[914] Teat Fed

I'm entitled. Hey! Stop. I can hear the collective yawn and not-so-under-your-breath "duhs."

The Google definition of "entitled" is "believing oneself to be inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment.

Some of you may recall that my mother used to like to refer to my brother and I as "Serbian princes." My old-world Eastern European relatives were always cooking for us, offering compliments, and just generally being fawning old people. My mom, who was routinely ridiculed for her body (I saw a picture of her skinny as shit once) and mentally abused as a child, did not do a solid job with her resentment for that.

I should get it out of the way to say that I agree. I do feel entitled to some things. I feel entitled to things I consider "basics" like food, life, and respect. One can get lost in the weeds of what really constitutes any of those things, or "enough" of those things, but most people I think would fall within a reasonable mean provided they were from the same culture and class.

My favorite kind of entitlement is what I call "pretty girl complexes." All women certainly suffer from what might be understood as a "barrage of dicks," at all times, but pretty girls could build a calendar out months with, perhaps even otherwise committed guys who they also found attractive. That lends itself to a kind of confidence and attitude I haven't found a comparison to. Even the prettiest guys can't necessarily get the prettiest girls.

I think I'm entitled to the access and use of my "stuff." My things represent countless hours spent otherwise wage-slaving at unfulfilling and often demeaning tasks. I think I've worked for everything I have and am thus entitled to as far as I can stretch those things. There is a parallel universe where I am entitled to months of sitting on my ass reading, playing video games, watching TV, and playing my guitar. Just by the math, no extra ideas about the objective/subjective value of doing so.

If we return to the definition offered by Google, I'm perplexed by the word "special" treatment. Pretty girls might flirt with a cop or whip a titty out to get out of a ticket. The presumed idea being that they are worth more in entertainment or looks than the rule of law. I wonder as well, special with regard to what? I don't apply to jobs like "Apple CEO" or "machinist 1st class" even if they pay what I think I'm entitled to as wages that might keep with inflation and productivity. I've never demanded more time to finish a test. I don't kick doors in when I'm told the restaurant is closed.

I also think it's healthy to inherently think you deserve privileges, at least the exercise of them, if they've been earned. I might be misunderstanding how it's speaking to privileges in the definition, but I think everyone should presume an inherent deserving of *something* related to the universal nature of experience and connectivity. Certainly legally you have entitlements bestowed upon you.

More abstractly, I feel entitled to a certain kind of attention or recognition. I work. You work. We all work. Some of us work because we have to, hate it, and the idea of not working suggests many significantly worse layers of hell to fall into. Some of us work on things we like in really hardcore ways that may sometimes detract from what we like about it. Some of us work with the idea of what more work there is to be done and others with the idea that they never want to work some kind of way again. Surely we've lost or so degraded our sense of what's worthy of attention that it's all but obliterated our ability to act upon the necessary entitlement to basically survive. Anti-maskers should be literally bitch-slapped.

I think whether or not I get the attention or recognition for what I do, I'm pretty aware of my motivations and strategies I adopt. I know that I go about life in a way that often rubs certain kinds of people the wrong way. Namely, the ones who either think they do anything less or anything more than I do. I choose a degree of aggression, zest, and antagonism, and find myself fairly well moving the needle. They, perhaps patient, polite, and tight-lipped, are wondering just where the hell I get off. But, I can only speculate so much. I make a habit of leaning into the things I enjoy, as I'm perfectly aware of the otherwise "even" deadness space I've existed in for long periods of time.

Entitlement, like all mere adjectives or judgements, isn't inherently bad or good. It's whether you're aware of how it manifests, whether it can be tempered, weaponized, or tucked between things. For me, I tuck it between the amount of work I do and the spirit of openness with which I explore ways and whether I may choose to change how I go about expressing myself. I believe you if you levy the charge. I'm then entitled to as many questions as I see fit in examining how you came to it. And I never disagree with how you feel about it.

I hope your sense of entitlement makes you fight viciously for what you've earned. I hope you have a sense of it at all. I hope if you're watching mine manifest in ways that don't jive or you see to be a problem, you're willing to spend as much time owning what you have to say about it as I am.

[913] Pot Committed

What are you committed to?

