[909] What I Really Really Want

I'm persistently battling the discrepancy between capacity and desire. I have the, not unfortunate, history of a demonstrated capacity or competence. I have a furiously chaotic desire to do a great number of things in no particular order.

I want to occupy the space “in between.” In job searches, I get email notifications for “management” positions, no doubt at establishments I want nothing to do with. I buy in when I'm actually responsible for things that rise to the level of my capacity to be organized, “professional,” and focused on the goal at hand. I also felt a genuine mild enthusiasm at the prospect of helping set up the county fair, part-time. I'm not a “company man” looking to retire at some pseudo-noble profession. I'm not a vagabond trying to piece his way one side-hustle or precarious gig at a time.

I am self-directed or authored. I do seek to continually explore this in-between space and figure out a way to proceed that is not dictated to me from a job board. I comment often about how I have yet to go door-to-door in pursuit of some small business yard work or scrapping endeavor. I read recently a post from someone who said they were “small” in doing a few million a year in revenue, but still feeling dependent on the checks cashing sooner or the operation might be stymied. What's millions when it's on fire and you're thirsty?

I would much prefer a generalized “gig” approach to my life with the gigs lined up well in advance to know there's some amount of money coming in. The only project I can intensely focus on is that of my personal life and comfort, which incidentally I'll go to extremely uncomfortable lengths to establish. Many variables remain unsecured, namely, long-term insurance across domains, and income that comes independent of my huge time or gas or otherwise investment.

I have a fair amount I wish to sustain and protect now. I have tools, including vehicles, I'd like to keep repaired and working. The things to watch, practice, and play are always ready and waiting. I can live lifetimes of “what ifs” as I lounge about the house and sporadically search for remote routes of income. The curious thing, you're always in debt in a society like ours. You always owe somebody, and the impending doom of consequences stokes your “motivation” to keep putting yourself out there for the next whip. The imagined alternative ways of living seem like a worse punishment, and there certainly does not seem to be any genuine “revolution” on the horizon.

I reflect a lot on why it continues to frustrate me when I think about the different directions people went after college. Now, we've hit the age points I called-out in my early 20s after the divorces I (sorry?) called coming and the hairlines have started to recede. People's smiles are looking a little more dead and the posts feeling obligated to promote the “happiness” of our lives feels less insistent. What's the take-away? Continue to live in service to our presumptions and pretensions regarding a “normal” life? It was worth it to run the experiment of things we knew, in our heart of hearts, was not what we wanted?

I know it takes an incredible amount of work and bravery to try and live in service to a “highest” ideal. Really, who's paying the bills? You have to look incredibly closely at what you're trying to create, what you can do without, or what it will say about you when things inevitably come to a grinding halt. I don't know that there are enough words to describe how different I feel even trying to “be me” verses play the many other parts I feel obligated enough to partake in. I can't describe the cascading frustration when I zero in on how fucking absurd it is to be granted so much and feel so stuck because...the pallets and a huge scrapping score are waiting just as I discover my trailer is out of commission, and I wasted money on the wrong tires, and it's unclear if a trip I've been planning for months will interfere with my ability to capitalize on my access to either. What good goddamn reason is there, universe, that I haven't been loading pallets and picking up scrap the last few weeks? I'm too broke to fix my trailer AND have a few months of savings? After a dozen passes under this framing, it never begins to make sense.

The move then is to center around what has been done and how much finer the line gets with each step down it. I can afford the trailer, extremely begrudgingly. Like with everything I call out well in advance, it does not make paying for it, fighting with rusted lug nuts, nor the tasks to engage in potentially last minute any more palatable. I've already achieved a serious amount of pallet and tire hauling before I discovered the new issues. I have a trailer to even be worked on. I have job prospects and lines of income at least in the works, so the added anxiety and frustration at the costs should be mitigated eventually. There is an entire world of scrap and pallets still left to be gathered no matter how frustrating it is to look ill-prepared and inadequate in the present moment.

That's my biggest problem. The moment feels like such a demonstrable and insidious lie and wholly a statement about me and what I haven't established yet. It takes effort to rope everything else in. It takes reminding myself that I tend to forgive people the circumstances of life because I'm so intimately familiar with getting fucked by them as well. I could have been more methodical in the type of tires I bought to ensure they were the correct size and not taken the tire guy's comment over the phone at face value. Is $200 ever going to make or break me? No. Is it just another testament to how expensive it is to be poor when you're navigating problems as they arise to the “best” of your attention and budget? Absolutely.

I feel like I have an incredible sense about the incredible heights I could reach. I don't overly romanticize anything, the past included, but it feels alive today as the same things that kept me excited and motivated and creative then pop up in what I elicit from people today. I'm still funny and engaging. I'm still sincere in how I relate information that means things to me. I'm still, sometimes on the verge of literally, fighting to not have certain standards of honesty and behavior fall through bureaucratic and pious holes of indifference. My “happy hobbit hole” is not a community and my forays into self-sustaining side-hustles cost an incredible amount in gas.

I do think an important shift has happened, at least nominally, in that I'm behaving more like the money is secondary. That's a class shift. I left my job earlier than anticipated, citing all of my righteous ideals, and after sternly dictating the pithy, but large enough, sums it would take for me to keep playing along. I passed on a sure-hire at another establishment with the same mindset. I don't want to be miserable and taken advantage of as much as what is on offer. I'm willing to exploit and be exploited, but it's taken me 3 years to open up more options as to how. What kind of fool works that determinedly only to persist in business-as-usual veins for longer than is required?

I continue to ask myself just what it is I need. Do I need recognition? Meh, I've only grown to look down on people more after increasing time around them. Do I need respect? Hard to ask for what you don't really give, so no as well. Do I need “entertainment?” It all, often, just feels like passing the time more than some deeply interested pursuit and exploration of why some artist is arting. No, I need to feel individuated in spite of the myriad reasons to suspect I'm a statistic across the endless means of categorizing. Writing is individual to the dictates of my head and fingers. The path(s) I choose will stem from the reasons or arbitrariness contained within.

Of course, my individual has morphed over time as incentives and obligations have evolved. I don't really care to surround myself with “friends” in the same way as I imagined in the past. This isn't a revulsion for social interactions, it is just another dagger in the romance. I want the creativity and chaos of genuine individuals pursuing their goals alongside and in service to each other. The focus and clarity of the how and why you are doing things is what bonds or outlives any one member. You can bind together because the profit potential exists, or you can vibe on an eternally enriching source of energy for defining the, not impractical, means for pursuing how to be your kind of individual. You can exist in service to or sacrifice of your conception of society writ large. You can marry every highest ideal to daily slog and you can do it in only ways you can define or figure ways to feel good and balanced about.

That's how I last in “normal” environments. I was alone when I went to people's houses and explained to them how the State worked. I made the rules of what was and was not appropriate in how we were going to conduct communication and visits, and those rules made just enough room for your traumatized and ratchet lifestyle without compromising safety or what it takes for me to live with myself. If anything, now is the time to be even louder. The impediment to that kind of definite statement is the “if only I had” kind of thinking. Had what? The motivation or organization? The drive? The desire? Surely I maintain those things, but it is perpetually unclear as to how they should manifest. I don't need a fancy camera to make Youtube videos. I don't need hundreds of dollars to knock on doors. I don't need to work 80 hours every two weeks an hour away to keep the bills paid.

I quit my job less than a week ago. I got a part-time job, am orchestrating going private practice for counseling, have looked into and sent quasi-applications to other part-time gigs. I haven't had the rug pulled out from under me for the scrapping or pallets. I haven't even begun the “real” work of what it would take to make the land profitable. I'm not in panic mode. I've just been given too many hours to get into my head and find familiar circumstances worth bemoaning. The needle has moved, but it feels different because I'm not desperate or feeling like my back is against the wall. It's a new kind of disorienting freedom.

I need to explore more grant writing and talking to people who do conservation and gardening. I kind of leave a lot of that up to Allie, but there's no reason I can't bump into someone who likes what I'm doing or knows who I should speak to that can fund, a year or few at at time, the effort to continually develop what we're doing. I never get properly worried until I've spoken to a few dozen people who all turn out to be shit, and I haven't even spoken to one. All of this could be functionally mute in weeks as well if this counseling pans out like it absolutely should. For now, I should focus on enjoying my trip to Chicago, the food, and ability to catch up on shows. Nothing is going anywhere.

[908] Mirror Mirror

 “Right, but which truth are you going with?”

I feel like it's been a while since I've written. I'll lump this in with my blog from yesterday. At once, I've thought I've had so little to say and it wouldn't be worth it, and yet my entire world is still happening, still chugging in some kind of direction. Things still annoy me, and there is always some level of existential crisis to constantly unpack.

