I had come to “accept” my daily grind and routine, for as little as there has been to do for me lately, as I looked at the massive chunks I'd taken out of my debt I thought, “Huh, already?”

This is my mind's ability to condense and block out. This is a kind of survival denial to keep from blowing up after ruminating too long. But it got me thinking about all of the little pieces that can or need to be in place in order for that flow state to be achieved. The forms of human experience are going to stop at the limits of the brain, but the combinations are endless. Was it 30% denial, 30% acceptance, and 40% actual contentedness for what I was doing? Toggle up and down and add different spices and you can play the game indefinitely.

This is how you get piddling sentiments about everyone having opinions and various ways in which they cope with the world. Who cares about the percentage!? The idea goes. As long as it results in another day to play with the dials, you're always a very specific kind of “right,” insofar as you haven't died. The artifice that is you is a perfect stunt double for what it might actually take to objectively regard your environment and your place in it as healthy. You've got the catch phrases, the low expectations, and many many things to distract yourself with. Who can say otherwise?

The doppelganger verses the real thing becomes important the more serious a situation you are in. “Patriotism” via car sticker likely crumbles when there's a knock at your door to answer the call of duty. In my work world “I care about the children!” is a nice substitute for too explicit a description of your bitchy tone, disorganization, and persistently missed deadlines. Does the stagnant institution challenge you? Of course not, and you're not going to do the work to either. In my world, you dropping the ball can literally result in children getting fucked.

I'd guess people my age pretty well understand the facade behind many claims to power (perhaps those younger even better). You don't get a fascist puppet for a president unless basically every possible institution meant to inform and protect against such a thing has broken down. So what then to make of all the little pieces that people are made up of? What's the percentages carrying them into the next day? 80% denial 10% irony and 10% thoughts about who they'd make sad if they committed suicide?

I think there's something vital to having intention and being what you do. I think you are absolutely you're work. But how do you go about recognizing that shoveling shit, for the muscled arms and shoulders it might produce, is not what we should be doing to get fit? I discuss the changes I want frequently. I see one barrier after another, and know more than I get credit for, people will need to be burned down in order to plant what's necessary. There's no polite conversation towards getting what you want in the world. It's out to kill you, so kill first.

Kill your imperfect language. Kill your doubt. Kill your fear. Kill the nonsense idea that things can't change and that you're not the adult in the room so you make the fucking rules. Kill the despair masquerading as humor and charm. Kill the silence. Kill the feeling of dying inside while you want to scream and scream little screams a million times a day until you ignite what those around you thought was killed in them. For you to live, that which is killing you must die. It is that serious. The ideas, the people, the institutions. You don't have to literally stab them, but you need to know the seriousness of the fight, and you need to live as loud and explicitly as you can.

It's incredibly hard to get where you need to be. Kill everything in your way, or die.

[835] Beat Of Disillusion

I feel dumb. Beyond the idea that we're always in a state of infinite ignorance, I mean I feel dumb in practical terms. I feel like every day I see an obvious solution, and pick otherwise. Depending on the problem, I pick it over and over again.

Some of it boils down to whether or not it feels like a “problem.” I'm a person who pretty regularly says I don't have real problems. Mine are boutique and come after “first-world.” Much of what I aspire to amounts to a degree of leisure, access, or consumption. I've lost illusions of “saving the world” and do not regard my species of really worth me (like so many pretentious teenagers.)

We can start with an easy example in considering working out. The gym is 3 minutes from my office. Why not just go? Well, how big of a problem does it feel like? This has gotten even more complicated, because I used to just look the way I looked and was regularly whoring around. Now, I still look like an older version of the way I've always looked, and got a friggin' girlfriend. I don't breathe heavy doing things like walking up 7 flights of stairs in the parking lot, but I will utter noises sometimes getting up, a harbinger of bad things. I, disingenuously, default to an idea about nobody living forever, and try to “feel it” before I make attempts to return to my human hamster wheel.

There's so many niche “problems” that beg to be addressed. I semi-regularly assume one day I'm going to come around the bend and see my house on fire. Home insurance and an inventory would be great for that situation, no? Why haven't I called across the country (I have), but even more so, until I'm able to find what I need? Why haven't I spent my weekends staying up all night listing my things and uploading backup logs to various clouds? I suppose I don't think the likelihood of my house bursting into flames is that high. I suppose I don't wish to add another monthly bill as I creep further and further from ongoing financial obligations.