It's a question that can diverge dramatically. You can be committed to a psychiatric hospital. You can signal your commitment through marriage. The two first google definitions state: 1. the state or quality of being dedicated to a cause, activity, etc. and 2. an engagement or obligation that restricts freedom of action. These sound like definitions that beg infinitely large questions about “freedom” and the nature of your “cause” or “etc.”

For me, you could say I'm committed to spite. There are few things that will motivate me, make my brain race to the series of deliberate and methodical actions I need to take, or clear anxious fog than spite. If I did not know that about myself, and then went on to do something significant or showy, I might be deluded into thinking “I” measured up to the grandiosity or was responsible for the show. No, it was the spite. Without the spite, nothing gets off the ground. If you want to examine the spite you might find certain insights about how it operates or different ways to describe it that you find more palatable, but if you pretend it's not spite, you don't have a prayer of understanding me or whatever I've created that might be regarded as significant.

Never will a single word nor overly simplified sentiment encapsulate what's really going on though. Spite won't suffice in place of all the words it's taken to process or experiences which lend themselves to rounding out a perspective. Spite might keep the flame alive, but a controlled burn is certainly preferable and required if you wish to keep something worth sustaining. So, we return to the question, imagining a commitment like a sustained and tempered burn.

Large institutions and interpersonal relationships can inform how you understand longevity. Maybe everyone in your circles is selfish and chaotic, so you internalize that no one is stable and never worth the attachment. Ironically, you can develop the exact opposite sense for the same reason, relying on the stability and attachment of and for yourself in spite of the chaos around you. You know you exist, you're still here after all, but stable and attached can only be trusted or wielded as you see fit, never extended towards things fated to abuse.

You could blithely remark, and you hear it often, that you're committed to yourself. You don't trust anyone. You hate to ask for help or favors. The running narrative is almost perfectly devoid of the different contexts you exist in or memory of things that compelled your decision-making in the past. This is an exceptionally lonely and often disingenuous place to exist for very long. It's akin to the baseline animal drudging though their instinctive behavior I watch from my nature shows. There's no plan, intercepting of foreseeable patterns, nor idea that there's anything to be done but suffer or greedily indulge in whatever the present moment is offering.

Nothing you commit to will last. Even if you're opting to take the wild animal route, the suffering will either end in death, the march to the next watering hole, or the chance abundant meal and time to play. You can get stuck in thinking you've derived some kind of wisdom in throwing yourself at the fates and arresting your agency as life carries on ambivalently doing the work for you. Rest easy, you're gonna die anyway. No surprise, this idea does not seem to provide people any ease or capacity to rest.

Again, what keeps the fire burning? What are you holding a candle for? What Olympic tradition is worthy of being passed on? Why?

I think of the sunk-cost fallacy. Committed for the sake of it and because you've already spent so much time or money. You could find the easy answer if you can overcome the guilt for your folly or undermined wishes. This is why people in professions of presumed high-value, money or otherwise, kill themselves. They've literally couched their identity, very existence, in nominally communal or colloquial notions of what those jobs and titles are supposed to mean, not necessarily what those jobs mean to them as an individual. Nearly all soldiers come back with PTSD, regardless of their role, some dramatically more shocked, SHOCKED, by all of the death.

Most often, we seem to be committed to things that were insisted upon us. I tried to drop out of college. College was a joke. Whatever you may glean from modernity bemoaning safe spaces, the lack of critical thought, and general exploitation offered by the post-modern indifference to defining and fighting for life-sustaining values, it was a problem at least 15 years ago, and I've recently learned the first gripes were codified by conservative thinkers in the late 80s. Ew. We've also got arranged marriages, notions of “elite” preschools, and the catastrophic fascist destruction from those with an infinite appetite for obstruction, dishonesty, and suicide. The mental asylum zeitgeist rages on.

In some ways, once you acknowledge that depth of the depravity and chaos, it makes what you may choose to commit to easier. Well, I can't fix all that, so let me focus on my kids! Or crafts! Or volunteer hours! Here, a most pernicious pitfall must be attended to, and it's why people self-sabotage and surprise themselves with buried resentments. Are you committed to those things, or are you committed to the shame and guilt towards the chaos? Shame and guilt are shades of spite. They're dependent, a response or initial coping mechanism. People are quick to deny they are feeling guilty or ashamed of something as it might undermine their ability to keep working in service to their kids, crafts, or whatever else. You birthed kids who are often disappointing and who are definitely going to die one day. What the fuck are you supposed to do with those feelings? ::Religion rings its hands.::

Come on, what are you committed to? Denying the depth of your lonely feelings, regrets, and aimless stabs at marginal fulfillment? Are you a task-master who makes lists and crosses them off because you have to? Are you a cheerleader because you believe in the team, or because your tight outfit attracts useful distracting attention and the noise keeps you from thinking too hard?