You never are really allowed to stop talking. That is, it's always very noisy. There's TV, news media, YouTube personalities, best-selling authors, and that nagging so-and-so in your life. Your kids never shut up. Your brain, plagued by anxiety or otherwise, reminding you or hinting at all of the things you're not giving the requisite attention to. It's an unconscious conversation with yourself at all times, manifesting as distracted or hurried moves in the world meant to assert or pacify.

Adam Curtis's latest documentary “Can't Get You Out Of My Head” just taught me Valium was trying to quell the emptiness in 1971. The Sackler's then kept on sacking. Today, I have endless discussions to nowhere with people addicted to opiates, trying to reorient their behavior into something “healthy” or “productive,” or in their words, “normal.” Curtis's documentaries are a meditation on the infinite amount of forces and ideologies permeating every thought we have. Coincidentally, I just saw the movie “The Sound of Metal” that ends on a scene where the main character shuts off his cochlear implants to finally take in a moment of stillness.

It bears remembering at all times that you will die. I think when death is fresh in your mind, you get more deliberate, more patient, and find more meaning. Your example is one you choose to set more than the one you are incidentally setting through circumstance. When you can own your death you can begin a life project you feel motivated to be responsible for. Death is hardly something people take a significant amount of time trying to define. Death is the thing to be protected from, reacted to. It's not something to bear proudly or exalted by anyone but mythological heroes who, in one form or another, get put right back through the human anxiety machine and are reborn or otherwise immortalized.

I think I understand power as a complex way of denying death. Whether you rise through the ranks of a particular organization or terrorize your household, you haven't sorted through your powerlessness in the face of death. You'll never terrorize to the degree you feel terrorized. You'll never control more than the law of entropy. You can lead the dance of your conversation and observation about death or things breaking apart, but you're going to trip. I think as with most ironically held desires, you get power when you don't want it or pursue paradoxical ends given the contexts in which it is sought. Who is more powerful, the dictator, or revolutionary? To me, both are undermined by the power of ideology, thus I feel the most powerful in my understanding of the broader context or nature of the human mind. It's on me to not let that become its own pathological ideology.

Thus a habit of persistent scrutiny and healthy doubt must be employed. An active discussion about balancing forces must take place. Without them, we become defaulted to the sea of indifferent and incidental forces of infinitely fluctuating power. If you believe nothing else about your place in existence, it's that you have the ability to speak to, examine, and shift what you think and feel. Perhaps you do it for the sake of the shifting. Perhaps you have grand designs to help others shift in different or easier ways than the current culture paradigms allow for. Regardless of your aim, it behooves you to understand the nature of the game and forces you are up against. Ignoring them is how the disillusioned fringe become the next tyrants.

So much of my effort is in pursuit of the privilege to be left alone. I don't want to fight. I don't want to have my brain hijacked by the chaos of people unable or unwilling to sip let alone gulp responsibility for how their miserable consciousness is manifesting in the world. I comfortably eschew your decision-making whilst still respect how little I believe there's much of a “you” there deciding to do anything. I tie that struggle to the practical options I wish to give myself in the world I'm bound to. Oh, you want fascism? I can probably buy my way out of its worst consequences. You're just super stoked to keep denying history and racism? Bet I don't use my future wealth to back minority-owned businesses or support immigration causes.

I think of my obligation to the world or myself as a form of asymmetrical warfare. I'm not gonna storm the capital like an insurrectionist dipshit. I want to create diffuse loci of power. I want to be off-grid. I want to be multi-lingual and counter-cultural in a perpetually subversive manner. I want to take the diffuse and abstract and meet it with an intentional greater abstraction driven by a tempered wisdom and playfulness about what it is I'm really after or how it might get there. I know I can't “control” in the colloquial sense. But I can acknowledge my identity, my mark, and witness my environment get shaped around my ideals. That's as close to peace as I'm going to find. That's how I get to die in my world on my terms.

My clients tell me often how their drug use did not make anything better. “It masked or numbed what I was feeling, but...” Same story every single time. Same truism, cliché, almost rehearsed lines. The response? Do the drug again. The mind's agency has been subverted. The compulsion capitulated to. The forces their brains formed around win again and again. They'll say, “Well everyone's addicted to something.” I can agree, but arguably in a deeper way than they're even speaking to, as they're employing the saying from an excuse-ridden place. It's dismissing their agency and responsibility verses acknowledging how someone else's addiction might mirror our own and then asking ourselves what to do about it.

I discover my responsibility every time I ask the question. It's no small feat to take it upon yourself to ask the question. It's any wonder how you build the resilience to keep asking every day or every moment. It's terrifying work on its face. It's the killing of ceaseless presumptions and pretensions that would otherwise occupy the space for the question. It's a space people are happy to fill in for you when you're not paying attention.

At some point, I think it was in early high school, it sunk in that my eyes were permanently nailed open. Whether I understood what I was watching or not, I had to keep looking and feeling and coping with it. I had to make peace or I would drive myself insane. I had to write. I had to read and question. I had to argue. I had to stand for the slivers of hope and peace I could cut out of otherwise ceaseless angst and pain. So I started writing. I started anchoring my experience in a sea of words that more often seem to make considerably more sense to me than anyone else. I observe myself trying and organizing and turning consciousness into a reflection. It makes me feel better and like I can begin moving again in the world; like I have a stake and ability to change and grow with as opposed to suffer from. It wasn't magic. I didn't start believing in mythical beings who granted me special privileges. I just paid more attention. In doing so, it becomes pretty fucking clear what other people are ignoring, and what, if anything, I can responsibly do about it.

[907] Worn

 Bloody hell, I've made it home. This is one where the title came first.

I have many goals. They run all at once, they are more or less affordable, and they require things of me that speak to different aspects of my being that I care about. I like to build and create things. A specific tool I might be able to afford. The set of tools to really build what I wish to rarely are. I want to be basically in shape, and yet mostly use my gym membership for the shower. Well, better look for the free bricks, pallets, posts, or some other dirty job that gets me lifting, walking, and otherwise developing muscles that mostly make an appearance in the warmer months. I want to practice some degree of sustainability or “green” building, so it behooves me to ensure the money I'm spending works in concert with that kind of ideal.

Today was a “hit multiple levels of your goals” day. Pallets, for “free,” from a place not too far, but just far enough, and who is going to have them in perpetuity each week. I make the pitch to be the go-to so that I'm not playing Cannonball Run trying to rush in to first position. The guy takes me up on it. Great! Right? What are all the goals and layers to begin with?

I have the tools; the truck, the trailer, ratchets, gloves, my redirecting sweat band, and glasses. Each tool a micro-goal spanning many years and the waiting games of paychecks.

I have the time; I consider my time the most important thing, and now I get to be using it in service to my highest ideals. I don't have to rush because I asked for my time to be respected, and it was granted.

I have momentum; it's been a busy set of weekends, and doing labor gets considerably easier when you're physically and mentally prepared to continue to do labor. This will more than count for a workout.

This is about as sustainable as you can get, turning “trash” into cool creative things, utilizing all your home tools.

I like to demonstrate that I mean what I say. I don't take selfies for the sake of selfies. I show you pallets and fence and hopefully translate the enthusiasm I have for this whole thing into, if nothing else, demonstrable proof that it is possible, fun, worth it, and what you should have been doing when you lied to me about what you wished to be doing back in college.

There's a hiccup. I'm not actually rich enough for all of my goals. I'm hood-rich. I'm first-world poor. Everything I do, at all times, comes with a hope and a prayer that no one gets severely injured or too many things break at once. You have to be a little cavalier in your estimation of the danger or investment of what it's going to take to get the job done.

Take my trailer. It was “affordable” in that, given I did not immediately rush out to replace at least two tires nor needed to bother with re-welding or fixing a loose board, I could pay the guy $200 up front, and he was willing to let me pay the remaining $600 when I got paid on Friday. I'm not the guy who can just show up to the trailer store, buy a car trailer for 3K or more, and drive away ready to get to work, no no. The trailer serves me well in hauling the tires, having a heavy jointer loaded onto it, and I certainly noticed one tire appeared to be oddly wearing down, but I had a spare at the ready.

Consider my ratchets. Some are pretty old and one snapped. I just got a set of new mid-level ones in which one decides to scrape against a rough edge and render itself basically useless overnight. These suckers weren't cheap either, but my last pallet run needed reinforcements. They're not terribly long either, at least, not pallet wrangling long.

Gander at my gloves. I've got several sets of gloves, most “reinforced” with layers of gorilla tape where all the holes started to open up. Not these gloves though, just holes. Holes which made their presence known as I go to move my scalding hot truck box into a position more conducive to hauling pallets. Mind you, a truck box I only have to move because it's *just not quite* long enough to rest on the side walls of the truck.

I made a trip to Menards to get commercial ratchets...for $200.