A new problem happens every time I try to read, now listen, to a book. I want notes! I want to follow-up, and at least read one or two of the books the author mentions that seems like it would open that world even further. How do you do that with a day job? I never really thought you could, but I'm a year and half of living it, and every book I read leaves a gaping hole where I'd jump in until I felt I had a meager grasp on “the economy.” Now I just get notions and impressions, and take them where? Do you care that I might chime in that China's “growth” is more precarious than the numbers would suggest?

Work is a big problem. It's more like representative of the larger problem. There is no field that won't suffer the humans attached to it. There is no problem that can't be talked in circles about. There is no definition that won't slip from common consciousness and therefore common cause and effect.

Most of what I conceive of myself doing, that might be listed on the “large agenda” are projects that take a day or so. List two thousand books? Mostly done, just need to ensure I could actually timely ship 10 or 100 at a time if they actually sold that quickly. I can't, so I have a pending task upon my retrieval and storage of boxes for shipping, and cultivation of space for cutting and crafting. Me at 9pm swinging cardboard around knocking various things from shelves and raining scraps is goofy and inefficient and not scalable.

I got an auger. There's holes to be dug. It's perpetually raining or snowing. Do I power through, maybe burn out my motor, and soak through what were perfectly good shoes not-so long ago? Or does this require my often mentioned tent city system to try and keep work areas dry independent of the weather? Is it a problem that I have a new piece of equipment to taunt myself with? I understand it more as creating more potential. Maybe Greenland will get done melting and the weather will figure out somewhere else to dump the rain.

I have books and video games and music to be learned. How is every waking minute not spent drilling them while I'm “free” to do so? Do we finally have a problem, or a paradox? What do these activities represent? Distractions? I don't treat them that way, so it's not enough to have something I like just running in the background as noise. They're aspirations. I want to be able to discuss the books I read. I want to be immersed in the video games I play. I want to surprise myself and push my physical boundaries as well as build on my knowledge with music. When the goal isn't spoken to, they hum in the background until that righteous inspiring moment kicks in.

Part of learning that I either learn particularly quickly or have an ability to snap into focus when something matters to me is that my pensive infinite down time, I believe, looks like procrastination or shit-talk. I get overtly excited when I get something like a tool because it allows me to create a shared picture of something tangible verses the endless talk. My house with my things arranged in it, with me typing to you from the middle of nowhere, did not exist for me until it did. I don't see intermittent steps. The whole process looks like a thing, all at once, and that's what I want to do until the end. Why watch every episode? I can see the end. I can record the progress. It's almost, but not quite, pathological.

As I get close to or ping in and out of being in debt, I want to spend more. This makes me feel dumb. When you consider what I'm spending on, it's $70 in oil, wipers, and engine flush my car absolutely needs. It's $300 for glasses and contacts. It's $200 for gravel, $150 for the auger (that runs closer to $400), and it's back-up keys or food. When I buy something I call “stupid” or label as “toys” in my tracking page, it's less than $100 combined. Why don't I feel mature and responsible for trying to get out ahead of problems? Why does my cold acceptance that every dream I have rests on a series of practical underpinnings not leave me revved up and looking forward to owning the future?

I think I have an internal politics. The point is often made that people vote with their emotions or against what's in front of them, not on 20-point plans or anything remotely long-term and reasonable. That's the work of the “deep state” and day-to-day bureaucrats I work with trying to turn the mess of right now into sustainable vision and practice. I spend a lot of time downplaying my “right now” because it gets out of hand. I become the task master. All of the tasks I've mentioned would have been addressed, aggressively, and at the moment I had maybe 60% of the resources to do it correctly. It's a great way to live an intense, short, life.

Now, I hesitate to use the word “tired,” but my energy is not so much focused on my and my effort alone. I shy away from attempting to manufacture guilt that's pretty incredibly hard to come by in the first place. My philosophy has a pace or tempo that doesn't suggest runaway train.

I still think I'm going to get everything I've ever wanted in life. I don't know if that thought has ever really wavered. In fact, the more I've engaged with aspects of life that I've worked so hard to try and avoid (like dress nice every day and work for the State), I'm even more convinced. The more head nods and references to and from people I admire reinforce it. The befuddled, indifferent, or angry looks I consistently illicit create ancient foundational concrete that strengthens over time. Though the secret to its mix is not lost to history. The “problem” of “all that I want” is an easy one. On many different levels, I've already solved it. I recognize that I can and that I want to. I know most of the barriers are dumb or distracted. I can count and budget. I have the home. I have the land. I have the words. I'm courting the time, and when pressed, remember that when I had all the time, I used it to read, and put me at my current starting line about what to read next.

I still feel dumb. Irony again? It can't all be irony all the time, right? But what do I know?