If your ideas are, none, or handed to you, or incomplete, it's impossible to commit. No definition will announce itself. No meaning will spontaneously manifest. No work has been done to get oriented, let alone embodied, across the worlds you inhabit. You don't know who you are, or at least, feel remotely comfortable with the seemingly contradictory abstraction that you are, so you're paralyzed, or resentful, or ashamed, and written off by a world as ambivalent to you as you are to it.

I'm committed to this. I'm committed to working though my ideas and the attempt to pay attention to how the things I experience synthesize into things I do or do not wish to be a part of my and our world. I don't treat people nicely because I give a fuck about people. I do it because the ambivalent math says the more people who's problems I can generally alleviate, the less problems I'm going to have to deal with. At the very least, the nature of those problems will be considerably harder to generate guilty or shameful feelings about. I can cross my fingers people will “get it” and not behave like I don't want them to behave, but I'm not naive, and I'm confident in my spite. I attend to my experience that is significantly bolstered when I behave one way and painfully hindered when I succumb to many others. I know how to tie the abstract nature of those sentiments into sweat and patience and words that almost force themselves out of me.

Are you trapped, or committed? Are you the cause, or distracted by errant et cetera?

[912] The Hunt

I think it is exceptionally rare, if not nearly impossible, to do anything in “light switch” fashion. The two ideas that embody light switch change coming to mind quickest regard brain injury a la Phineas Gage, and the phrase in ceasing drug use immediately as going “cold turkey.” Perhaps the addict relays a moment of epiphany in which it became almost mystically possible to stop. Perhaps most of us need something tantamount to a rod shooting through and eliminating the most objectionable parts of our brain.

I feel generally stable. This has not always been the case. When I am unstable, I can usually trace it back to a handful of pretty common or familiar things that, presumably, would destabilize most. I might be hungry, tired, or physically exhausted. It's not really a secret that when I donate plasma, that day I shouldn't be battling the heat with a power tool. I know Tuesday when I forget to pack a lunch, I'm going to be grumpy at 11:30 as I anticipate eating. In a fleetingly small amount of days, I sleep wrong, and perhaps there's a knot I've worked my head, shoulders, and back into that creates a tightness and unease I can't really shake. Those are all simple and anticipated.

I can still work myself up about all that I wish to do and be. I often point to other people's inconsistency or intransigence as “my” biggest hurdles. I reflexively frame issues as a series of any one person or group of individuals who appear, at least superficially, to have more to say and control over my fate than me. It's a long road to travel in attempting to discern where and when this may be the case. I may know that I can't save the planet replacing my light bulbs and recycling, but after I learn my statistical insignificance, do I continue to do so in service to the larger narrative? Do I more deliberately inform my conservation efforts going forward, or give up, hopeless and confident my example does not matter?

The story I tell myself at that point is an existential one. Am I seeing any light but one shining on the mockery and futility of my effort? Am I discovering creative ways to plug into and revolutionize what needs to happen at the macro scale? Can I parlay my individual effort into a series of compounding consequences and create something no one expected or could originally conceive? Just what does it mean for me to exist as someone who wants to recycle their cans or save a little energy one bulb at a time?

For me, every moment is something of an existential crisis. Whether I'm negotiating whether to wash dishes, write this, or find the steady and determined mind to knock out a more laborious task, answering “just who I am and why” is feverishly knocking, insisting to be let in and entertained. The different parts of my personality answer the door and generally keep the question satiated and engaged.

Well, how? Why?

How I've come to understand myself is an evolutionary process. I had to first discover what it meant to be embodied. I had to test and find my limits. I had to baste in the anxiety and angst of whatever I deemed to be a crisis. I had to figure out what the words I used to understand myself actually meant, for me, and how others employed them too often against me. I'm still doing so. It's a never-ending adaptation to whatever being presented to you in any given moment. It's work, but before it's work it's an awareness that it's the only real kind of work you ever have to do. Evaluate your circumstances, consider choices, make peace with the consequences of those choices.