In my fervor to keep making “progress” or “demonstrations” that I'm all of that which I say I am, there's often very little planning. I didn't have enough to drink. I didn't pause to ask the guy how many pallets there would be, and stupidly trusted a misleading picture. I said “the spare is there,” and didn't take too hard a look at the other tires.

Increasingly sun-burnt, thirsty, and approaching undue mental confusion, I get all of the pallets loaded up. I go on my merry way. I buy two over-priced smoothies on the way. I stop to add a strap. I drive the kind of slow that's reserved for a cheeky 80's comedy where I'm supposed to be waving at all of the confused and angry people speeding by. A pallet comes loose. Two semi-trucks let me know through frantic beeping. I play the world's least interesting game of Frogger in picking my moments to step into what's assuredly going to be my doom and wrestle with the pallet. Another car motions in a whirl telling me to look at my tires, bits of rubber dancing away with each bump over an unpaved section of road.

I'm home. I'm safe. I have a shit ton of pallets, or, work to do on them to make them a fence and other things. The trailer did it. The truck, shaking like the palsy, I suspect burned its last ounce of oil, and easily $50 in gas. By the numbers, I used my time in the most productive way I consider possible. Spent less than $300 to get what will be a lot of future fence. This is time saved in running to different locations for considerably less pallets. I get the harrowing story. I get one more notch in my “you're taking the wrong lesson from this” belt.

I still find it in me to envy the people with the bigger truck with the new equipment attached to it, doing their thing with considerably less cab shaking and muscle tension as they laser-focus on the rear-view mirrors (I assume). It's not that they take away my motivation or pride in what I'm doing. It's that I don't think they appreciate what they have. It's probably an unfair thought, but I picked these pallets up in one of, if not the, richest cities in Indiana. I drove them back to one of the poorest. So poor, it's on our goal sheet to figure out how to give them sanitary ways to shit.

I can't help but think that I stretch myself incredibly thin, and never had to. At least, by the numbers, all of the people I imagined I'd be doing things like this with all came from the same kind of backgrounds as me. We aren't poor poor. We have supportive families. We imbibed the apocalyptic narratives around climate change and are certainly now the exact age we should be actively batting to death the literal fascists...but that's a whole thing unto itself. What happens instead? I throw little parties for myself and garner the likes from the handful of people who consistently have given a fuck about what I'm about. It's good. It's gratifying. It ain't gonna save the world. We're all certainly smart enough to find ourselves preoccupied in whatever upper-middle class city we choose.

I wear a certain kind of badge in service to an authority I wish to maintain indefinitely. It gets the job done, in spite of everything. It' not a discussion about would've or could've. What if the pallet fell? Pallets don't fall off things that are better equipped? I made it not fall, and got it home. What if the tire blew? New tires don't pop? I gambled and won. I wish I never had to gamble. Nothing about the environments I'm stuck in suggests I'm ever doing anything less.

I'm already home. Before I go looking for the next “free” things, before I roll the dice, and before I need to unpack some situation seemingly so indicative of my state of being, I know why I went, stayed cool-enough, and got back. I know where those pallets are going. I know how to improve my next run. I know how and why I can afford it. I'm good with every good and bad thing you think the situation says about me. I wish I had a better handle on why I can't believe any of this effort is taking me anywhere but “away.”

[906] Noise

I suspect, at “bottom,” I'm as “even” or “ambivalent” about “anything” as every particle I'm made of. While I don't subscribe to the notion of a “mechanical” universe nor determinism, I don't think you must be particularly “intellectual” to surmise “power” or “something greater,” even in a simple explanation of complexity, that renders you pointless and obsolete by definition. Indeed, many find it quite a relief when they can “give up” and hand over the weight of the world to this disembodied power or larger narrative as to where they fit. There's great utility, psychological and practical, to organizing your mind into a framework well independent of scrutiny.

When you have problems, it's easy to keep yourself from questioning. In the moment, there's a fire, and you try to put the fire out, not read about how many fires get started in how many ways nor do you care if statistically fires in your area are from one thing over another. These are our automatic reflexes and muscle tensions. These are our compulsions and self-soothing behaviors. These are the embodied demonstrations and movements in the world indicating an actual problem as such, and something being done to it. Whether it's exacerbating, temporarily stopping, or genuinely healing is often discovered too late, if at all.

I can frame dozens of problems instantaneously. I don't have health insurance, nor been to the dentist or eye doctor in a couple-few years. I have “stuff” everywhere, disorganized, and curious if I'm ever going to get around to fixing or using it. My shoulders and jaw are tense. I don't eat that well. I'm ambivalent in many of my choices in spending money. I'm in positions of power and influence I don't respect nor draw motivation or inspiration from. My most important thing, time, I'm still not feeling better at finding more control of, even if I technically have more hours in the day in which I can use it relative to my previous jobs. I could only dig out pieces of a tick from my cat. My shitty car is costing me, continually, more than it is worth both in time, thought, and money. Is that twelve?

I want such stupidly “easy” things that I get acutely dejected when they seem so hard to pull off. Like, I just want to go bowling with my friends. My friends are busy, don't really like or care about bowling generally, and it's been many months, pandemic aside, since remote enthusiasm for the prospect of bowling has been voiced. Why the fuck can't I pull off bowling? I let thoughts like that compound and it becomes speculation as to what about me and my lack of focus or enthusiasm or competence lends itself to my car issues or house project delays. Why would I waste money on being “entertained” when I could be *working,* like once another room is built I won't be stuck with the exact same set of issues involving a general “lacking” sense underscoring whatever I do.

It's one thing for me to say I get what I set out to. It's another to have little or nothing to say about the next things in line. More stuff? Spending money is not an accomplishment. More knowledge? To what end? I perpetually have dozens of articles from months ago I'm not actively reading. There's always a little picking up or chores to do...yippee. Do things for others? Never will the idea of you being unable to help others if you can't help yourself ring louder. Compliments from clients or praise and thank yous when I'm counseling them through a crisis mean nothing to me. My concept of what I'm capable of and its inevitable consequences has been overflowing for a while.

I managed to get the rest of the tick body removed from the cat.

[905] Kick The Habit

I'm fucking frustrated. I have no real problems, so I get to hyper-focus on the little things that disrupt my perfect circumstances. I'm looking, again, for another car. Cars are generally several thousand dollars. Every last fuck online has zero concept of how modern banking works and the ability to pay with a credit card. They're smug about their cash insistence. They're short and offer opinions on how scammy it sounds to expect them to have a bank account.

It's invariably deeper than that. It's the “easy” things going awry generally that keep me pissed off. At work, I'm a “counselor” for drug addicts. As a center, we don't have the “easy” things in place to provide even the basic structure and routine we're implicitly expected to demonstrate for a class of people who struggle with holding accountable routines. The vast majority don't have the “basics” in place, before pick-your-dumpster-fire scenario enters their life. Whether it's basics in terms of budgeting or peek behind the curtain of consequences of “critical thinking.” A good portion of my day is insisting we practice breathing.

A theme for the last few weeks has been presenting itself. Those that are “good” or “better” are routinely attacked. It's not some righteous battle where the lesser fools insist on humility and a comprehensive accounting. It's the sea of resentment that must be actively combated in order for anything worthwhile to last or register in the first place. Having a goal makes you a target. Being able opens you up to an endless attack, not even just from the outside. You get to undermine yourself and find every damning assessment and insecurity more compelling than any step forward.

In the many years I've internalized a sense of my being and described the kind of world I feel like I'm obligated to creating, I still haven't learned how to square that with how infinitely destructive I view the context which I'm working within. I try to bring a little life and access to information to my door? Cue the shit-talking nurse about what is or is not supposed to be on doors. Just...because? (I put pictures of books on my door and offer them as free downloads at work. The gossip train clued me into that apparently rubbing someone the wrong way.)

So infinitely petty, yet I find it so infinitely objectionable it gets to be a piece of my breakdown. I'm not curious of her motives. I'm not intrigued by her decision making. She's just another piece of compulsively shitting on things that are good, potentially useful, and indicative of an intention to give and try in spite of circumstances that are less than ideal.

It's been over a month since I made my case for the hiring bonus I'm absolutely owed. I know they don't care about me. I knew that coming in. So, I'm fighting. I'm reminding. I'm patiently biding my time, looking for other jobs at the same time, and trying to figure out just how much room I'm going to give myself in un-earned overtime and time spent watching Excel training videos to quell how sick it makes me to jump from one incidentally monetarily useful expenditure of my time to the next. It was 3 weeks before I was shouldering other counselors' work. I already know the path to being able to do even more.

I never seem to matter outside of the incredibly small bubbles I try to create for myself. In my bubble I build things. In my bubble there's buffers and a coherent through-line towards one or more coinciding ends. My bubble, which I was hell-bent on securing, if nothing else, costs about $300 a month to live in before I need to sacrifice “comforts.” I get exhausted leaving my bubble. Any city feels like a “big” one, with too many people doing too much nothing, and waiting to offer their ill-advised “thought” about what it is I wish to do or who I think I am.

You know you don't even need a license to be the level of counselor I am? Do you know what it feels like to create from a hodgepodge of psychology literature I've found useful insta-group discussion topics and activities that people are raving about to their licensed counselor who then asks me just what it is I'm doing that's so worthy of such enthusiasm? The bar feels too low. The suggestion is that our systems of educating and licensing are not doing the easy or bare-minimum things in how they're conveying information or why.

I doubt this transitions well, but I've never found “it could always be worse” thinking useful. Maybe it couldn't. Maybe it's as bad as it can be or has ever been, but no individual is going to have the ability to see so by definition. It's a hopeless kind of thinking. It roots you in the misery and simultaneously disengages your agency to do anything about it. It could always be worse? What's worse than you being a useless sack of shit throwing up your arms and resigning yourself to fate? That sounds like the worst to me. That sounds like you actually crave something worse to experience so you can let yourself off the hook for how pathetic you're currently behaving. No, there's nothing worse than absolving yourself of the fallout of inaction and inattention. The asshole that says “it could always be worse” is merely saying, “At least I don't feel responsible for it.”

I think at some level the tide is turning on the hapless victim complexes. Twitter still gets its way occasionally, but practically it's sinking in that none of our hands are really clean, and the exhilaration of religious fervor for any idea is its own kind of self-destructive addiction. “Addiction,” is a loaded word too, with very little needle movement on how we come to understand it culturally. I speak of addiction as “compulsion,” because the science tells me so. I don't call an addicted brain “degenerative.” I think abusing your compulsion in service to bad shit is what degenerates it. It's working just fine, with horribly inappropriate tools.

I still compulsively clench. I still compulsively hate. I still compulsively rack my brain for a moment's release from the thought that I'm miserably failing myself and future prospects by not either getting viciously efficient about money or ruthless in exploiting people. Mine would be the wide-eyed pure kind of evil pursuit though. I wouldn't compulsively try to tear things down. I'd be deliberately dismantling that which I don't respect enough to believe it deserves to exist. It'd be cartoonish villainy born from misguided pride and resentment more refined and justified than that of the unwashed masses. It would also be exhausting and counterproductive.

I know somewhere not-that-deep in my psyche I keep myself at a certain level of debt to trigger my “practical” sense that protects me from aggressively employing my other inclinations. I have many years under my belt that affirm my capacity to sit and save and survive on 1/10th of what I've been making the last 3 years. Sometimes when I say out loud how long I've spent doing certain jobs I find it hard to believe. 2 years at DCS? 1 year delivering food? 3 years piecing together this land into something I look forward to returning to each day? 14 years making errant appeals to get organized and budgeted into transcendent shared goals? 17 years writing about how to make sense of my place at any given point in space and time? I haven't gone anywhere, I've just continued to incorporate more tools. I've just watched myself do exactly as I told you I would.

Who cares? I don't lol. I care about so few, so little, and less every day. When that changes, the thought of having too much money, access, or responsibility won't feel like a matter-of-fact manifest destiny atop the bodies of the savage and unworthy. Maybe it would feel like I got a tool I could actually use in the right circumstance for the right job. Until then, just like the growing stockpile of expensive toys I can employ to build something – one day – I'll sit, and wait for the rain to clear, or the cost to go down, or until I find more someones it feels worth working in service to.

[904] False Profits

It's been almost a month since I've thought to write anything for my adoring public. In that time, I've been banned from commenting on facebook for 30 days, gotten settled into being a counselor at a methadone clinic, and done feeble amounts of yard work, scrapping, or other chores in the intermittently nice days and inclinations that strike at random. It's nothing new that I don't know where to start.

I seem to find ways to make more and more money doing less. That was the thought I had finding a job where I can sit in an office all day, using “motivational interviewing” and “solution focused” conversational techniques to signify I have a basic respect and understanding of “where they are” when it comes to my “patients.” Depending on your “professional” distinction, you might have “clients,” but because you actually come to our center to get dosed, “pt” is the preferred descriptor. Suspiciously, “therapist” shows up on our internal sign-in sheet for staffing, and “counseling” and “therapy” are used almost inter-changeably by everyone but me.

The pragmatist in me gets it and even agrees, to some extent. I genuinely can't distinguish what any given psychologist is doing more than a person who is basically respectful and employing non-judgmental and curious language to get people to arrive at their own conclusions. I don't mean to be flip or deliberately blind to the exacting understanding or rehearsal of tools that advanced degrees require. I think there is enough room left for improvement in our understanding of the human mind and social environment to be suspicious that your problems rise to the level of hyper discipline-specific knowledge or medication most often.

I think that we even allow for institutions like the one I work for to exist in the first place is the realized truth of my pragmatism. Therapist shortage? Let's get into the tough conversation about what people really need. If you've managed to hold on for 4 years in service to a social-adjacent degree, you're it! Whether it's culturally imposed narratives or not, the feedback I get most often from patients is the insistence that “routine” or “structure” of having somewhere to be each day helps. I had a patient tell me she wanted someone to “call me out on my shit.” Culturally, we know we're all over the place. We prefer even the semblance of order over our internalized chaos.

Like many ill-equipped and poorly managed greedy dress-up games, they suffice to drop you in the middle and cross their fingers you'll make them more money than feel entitled to be paid. I was given ZERO training in how to conduct a group counseling session. I was given ZERO information on the nature of addiction, risks, or health implications of methadone. I was given ZERO reason to believe my “leadership” had anything more than a few letters after their name you can acquire after several day “training” workshops and taking a test for which you could be googling the answers to in real time.

What remains true at all times about this situation is the same across all situations. There are sincere people taking at least something seriously, even if it's not the kind of comprehensive long-term accountability that someone like me prefers. Everyone needs to be there, either to feel a certain kind of way, or be paid. The veneer of respectability is less something to bemoan and more to be understood as the playing field. Can you operate within the confines of what you've been given more than you destroy by virtue of what's missing? So far, it seems like I can, which feels obvious, but is no less generally disconcerting and sad.

It feels like one a job that I could never screw up as long as I was there. I turn on when I have to deal with people. If I'm tired or disoriented, I still have the capacity to direct or redirect the attention or language. I can set aside an hour here or there to type up any number of notes. I can nod along silently as someone who does not want to get better weaves webs of bitter bullshit and performs the story that precludes their ownership. I can do this dance until late July when I've hopefully paid off my debts and not found anything worth staying $1-3k in the hole for another month or two more.

In the meantime, I'm asking myself what I can do or speak to each day that will interrupt my tendency to...point out how wholly unfulfilling what I'm doing with my time is, deeply in spite, of any good I may do in service to any one person's life. A small proportion of people appear to take the process seriously. They communicate. They show up on time. They want their 6^th counselor in 2 years to perhaps give or teach them something useful. I'm not a “go through the motions” person. I will get bored, create something, try to do it in a new way, or take on more random shit to do that never made it into the job description. I need to find a way to actually stay awake after I get home and utilize the nice days before they are miserably hot. I need to bring food with me to eat throughout the day.

I'm, especially now, trying not to fall into a psychological black hole where I just kind of exist for the next few months, feel the clenching and weight lift little by little in two-week intervals, and remark 3 months from now just how “easy” or “obvious” my relative comfort or budgeting has manifested. A hidden opportunity, for example, was a patient who said her brother had 200 pallets he never knows how to get rid of each month or so. I can spend a few weeks transporting pallets in the bed of my truck, just like I've been making pilgrimages to Menards for cardboard to help fight needing to weed the garden. I'm also looking for some kind of preferred systematization that's both consistent yet spontaneous. If I owned my job and could take off or show up at will, like anything, I could see myself engaging with it indefinitely.

I intend to get as many letters after my name as they can bilk me for, with one conference/test in June on the calendar. I'll also be looking into gong into private counseling with a friend so we can court the hourly rate insurance actually pays verses what the middle men say we're worth. When I've got a blog on one screen, and a telehealth patient on the next banking me $150 an hour, we're going to have to start having some serious discussions about how that money should manifest in the world. By “we” I mean the 5 or so people who've actually bought into my designs for world domination.

[903] Oregon Trailer

I want to talk about the difference between “coping” and “processing.” Of course, this will, as always, just be my interpretation and how I might think to use them in my own life.

 

I think the primary difference between coping and processing is “intention.” Children have to cope, they don't have a choice. My body, my habits, and my thoughts were shaped by my quasi-abusive upbringing, and the things I did or continue to do were coping mechanisms. Obsessive thoughts, picking, headaches, or less maladaptive things like learning how to joke (in a cruel or otherwise manner) fall under that umbrella. I didn't say, “Hey, that's hurtful or confusing, let's make my head pound for a month!”