One of the reasons the mental health discussion forms around the trauma experienced in childhood is that child brains don't have the capacity to engage that process. What does a child know about a sexually exploitative environment? How can a child be said to be responsible for their choices when we know their brains aren't even completely formed until their 20s? How can a sense of “resolution” for a “choice” be determined when accurately determining what you're even made of is functionally impossible?

Now, you get to your late 20s, 30s, and beyond, and perhaps for the first time you're even presented with the opportunity to “really adult” or “responsibly evaluate” your circumstances. Surely, we're modern creatures, so the wisdom of different cultures, schools of thought, and science are introduced early if not arbitrarily. Does merely teaching about slavery or The Holocaust mean you'll never behave like a psychopathic Stanford prison guard? Obviously not. The lessons of history have to be worked for, not merely handed over. I just completed the series Human Planet, and not a single tribe member said they inherited that day's meal from their ancestors. The knowledge of what to do had to be put in practice, the same risks taken, and the same respect for the nature of the task given. Or, you die.

I realize something in this moment about why I get anxious when I don't feel busy. Somewhere deep, I know hard work is the antithesis of death, so even superficially, too much comfort is synonymous with being dead. I don't wanna be dead yet, so every moment my subconscious screams I'm dying kicks up some butterflies and tension. Some level of work needs to be done, no? Add another reason I'm thankful for writing and the peace I'm able to make examining what constitutes my anxiety. It's not irrational nor uncontrollable, it's just complicated and hidden, and you never know what you watch or hear that's going to provoke, obscure, or illuminate.

Once again I return to probably the most repeated line in my head from Waking Life about what is the most universal human characteristic; fear or laziness? I'd have to look back through blogs, but I pretty readily answer laziness even if my first instinct might have been fear. I view the vast majority of everything good in my life as an extension of what I've been willing to work for. I think the narrative of that work is highly susceptible to kidnapping by self-aggrandizing and lazy understandings of “just who I am, and why.”

I don't think the entitled insurrectionist dipshits are afraid. I think they're too lazy to do the work of accepting how bad they really are or how good they could really be. That's when you find fear. That's when the reasonable fear of the consequences can take hold, when you embody the work and feel what's missing in threads of fabric it takes to weave together existence. I'm afraid of myself when I decide to grant myself the license to retaliate or methodically target. I know what I'm capable of. I'm afraid I get the money and power and control, and too comfortably slip into a kind of ambivalence about the values that drive my working ethos. Those are good things to worry about, stay mindful of, and bring up in conversation often so you don't turn into a rotting mockery of your potential.

The work of survival is endlessly obscured by modernity. You're situated, too comfortably, by default. I've never been hungry a day in my life. When my air conditioner breaks, I can burn fuel and sit in my car, or meander about a Wal-Mart. We're also given psychologically pacifying (another mockery) narratives about our place in the universe and heavenly desserts in spite of our abject sin. Why work when I can simply believe in the guy willing to take the crucifying for me? Why conserve what was given to me by right? Why learn for myself what can be easily recited over and over and never put into any real practical practice?

This is how I've come to understand my responsibilities and get excited about the nature and purpose of my work. When I say I'm a “spite engine,” it's my deep resentment towards people unwilling to get off their ass or ask the next question or allow themselves to feel the deathly consequences. I don't have to know what's in your head to see whether or not you're doing the work. I know how your entitlement manifests as you unfairly latch onto the meals the workers provide. Because we have so much food, we've severed our connection to all of the intangible nourishment that comes from pursuing protein for days and maybe leaving empty handed. Maybe this is the fascination modernity has with hiking and climbing, trying to reawaken the necessary danger that doesn't really exist anymore. Of course, it does exist, it's just manifesting “over there” and “beneath” us who've insulated so well. We may not physically starve to death, but there's an undeniable hunger and unquenchable thirst.

[911] TV Made Me Do It

It's getting late and I'm feeling sickly after doing 50 squats on a plasma donation day, so I'm gonna talk about TV.

I've been thinking a fair amount about how and why I watch so much TV. The easy answers pertain to the mild compulsion to complete things broadly, the informal "points" that seem to accompany the binging or gaining of familiarity, and the general mild interest I maintain for anything I haven't seen yet.