 

Processing is deliberate. Processing is writing. If I encounter a difficult or stressful situation, I want to exhaustively investigate each moment of what happened. If, in less than a second, I swing from immense pain to sadness to a flicker of joy back to pain and right into confused emptiness and disembodied consternation, I want to know if every beat of that constitutes their own paragraphs or singular words. I respect my brain's capacity to fuck me relentlessly over “small” things or “fleeting” emotions and sentiments. I respect that it can do so in a way that massively outweighs its ability to remember and reflect on what's good or worthwhile, and is even evolutionarily designed that way to protect me from underestimating potentially deadly dangers.

 

Even more disparaging of a thought, there is no guarantee you'll ever really be able to process something. Maybe you lack the mental acuity. Maybe you're never provided nor able to discover the series of words that result in a genuine epiphany over struggle to manufacture insight. I had a lot of extremely naive ideals about “love” and what a “healthy” relationship were before I decided consciously to tango again and again. Had I remained in that “intellectual” posture about what coupling was or who people should be, it wouldn't be a stretch to say I would severely lack the visceral insight, bravery, or patience to engage with the infinite series of questions and struggles that arise from our ever-iterating entanglements.

 

As long as you're alive, you're coping. You're coping with getting older and things failing you. You're coping with less-than-desired novelty. You're coping with growing obligations or responsibilities, which are not the same thing. Maybe the coping is helpful, maybe not, maybe sometimes, or maybe results in a threat to someone else's coping. If you've adopted a kind of “radical honesty” that has manifested as an amazing tool for stress reduction in your own life, but everyone hates you and what you have to say, well, hi. Without the hyperbole, you can understand the different kind of approaches to life when you contemplate the difference between when you're able to counsel verses when you need it yourself.

 

I think most healthy adults most of the time don't react to things like literal babies or young children. Spilling a little food isn't going to have you crying for an hour. Stubbing your toe isn't going to prompt you to throw something or punch the wall. You would counsel that child to come to you, maybe kiss the spot that hurts. You would redirect their attention. You would try to make them laugh. You know spilled food or a bruise are not the end of the world, for someone who's perspective is so small or short-lived, how can you expect them to know it isn't, in fact, the end of the world as they've come to know it? It's the parents that were treated like adults and traumatized to grow-up and suppress before they had the tools or time that break the little brains of their offspring. “I'll give you something to cry about.” They had room to introduce more pain, but not room to explore or find a better habit or perspective.

 

Somehow, I've found myself in the position to now be an addiction counselor. I say “somehow” somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I've been aggressively exploring my place in the universe for 16 years. I parse out the language. I take the time. I write it down. My attempts to relate my experience were felt, put into practice, and I'm sitting in the consequences of every moment. Every extra second of patience, every more-exacting word, and each opportunity that builds on them is the best I have to offer. I know you can't move me when I don't want to be moved. I know the difference between feeling and behaving indignantly verses genuinely not understanding what you're talking about. Even if I may remember or recall feeling viscerally, I also know I've chosen to approach those feelings in a way that moves them away from “coping” and into “processing.” Both surely happen and often at the same time, but you're watching my chosen habit. Yours might be different and function the same way. Only you'll know.

 

There are a lot of cliches that become apparent even in scratching the surface of group therapy or addiction counseling. One is, “Meet them where they are.” Where any of us are appears functionally or practically impossible at first pass. Where am I? Well, I'm behind the computer or leading the session, physically. You don't know what's going on in my head, and it'd be a wild amount of pride to suggest I knew it “perfectly” or “exactly” either. Where are you? How am I supposed to understand where you are? Maybe you'll tell me. Maybe you're lying. Maybe I won't understand. Maybe you have a very narrow word box that keeps you penned in. Maybe you've never read nor heard the *exact* way you've been feeling, so that even when you hear it, it does not translate because it's 15 syllables long and in German.

 

The whole of conscious existence swirls around that kind of battleground - provided you're not on a kind of hippie spiritual or experiential flow that tries to not engage with it all. It's one that I'm notably learned in generally, now, remaining “ambivalent” or “nonplussed” about, and it has “chased away” a great many of my relationships which were not prepared to break things into minutia or “argue” semantics. I state pretty quickly and confidently that I'm aware of my role or posture in those relationships, and have made peace with the ones broken or will in fact break in the future if and when the idea of talking, writing, and honestly sharing is beyond the kind of respect or patience they are willing to extend to me as I show for them. I may not like them or wish to “fix” or “forgive,” but they aren't my focus or source of ongoing pain.

 

There's a reiteration in counseling to be aware of “thinking errors” and “irrational thoughts” that come with all-or-nothing thinking or presuming you know someone's motivation when you feel slighted. I printed out a top ten list of irrational thoughts to be aware of in cognitive behavioral therapy approaches to counseling. They apply to just thinking and people independent of addiction. I'm aware when I've employed them to misstep, and I'm aware when I'm tempted to say “everything” or “everyone” or “nothing” as though merely asserting the words makes them true and comprehensive. I don't expect you to understand any word, let alone blog, as I've “intended.” I expect you to take what you can, leave what you can't, and honestly engage, or there is no conversation or connection. I'm under no illusions about where my “power” lies or which thoughts I derive comfort from, and they aren't in the idea that I'm *necessarily helping you more than me.*

 

Would I like to help you? Sure. Can I help you? I don't know. I know what works for me. I know how it works against a myriad of reactions, judgments, and descriptions you might offer about it. I, more often than not, observe the “processing” and “progression” towards what I'm reaching for. Are you? And if you're not, do you have anything you are reaching for? If you were an addict it might be reflexively “to get sober,” a disembodied generalization that has nothing to do with the underlying compulsions or trauma. I had fuzzy goals of “being rich” or “exacting revenge” that have gotten so specific like “acquire 15' x 8' ft 6500 GVWR each double axle trailer to tow large equipment, vehicles, thousands of bricks, or in-tact sheds to stockpile for future self-sustaining plots with on-hand salvaged/recycled resources.” That's one goal in a chain of hundreds of lists, less-specific goals, and built on new discoveries and experiences along the way. I can confidently say if you found me a trailer like that from free to affordable, you will have helped me in service to a transcendent yet specific goal.

 

You can be that exacting in your behavior to stressful or triggering situations, but not if you're unwilling or unable to ask yourself a lot about your needs and learn at least a bit about the [trailers] that are going to facilitate your goals. How are you going to understand the weight you're carrying? I understand enough about my own to seek out more. I understand how to differentiate mine verses what you or life broadly may ask me to carry. I want the kind of trailer that's prepared for all things. I know that's going to take a kind of patience to find one within my budget. I know it's an invitation to more work and risk as much as it is a solution. I have to search, wake up early, budget, make the repairs, work the “normal” job, cope with my own anger and sense of futility, drive safe, find patience, and remain open and pliable to modifying goals or dealing with threats independent of what I think the trailer can do for me. Like all things, it can help or hurt depending on your approach, and the more you understand how it will invariably do both is going to speak to “where you are” relative to the infinite possibilities.

[902] But Seriously, Like, Read This One

I really want you to pay attention to this blog. I'm going to try and approach it very deliberately, run some numbers, and speak to some of my highest aims. I had a momentary resolute surge of hope for the future, and longtime listeners will know how much I dislike the word “hope.”

I genuinely want everyone in my orbit to be organized in a way to “maximize” themselves. This is not a small or simple feat. It's also not synonymous with being “efficient” or presupposing some level of opulent lifestyle aims (which, to some extent, I have).

If you have goals in mind at all, they are likely to vary in as individuated of ways as you conceive of yourself. Maybe you covet a certain kind of decadence or environment. Maybe you want the simple pleasures indefinitely. This is “fine,” in some broad, existential way, but it also might mean you are not my audience. Or, in the spirit of “hope,” you're a $1/month subscriber that functions as a kind of thumbs up for the greater political project and contributes to an ever-more-imposing supporter count.

My bills, at what I consider something of a modern subsistence level, are $106.50 for the internet, between $117-$374 for electric (3 space heaters for months straight - not typical), and food, which were things to get dire, could be supplemented by the food bank or food stamps. What this translates to practically is, at bottom and in splitting the bills, I'm only obligated to pay $240/month, in the worst of all possible space-heater worlds. Do I need a cell phone? It's a kind of luxury, but that would push the bill to $265/month. I don't ever need to leave my house with the amount of books, movies, and instruments I've amassed, so gas and car insurance/maintenance/registration would drop precipitously. Property taxes can't be ignored, so $326/month if I don't pay them in a lump some. Every year, being a hermit who wants the internet and to wear his contacts too long, it costs me just under $4,000. Unplugging the space-heaters knocks that down to just over $3,000.