I started watching TV aggressively when I found myself with considerably "too much" time on my hands after college. I had money in the bank and no worries about bills from doing the drug studies (also little to do beyond watch TV in those). None of my friends were particularly not-busy nor interested in making any more time to do things together than they did. When left listening to my internal body clock and with nowhere to be, I'm immediately up all night so there's certainly no better time nor excuse to find a screen, right?

I remember thinking to myself I only watched "good" shows. There was a certain dignity in it for me. The critically acclaimed, show-up-on-every-list type shows. I never got the inclination to watch things sped up. I just would have felt a kind of foolish or missing out if I couldn't marvel at The Wire.

It moved into a space of trying to understand the shows my parents watched and making up for the cartoons I never got to see all of growing up. I think around the time I started watching ER is when it occurred to me to start speeding things up. 331 episodes are not carried by particularly thought-provoking or plot-moving intricate details.

I broke my thought process of only watching "good" shows with Arrow. I know people who were really into that show and I still have no idea why. I wanted to be able to argue details. I wanted to mock and joke more effectively. I wanted to see if there was something there that I was perhaps blind to, but I doubted it. The same can be said for Twin Peaks which I've authored pages of arguments against all for nothing when I discovered a fan video detailing just what it is Lynch was after. But the "fight" with an ardent, if equally oblivious fan, was fun.

A lot of progress recording sites were experimented with and Trakt started getting its legs. It compiled lists of the "Top 250" movies or shows of all time. It would start telling me what was coming or what else was getting an unnecessary reboot. I could turn watching TV into a collecting exercise. If you don't know, I used to obsessively copy down animal names into a notebook, filling every inch, searching through encyclopedias, and parents' friends' books when they doubted my efforts. It feels good to click the little check mark and shame the non-believer.

I started developing an affinity for certain actors or story-tellers. I could start to discern when someone was trying for something verses working for a paycheck. I started getting a hint of feeling like an "insider," who knew little details about career paths or projects. I wasn't getting nearly as obsessed as I was about animal names, but it's gratifying to chase an instinct down a google rabbit hole and discover you were able to recognize an individual's voice or be right in who they claimed to be influenced by.

Part of me also wished to prove a point about time. There's so much of it. Over the period of years where my friends were becoming less social fun and exploratory and more hyper paranoid and focused on how to "adult," I felt like I was carrying a certain kind of flag for the existence I have now, and I wanted to prove I could still do all the little things in service to it, watch as much TV as they played video games, or significantly more, and still move towards what examples I'd prefer stood out about my pursuits and goals. I'm not butt-hurt people spend their time otherwise, I'm ashamed they don't also get at what they said was really important.

I wasn't just watching TV, or when I had to, working all day and night to get things moving here. I was getting myself immensely stressed out about the state of the world reading article after article. At one point, not unlike when I obsessed over religion and would respond to things with book-length answers, you could name a country, and I could name a damning thing or several about it. I remember an instance at Sports where I caught myself off-guard in how much I was talking about Malaysia when prompted. TV offset that to some degree.

I weened myself down from reading about the world, at least from "news" sources. More time for TV. I completed lists. I got used to the idea of subtitles, in fact preferring them for things better watched sped up. I would marathon anything explicitly recommended. Awards lists, "cult classics," whatever shoddy hipster website said was underrated or niche. I wanted to know what shows meant the most to individual countries. I wanted to know what movies or characters other characters were referencing. I wanted to see every series or project the characters from my favorite shows got involved with. You think I watched Suits for Suits? I really liked Suits, but Zoë, dammit.

I learned that my reformulated concept of "good" shows causes me to slow them down. The dialogue feels like it matters or the jokes deserve the timing. The scenes are begging to be taken in and the plot, inevitably recycled in some manner, tastes a little different in how the actor is portraying it or the line was tweaked. It's how you can get nuances in "cop show" or "angry alcoholic/smoking white guy." It's how I'm confident in agreeing that representation is important, but woke or purely identity-based storytelling can still be boring as fuck if the characters, ethos, or perspective doesn't transcend superficial presumptions of value and avoid reducing to cliches. Luther, Atlanta, The Mindy Project, Broad City, Ramy, and the first few seasons of Girls figured out something Insecure, Master of None, Lady Dynamite, and the back half of Girls did not.