Of course, that's kind of ridiculous, right? I like eating at restaurants, leaving the house, and playing with new toys and tools. It's not “realistic” to expect myself to hunker down for the entire year and really feel “human,” unless I was oddly gratified by becoming a mythical miser. I designed my lifestyle to try and account for what might happen if I had to work at McDonald's, and still wish to feel like “me” in pursuing my larger entrepreneurial and world-takeover goals. I'd cover the basics in 3.5 months flipping burgers.

I currently occupy this weird space that is filled with increasing amounts of potential. Last year was amass the supplies and tools. This year, they are in the next room or sitting outside. Last year was dig up the hundreds of saplings or dump piles of driveway stone one wheelbarrow at a time. This year it's detailing with soil amendments and shoring-up muddy holes. I'm *excited* to build experimental structures that are blowing over to ground me in what I can and can't do with salvaged wood.

So much of this process has been a pain in the ass. Who wants to drive to the middle of nowhere? Who wants to learn how to compost if you grew up “normal” and flushed your cares away? Who wants to deal with Trump flags, fast-food 20 minutes away, and ticks? Who enjoys the aesthetics of a shed for their living arrangement? Who wants to get nominally used to water that smells like sulfur? Any one of those things would have stopped me from bothering with this project had I maintained the point of view prescribed to me through a “modern” upbringing. I'm supposed to have a mortgage and car payment, right? SHEDS AREN'T HOUSES!

The failings of our capitalist system have turned “tiny houses” and shed-living into not-so-niche points of pride and creative excitement. Poverty re-branded as a lifestyle choice is a coping mechanism. It's not more or less an effective one than the polite pleasantries we offer to excuse our behavior in service to austere neoliberal capitalism or “conservative” thought. The antidote to those modes of being has been fashioned as a kind of “radical socialism” in which even marginally giving a shit about one another is branded as un-American and begetting the inevitable road to... communism? We get boxed into this rhetoric, paralyzed and exhausted by endless working hours, and become distracted indefinitely, if only to survive.

And then what?

I think I unconsciously ask myself this all the time. What happens after I make “enough” money? What happens when my dog catches the car? A wheel makes a revolution, always returning to where it began save the wind around it or the wear-and-tear. How fast do I want to spin, and what kind of air do I want to stir? When I stop spinning, will I have worn myself down for something worth it, or did I just spin too long because I could?

I've spent 3 or 4 years to go from buying the land, to the shed, to turning it all into something resembling a house and degree of comfort I look forward to driving back to each day. I vividly remember staying here without power, without rocks to walk on, without running water, and without any idea of when or if anyone would be joining me...ever. It's a level of focus and work-ethic that I take a lot of pride in speaking about. I also simultaneously SAVED THE CHILDREN if that counts for anything. It chases back further to being able to save enough money to buy the land, and discovering that I did, in fact, want to spend as little amount of time being subjected to “normal” as humanly possible.

I don't want everyone to “suffer” like me, but I do want people to appreciate the level of dedication and detail in their own stories as well as mine. One of the things I took for granted - especially talking to a mostly-white middle to upper-middle class group of kids in how I conceived of what our futures might be – was that there was an appreciation for how many tools we'd been given and how lucky it was that we had found each other. The “goal” or “obligation” seemed clear, don't fall into the habits and traps that got us all waxing about the folly of the past. Build sustainable things. Work together. Pragmatically pursue a kind of life that enabled what everyone was saying was going to be hard to impossible given our corrupted and (literally) crumbling conception of ourselves.

Oh to be young. And, really, I get why people in their 30s hesitate to call themselves “old,” my knees or general circulation be dammed. In truth, I've had less than 10 years to, not only attempt to circumvent the circumstances I was born into, but navigate all of the new psychological drama of algorithm-infused myopic “hatred” combined with a political project to ever-institutionalize American fascism that's been churning for 50+ years.

Like a conservative laser-focused on overturning all that is good and true in the world, I, too, have an indelible focus that believes I can achieve my ends. I think I can recognize my place on the wheel. What is yours?

I have land I'm offering for you to live on *rent-free. That comes under the condition that you do the same amount of work and sacrifice in service to your largest goals or narrative as you've watched me put into mine. There's room in between, I'll happily collect rent, but you know we're both better than that. What is your money going to? Where is your time spent? I want you to be exacting in your budgets. I want you to imagine what it would mean to take over the world.

When I look at my friend list, I don't precisely know how to understand it. There's people I've been familiar with, worked with, and a couple strangers. There's people I know a fleeting amount of their bill or life obligations. There's people I've gotten drunk and dreamed big with. There's people I'm waiting for my big birthday party invite no-one's going to show up to to delete the day after. They've probably still got student loans, donate to charity, or you wouldn't believe how complicated kids are! I see occasional personal wins or celebration. And then what? What is the goal? Wait for Joe Manchin? Die old and in your sleep?

I want to drop rocks, rehab a couple trailers, and rent free-to-cheap. Do you want “passive” income? Help me. Buy in.

I want to scale up worm production.

I want to grow food and live off-grid.

I want to build sustainable little communities on small and large acres that supplant the impact of the larger power brokers and psychosis of myopic depression and anxiety.

I want to sleep and wake up at whatever times I want.

I want to be left alone to practice a small measure of difficult music for as long as it takes my fingers or lips to figure it out.

I want to be busy with things that give me energy and get me up early in the morning.

When all of that comes under threat I want to organize my vigilant and accountable crowd to beat back the enemy (Guess where we are on the wheel.)

Then I want to get back to building the infrastructure that lends itself to letting me piss off and play music or sleep until the next Rush Limbaugh is born. Or, I want to have created such a robust and meaningful system, it incorporates the Rushes and the Trumps and the Hitlers in such a deliberate and awake way, we avoid bending ourselves into jagged spokes being turned against our will.

What does that look like for you? Where in my goals do you see any of yours? How much time do you want to waste doing 1/10th alone what we might do together? What's your budget? How much do you spend on rent? How precious is your locale?

16 or 17 years ago, I sounded a lot like I do now. The macro-picture has not improved, and I don't mean to dismiss the musing or statistics of a Bjorn Lomborg, Stephen Pinker, or Coleman Hughes, but they don't seem to have a way to account for what seems like the heart of a sickness. I can't “persuade” well-enough-off people to form a more aggressive Rainbow Coalition around a shared truth or identity that renders the ticks and funky waters of life as mere details. I can't persuade people to even *speak* to their goals for fear of provoking the embarrassed resentment that begets the flood of excuses for their behavior.

Keep asking yourself – and then what? The wheel is going to turn regardless. Where are we going?
In 3 or 4 more years, I bet I have another camper or 6 set up. In 10, I suspect I'll have stopped associating with the vast majority of every eye-ball that might be looking at this now. In 16 or 17, I hope to not sound piddling and pathetic about the state of the country, environment, or my prospects because we all saw what was coming, and couldn't be bothered. I am bothered. I am doing something. It won't be enough alone.

And if you can't figure out how someone so “bleh” like me could ever be worked with, borrow from Am's or BT's example. I'm basically just an obnoxious proxy for their behind-the-scenes calculations.

[901] Set Phasers Too

I feel I'm in a different phase. I don't yet know what I mean by this.

First, I can look at writing. Writing has been this tool to help me calm down, ease headaches, or violently puke ideas that no one was around to listen to me drone about smashed. Now, I feel more like a redundant chronicler. I'm not so much discovering new insights into my thought process or reasons for doing things. I'm watching and living the consequences of so many conclusions I've drawn over time. I rarely know when to stop blogs anymore. There's not so much a central “issue” I'm examining from all sides, because little carries the kind of emotional depth or suggestive trauma anymore. I'm matter-of-factly speaking.

I find this unsettling because I'm still an idiot. I work within the confines of my knowledge and access, and they are infinitely small for as abundantly they may make me feel as though I'm correct and doing the right things. I imagined myself testifying to the behavior of this particularly aggressive, lying, and spiteful mom; “Your honor, I can't diagnose nor have evidence of her drug use, but every song is made with the same 7 notes.”

On my drives home, I'm thinking about things that I believe would lend themselves to a blog. I get home, I either forget, or they feel diminished. That mom from above, for example, is nothing special. I've met her before I ever met her. I've made up my mind what kind of professional attitude and series of excuses I can lend to depersonalizing her behavior. I can bemoan the impropriety of her CASA praying with the family, thus advising the court they're A-OK, in spite of track marks you can see from the moon and her very-likely intoxicated/withdrawal state for the last visit. We can move right on past her former DCS ongoing case-manager being placement of her children, because that was a year ago, so no issues, right?