Currently, TV is something of a meditation. Maybe I'm reaffirming my view that a good portion of what exists on thoughtful-nerd-TV shows are shameless rip-offs of The Twilight Zone. Any time there's "family" magic that keeps a show running is something of an interesting miracle to think about why those people in that setting or with that set of writers in this era. There's still plenty of the compulsion pushing me through sped up third-spin-off series like Power Book III and The Flash (I managed to refuse the shitty DC rabbit hole, mostly.) But I can put them on while I drive or clean or weed whack.

I'm currently at, approximately recorded of course, 43,532 plays of 1,082 shows and 2,892 movies. I like to play with the numbers. One movie a day for 8 years is all it takes to catch up. Combined is 1,194 days worth. And I keep the bills paid, chores done, yard work, read/audiobook, podcast, and spend a solid amount of time listening to music or meandering about town.

I like to think about what's my favorite and why. Inevitably, it's what has a prayer of staying on my mind for any length of time. Right now, that's Rick and Morty, Mr. Inbetween, Last Week Tonight, Dave, Mr. Pickles, One Piece, Impractical Jokers, and Ted Lasso. I like to think I've found a place for each individual show like I've tried to cut out for each person as an individual. I want to be able to discern the voice and respect the slight skews in the perspective. We're constantly iterating and reflecting different things about our eras and headspaces. Maybe you find that vibe from looking at art or unpacking layers of music, but I think at bottom, for the true connoisseurs, we're all looking to connect with the same thing. Or even just connect at all.

I don't feel guilty about "wasted time." I'm not watching TV "instead" of otherwise respectable adult or responsible things. I'm sticking it into all of the cracks that would otherwise be filled with something equally absurd or "unproductive" as if I have some quota to fill before I die. It's free. It's considerably less interesting, even my favorites, than if you elect to actually go bowling, eat dinner, or talk about and help create what we may do together. It's a tool to keep me from anchoring myself to something that might be considerably more mentally or physically taxing. I know I'm obsessive and know how it can work against me.

I take a lot of pride out of knowing "something" about topics, even if it's just to like or dislike. I like the enthusiasm bubbling up when you tell me you're considering watching one of my favorite shows. I'm not memorizing air dates or converting my speech into a series of one-liners from shows, but sometimes something will stick and show up in a blog or just keep replaying in my head until I figure out why. I smile to myself when professions of "I waste so much time!" are made. Like, if you lock yourself into this moment, I promise, you'll start finding all the time you need.

[910] Shoot The Moon

What's new? Well, my buddy got the license we need to open up an independent counseling shop so as to become vendors for probation referrals and the ability to bill Medicaid. If we organize this properly, with even 5-10 clients each, I could be richer than I've ever been in a shorter amount of time than I thought would be possible without a dozen businesses running simultaneously. So, that's potentially good news.

My girl wants to do something “dramatic” to change the pattern of get along for two weeks, bicker about something incredibly small until she's driving back to Kentucky to reset, get along for two weeks, on and on. Does that mean her continued stay anywhere remotely close to me or the state? Who knows? So, that's potentially bad news.

 

I'm tempted to defer to one of my favorite stories about the monk who continually asks, “Is that so?” about the various circumstances of his life and things people bring to him. You might consider me in a “cold” or “calculating” space about how I attempt to organize the next few weeks and months of my life.

 

I've taken a lot of things for granted in my life. While I'm not keen to be shamed about “privileges” with a Woke Wokerson, I do concede that I'm a legacy of a level of work and care that a great many people do not get. I've felt obligated to match, to whatever degree I can, the stories about what my grandparents did or dad has done, in service to providing and creating the circumstances for me to be where I am. The details matter. The culture that undermines or protects what's there matters.

 

All of my grandparents' children were able to fend for themselves, get through school, retain jobs, and 3 out of 4 figure out how to get acceptable partners. They've still fallen prey to unprocessed trauma and regrets. They've still managed to steal from and resent each other. I certainly don't know the details of the households my grandparents were brought up in, but I know if they're even half of the kind of people I've experienced them to be and that my dad has talked about, they would never accept the kind of behavior I've been witness to from their offspring. That said, I still can't shake how my uncle was allowed to speak so shiftily towards my grandma.