I'm already home in the thought that in order to address what seem like particular egregious details in any one person's character or series of professionals' judgment, I need my own kind of thing. I need to be a kind of advocate and accountability marker that does not exist in my orbit, or at least in great enough quantities. This is a posture I've taken to my voice and work broadly. It's the decision I come to any time I find myself under the growing myopia of grievances left perpetually unaddressed. I need to own, destroy, or somehow put outside of my thoughts. Acceptance or forgiveness are off the table.

The weather is improving. I'm again looking at the land as a series of things I could theoretically do at any moment. The ground is soggy, but that's not too big a deal. There's wood begging to be nailed together. There's money waiting to be spent on details. I have another client whose whole family lives on about twice the amount of space we have. 5 houses, relatives with independent businesses. It's got little street lights, enviable garages, large equipment, and it's a class of people who make sure to buy another basketball in case the one they have isn't pumped enough or the tip is lost from one of the several air compressors neatly tucked on a wall shelf. They're living a version of what I want, superficially, as at least one of their members couldn't avoid methamphetamine.

I've met a few of those late 40s or 50-something guys who talk like their accumulated wealth or extremely specific hobby or job is just another take-it-in-stride kind of thing. Just enough grey in the beard and hair, slim and going to the gym just enough. One day, you buy an ATV, the next, the garage to house all of your toys you take out maybe a couple times a year. It's natural, right? Keep your head down, do your work, save and budget, you can be an ATV dad. Then, one day, you'll maybe have the privilege of getting old enough to be a great-granddad who tells his granddaughter's visit supervisor about how you played tag growing up in the small town a half hour away.

I return to the idea of already being home. Tonight, after consciously saying I've zero interest in rushing to get paperwork turned in on time, I've pushed right on through with my day, drove the opposite direction of home to get pizza, came home and started my show, and now, more than half the way through the pizza and show, have taken the time to write. I still have to get my notes in. I've got plenty of extra time in the morning in which I can sleep in. I remember the version of me that would be exceptionally anxious to get things done NOW, and he's still there, but more careful about using it in service to “better” things. It's wholly subjective, but I'm not going to work myself up in service to people or organizations I don't respect. This blog, TV show, and pizza are more important than your deadline. Significantly more.

My general posture towards the “professional working world” has been so degraded. It's one thing to read a polished business book about how alleged titans of industry work, think, or organize. It's another to have it hit just how goddamn fucking stupid everyone is piggy-backing off their privileged space in time, reinforcing entitlement with ego loops, and regurgitating convenient truisms to maintain a kind of stasis. Say you get in at the ground-floor of some company. Hang on long enough to get a little more power. You adopt the company-speak and demeanor that weathers every possible conflict. Did you do anything? You were there. You stayed. But just like playing a board game, you didn't craft the pieces nor invent the game, nor expect yourself to think about whether or not the game could or should be improved. But, damn, doesn't it feel great and “adult” when you tell people your title? Fucking rotten posers.

I suppose my interest in this next phase is pretty simple. I don't know what happens after all of the things I already know are going to happen do. I knew I'd get this home base into a livable, expandable state. I'm living here, not alone huffing drywall dust after having trudged through wet grass. I knew this kind of environment is going to appeal to my kind of person, and she arrived. This is not meant to be some “master of the universe” kind of statement divorcing her from her agency. It just means bros find frat houses, and no one finds that remarkable. I know that each of the pieces of this spot costs money, you get money from keeping a job or few, and if you show up and do math, you get more shit. All perfectly foreseen, if not the amount of money it might take to keep things fixed. This is often where that grey-enough guy I meet starts to lose me. Domestication takes over. Regular drinks at the Cheddars becomes the highlight of the week.

I still want the kind of thing only I can create. I want the light shining between lines of a blog to illuminate something I can hardly imagine. Just like I keep searching in writing for what's really on my mind or for a way to combine all of the flourishes into something digestible. What could you call my 900 blogs? Simply, writing? Everything I've ever tried to say? A path to personal enlightenment? An ego-maniacal diary of someone who never learned how to just smoke weed and shut the fuck up? It doesn't matter, and that seems like the point. Your approximation, wholesale disregard, or somehow obsessive fan-boying don't matter. I found the will to move here, build here, write here, through writing about who I was or still am. I accepted, deeply, my power to own or destroy, and anything I couldn't put outside of my mind, I put on paper. Maybe that's a blur of old friendships no one wishes to own in how they were destroyed. Maybe that's echos of dreams better learned from than pursued.

It will probably be pushing midnight before I bother with this program for inputting my notes. I'll be over-tired as the itis kicks in from all of the pizza. Tomorrow, I'll try during staffing to stifle my enthusiasm for my drift away from this latest blip on my work-experience radar indicating again how just barely anything works. I'll weave into my next gig, pull in more money, glance at my cameras and see the garden shed installed, perhaps renters at the end of the drive, and I'll be out of debt, or not. It's still the realm of all things I'd be perfectly reasonable in expecting to happen, but it is changing. The phase shift by its very nature is unknowable until it's happening, and that's why I'm seeking it out.

[900] Power Off

This can be considered an ongoing riff on power.

 

I just got out of a conversation with two good-ole-boys otherwise understood as my neighbors. One, a former trucker, another, some kind of job that requires neon clothing. One, agnostic, man-of-all things with a lot of hillbilly knowledge, and is perfectly okay with treating people as they treat you, but damned if he'll tolerate a trans man going into the same bathroom as his daughter. The other, a Christian, was raised to believe if you're choosing to be gay, he views it like all sins including stealing or murder. He's suspicious of unions and doesn't believe his friend is genuine in his recent talk regarding a union he joined, but is trying to fit in. He does not believe in “white privilege” and knows plenty of poor white people, and disputes systemic racism. We all agreed that there's a lot of divisive talk in the media and that people need to get to know each other.

 

It's a kind of conversation that only takes place when people feel “comfortable” honestly relating their various strains of extremely problematic views immediately tagged with a held-harmless “reasonable” thing to reassure you. It's variations on, “but I have a black friend.” It's familiar, I find it boring, and it's the kind of thing you do just to kind of reassure your neighbors that you don't hate them when you'll need their heavy equipment.

 

To me, it highlights how, almost functionally useless talking can really be. I'm, in theory, diametrically opposed to, at least the Christian, neighbor, and for as cliché or stunted as the other's view on trans issues may be, he's never going to have the opportunity to confront a trans person who may be in the same bathroom as his, adult, daughter. The power, to not lose the theme, comes from listening, sharing honestly, and allowing for the discomfort of ambiguity chase them home to reflect on how you may (I did) pock the conversation deliberately with guilt or introspection-inducing ideas. Don't you know how uncommon it is for the “average” person to really sit down and figure out how to live with each other? Takes a special kind of person, perhaps the numskull Christian across the way, to really wrestle with practicing what he may preach.

 

The Christian neighbor made a point about how people want to belong. This was servicing his argument that democrats were being divisive and wanting to lean on anything, like race, to build a camp to belong to. I think his point is important in understanding how most people feel power. They belabor their family values, their traditions, or their creature comforts. For as much as you might profess to have your “faith,” it comes with a tangible community that is bringing you food when Jesus can't be bothered. I think there's a move to defer to the ambiguous values of the community as a kind a faux humility. In pawning off your good deeds, you're able to eschew the responsibility for your bad ones too.

 

I think a new kind of community can be forced. I think I can build a coalition around, “I'm tired of being poor.” Am I going to moderate the humble-ignant-religious nut as they hopefully discover their gay neighbor isn't choosing to, functionally murder, their soul? No. I'm past that. Don't need the seminar. Deeply and dismissively appreciate how long it will take you to find the truth. In an important sense, attempting to meet you where you are would absolutely destroy where I can and want to go. You don't get your PH.D. teaching kindergarten, but no doctor would dismiss the idea of educating children.

 

Do I consider not needing a god, my basic understanding of people as people worth a degree of understanding it might take work to achieve, and significant amount of reading I've done to conceptualize myself as a small piece of the whole powerful? Well, how am I using it? Neither of my neighbors walked away from that conversation pissed at me, if they even understood 90% of what I said in analogizing or drawing from historical examples. If I can no longer access their tools or a phone call when a new car comes to the area, what would “I and all my book-learnin'” get me? What did I want from that interaction? Simply, to honestly represent myself. I do know a lot, use big words in between saying fuck a lot, and am extremely sympathetic to black people and liberal views. What that looks like in that kind of exchange is almost like practicing an art.

 

They know I don't hate them, nor do I believe they hate me, and I think I could throw a party with as many different kinds of people as I wanted and they'd be safe out here. Does that mean the Christian neighbor would stay for the whole party? Probably not. Does that mean I want to attempt to mediate a bathroom argument while intoxicated between my other neighbor and the trans friend who defriended me for persistently disagreeing with a meme about thought and word policing? Fuuuuck no. Everyone is toothless, dumb, and extremely insecure. I wish you would bear that in mind about most people you talk to. Not me, but like, people. If you're going to be like them, respect what they actually consist of, and don't make a boogy-man and lazy conception that pretends they're dumber and lazier than where you're coming from.

 

Get in the mud. Focus on what's true for you. Years ago, I don't know that I would have had the patience or maturity not to simply make some smart ass comment about “dumb religious fucks” and how little I cared what they thought of me or what they might offer. It's not even that hard or a secret to understand that's not the way to go, unless you're me. You might not be as dramatic, but the same forces are at play in our political discourse. The same fears and discomfort preclude talking at all, let alone about the hard things. Ambivalent power will fill the void and we'll keep eating ourselves out from the inside if you can't find your voice.

 

My voice is moving to a new job. My demonstrated capacity is again disregarded. One day I went to sleep, the next, 6 months later, I woke up and am pursuing a new job. It didn't take 2 years like the last one. I didn't allow myself to get worked up and excessively stressed out. I trusted my voice, honestly relayed where I was at, and can cut ties without resentment. I'm judging the shit out of people dumb enough to let me leave, but that's on them. I'm hoping the example I set and conversations I had are little seeds for other people to use to find a place more representative of what they are worth too. There are so few examples of those willing to remind us what we're worth or what we should be shooting for.

 

No transition, but I've been thinking of a way to talk about a Jordan Peterson video I struggled to watch. Peterson has been severely ill for the last few years. His wife beat cancer. His daughter has had extreme health issues throughout her life as well. Recently, he was in a conversation with Jonathan Pageau. I don't know Pageau, but Peterson enjoys him and considers him a deep thinker with regard to Orthodox Christianity. Peterson, broken, searching, is discussing the “inevitability” of Christ when you chase all the ideas of the greatest good and what it means to be conscious. Peterson is on the verge of tears several times throughout the discussion. Peterson posits, “Does the fact that that's how it should be mean that that's the way that it is? And that's trust, that's a question of trust.” in discussing aiming for the best, and embodying what you believe.

 

Pageau gets a smug look and says, “It's a question of truth with which ends up manifesting itself in love [] and I think that like the love that you have for the world which is [] clear...anyways, it shows me that you migtht be closer to that trust than you might want to admit to yourself maybe.” as his voice trails off.

 

THIS IS THAT INSIDIOUS POWER SHIT. Fuck that guy. 

 

Peterson says he doesn't know what to do with his thoughts, is the most confused person he's ever met, and says he's working at about 5% of what he considers normal. Peterson is vulnerable, and here come the Christians coming to prey on him.

 

This kind of power I feel is precisely why most things are fucked beyond measure. If you want a convert, go at them at their best and win. Don't hijack their weakness and pair subversive language to their struggle. Are you a pathetic boss who doesn't want to be undermined? Drone about policy and abstract plans until someone like me quits. Are you ashamed or naive about your privilege? Tell all your white friends, where it's safe, and your ideas can congeal as a vote for fascism. Parasitic subversion is the preferred method of the worst ideas and behaviors into popular discourse precisely because when it's uncovered and felt for what it's doing, you might struggle against how it's killing you.

 

The comment section is littered with chirps and prayers and the typical, excruciatingly gross prostrations I can only depict in the image of those crowds falling over when the preacher pretends to be imbuing the congregation with heavenly manna. What's the power they seek? The power of the crowd, the familiar affirmations, and deeply personal shares of their own pain or epiphanous exhaustion that finally brought them to accepting the truth of the metaphysical. Since it's true you should be good, and Jesus is good, Jesus is the truth! – circular reasoning triumphs! Transitive property FTW! It's definitely not assumptions couched in word-salad and trust/love-laden language foisted upon the self-confessed exhausted and confused mind. GO TO HELL!

 

I'm not angry or suspicious when you say you care about someone or enjoy talking to them. I'm extremely skeptical and pessimistic about the move to divorce your agency from your actions towards them. I don't care how many thousands of words you use to “minister” to someone, you will inevitably find yourself drawn in a circle, justifying anything or everything and nothing but because you could and it makes you feel good. You'd rather hide from the ego that nakedly enjoys it. You'd rather shutter your window into yourself and the world and play on the merry-go-round of your reasoning to nowhere. You're not seriously engaged in the world when you can blame Jesus or when you're preying on the weak. You're letting the world burn in service to egos high on their own supply.

 

I seek to destroy with my power. I don't want explosions and death. I want to kill this fluid habit of acting like parasites looking for hosts and validation in everything besides our best ideas or capacity. You want to “intellectualize” religion and call that Christ? You take on all the baggage. The predators are on your team. Is your sacrifice of who you are for what they tell you you are worth it? Jordan Peterson has meant a considerable amount to me, and not for his ability to break and choke down bullshit because a pleasant goatee mirrored his pain and called it love.

[899] Power On

Let's riff on power.

I think people underestimate me. Be careful to prevent yourself from reading that with more than what I'm saying. I'm not saying I have extra or secret powers to be unveiled after appetizer skirmishes. I'm not saying they are consciously saying, “no” or “I don't believe you.” I'm not even saying the ones who aren't would understand what I'm putting down as powerful would regard it in the same way I would.

I think people underestimate me because they underestimate themselves. Where they doubt, I bet they could. Where they profess the truth, I doubt it's so sweetly understood. I habituate a contrarian impulse that shapes my approach to the world. Every “I could never,” if nothing else, gets its thought experiment for just how deeply and aggressively I could. I divorce my ability to entertain every terrible or amazing idea from an insistent moral or value flavor were you to share it with the wrong person.

I consider this ability part of my immutable power. As long as I can feel, say, or do otherwise, nothing will remain sacred or too powerful. Your authority is suspect. Your words will be open for discussion and dissection. Like all forms of power, it's ambivalent to the outcome of its exercise. I either crash your disposition and into how you conceive of yourself, or I don't register at all but as someone carrying on a discussion or making a harmless point. Rarely, if ever, am I able to tell something to someone they don't already know about themselves, but the reaction isn't so often a nod in solidarity more than a condemnation for the whole intellectualized posture and mere speculation of their character or motivation.

I think people have considerably smaller conceptions of their own power that often conform to modern narratives or prescriptions from authority. What's a “middle-manager?” Someone who has played along long enough to get someone underneath them they can dictate to. Whether they are actually feeling responsible for those people, or what they say to them, is entirely removed from the hierarchical structure's implication. They're your boss. They manage. In fact, “management” is whatever they're doing. There's no check on the implicated reality without you bringing one to the table.

I think people are embarrassed at the amount of power they have and double down on their embarrassed paralysis in observing how little they use it. It's not that they don't know what they could do, it's that they don't choose to engage the consequences all the way through. This is born of a false notion that everything isn't playing out its series of consequences at all times. You have to pick what you're choosing to suffer or the suffering that's going to happen anyway will be for nothing.

I find myself in a persistent power imbalance. I have a habit of being able to demonstrate my ability in ways I struggle to describe as anything beyond making people feel inferior or resentful. I have the “power” to play-along, find my middle-management impulse, and settle into the kind of graduated authority I obtained in my first job in high school. It generally takes less than 3 months before someone, somewhere, gives me the license or authority well before and independent of a matching title or paycheck. This translates practically into me getting taken advantage of and elicits an endless array of bureaucratic platitudes to my offers-cum-pushes for increased access, control, or responsibility.

The first rule in The 48 Laws of Power is to not outshine the master. Be deferential, and god forbid you're charming, try to avoid working for them altogether. In my capacity at DCS and now social working, I connect. My habit of seemingly baseless (invisible) speculation on my observations allows me to get people to crack or comply. My unwillingness to compromise on a certain kind of behavioral standard makes the rules by how I orient my life real for you. I'm charming, deadly honest, and I happen to have an inexhaustible well that's oriented to making a big show or example of what I'm capable of. I denounce the concept of masters and routinely leave them blind. It's never been a secret why I've wanted to strike out on my own entrepreneurially or am super enthusiastic about turning a spot in cousin-fuck Indiana into something remotely representative of my values.

Am I powerful in other ways? I'm fairly strong. I'm terrible at getting sick, but have tended to survive. I have strong opinions on the forms political engagement should take place. The relationships I cultivate and seek to protect form a basis around how I think my values can be extended and manifest independent of me. I try to keep the chaotic and angry ship of my brain flowing with the wind and current yet not carried away. I think writing is powerful. I'm giving shape to the infinitely abstract. I'm building another anchor and reference point. I'm seeking a point of connection I can never know and trusting the consequences matter.

What's the nature of your power? If it's memes, try again. If it's self-effacing excuses and shoulder shrugs, try again. If it's mocking the very idea or question altogether, think about the example you are setting. Think what you would tell a child you cared about. Think as though what you can do or say will last forever, and whatever people may think of you, that's what they're going to see. Would you recognize yourself in what you said or did? Were you even trying?