 

Either way, for all of my privileges or “born with its,” I could have, by default, had more. I could have started this cousin-fuck Indiana experiment with the money from the sale of my grandparent's stolen house. My mega-rich second cousin and aunt could have thrown me the money they wipe their assess with to make it so I wasn't spending 22 hours a day working and navigating the exploitation of mall leases and politics. Money I don't feel entitled to, mind you, and worked to account for other ways. The details matter. The culture that undermined or protected my efforts mattered.

 

I've stated on more than one occasion that were it not for my dad, there's an out-sized chance I would be in jail. At 33, in 9 days, a person who has demonstrated he can work high-stress, high responsibility jobs, build a little homestead, and otherwise be “boring” enough to keep an earnest TV habit, it might be easy to dismiss the idea of the wanna-be hood rat and violence I was itching to ratchet up. I don't continue to obsessive compulsively count, tap, collect, read, or literally physically and mentally exhaust myself, routinely, trying to satiate my underlying need to be recognized and cared for. Anyone who's listened to me for a prolonged drunken rant on a patio or been stuck with me in the car as I went on about lady woes can be confident my mind is begging for the excuse to spin out at all times.

 

I wrap a lot up into the things I say. I'm the running dialogue of my experience and effort in the world. I don't expect to be “perfectly understood.” I don't think, especially if you are unwilling or unable to provide the means of doing so, I'm capable of wrapping my head around any given individual. I see trends. I pick up on choice phrases and body language. I know history rhymes. That is often more than enough to navigate most people most of the time. That is how I can wiggle my way out of the worst consequences of my propensity to give myself over to anyone I've deemed “individual enough” or perhaps back in the day “on the level.”

 

The first part of the work of appreciation has been to do the actual work. Speak to it. Repeat it. Remind yourself of the standard and compare it to what's come before. It's important for me to know who I am when no one is around or who I've been when I've been awash in personalities. It's important for me to know the nature of my compulsions and utilize their power without getting burned. My stomach still drops with anxiety, and now I can deliberately meet that with another TV show, a meal, or a smaller task than the capitulation to pretend I'm addressing all of the drama and hatred I have for the world by over-achieving or doing “everything” in the moment. I'm lucky that I've built a repository of reminders on how to engage temperance and not a list of excuses for laziness. 

 

It's not lost on me every single detail it has taken to enjoy a measure of comfort or “stability,” and even still, I have to work and convince myself there's anything remotely stable or there to enjoy at all! I need a specific kind of spreadsheet that lights up green even if the numbers are the same on the one I normally use. I need to use the microwave and stove more than 3 times in a row before it clicks just how much food there is I don't have to drive and overpay for.

 

You know what I can do? I can build a house, and work DCS or casework or counseling, and pull up 200 saplings, and spend entirely too much money on shitty cars or gas, and eat out too much, and buy concert tickets, and tools, and find, transport, and carry heavy free shit, and build a fence and room and fire-pit-turned-pond, and watch 1188 days worth of TV shows and movies, and fuck nearly every day! I'm a fucking beast. I can also remain open, mostly tempered, and willing to learn more, do more, and spend or sacrifice the comfort on hand if it will help you. I've got plenty enough going on in my own head and that I enjoy doing with my time if you won't convey how you wish to better relate to it.

 

My friend, who needs brain surgery and couldn't find a ride so it had to be rescheduled, asked me yesterday what I wish I had if I had to start all over. She wants land, to be off-grid, enjoys camping, and is dealing with her own obligations with kids and work. I told her I wished I had more help. My situation struggles with the same cultural tides that are begetting fascism and learned helplessness. The faux obligations, lack of civility, and broken concepts of truth or dignity pervade at all levels. People don't believe in the future, their agency, or that there are creative and incredibly tough ways in which you build things to believe in. They don't trust themselves to be satisfied, at any point, in the process which precludes their ability to enjoy the ride. They've been met with the same crickets or betrayals in service to their ideals as I have. They're taking for granted as many things as they can claw away from their circumstances.

 

I continue to ride the begrudging gifts bestowed upon me. I want to enjoy the ride and know that if it all stopped this instant, I'd still be a king, I'd still be full, and I'd still be hyper-aware of the difference between what was “me” and was given to me to work with. I'm not feeling guilty over the dozen things yet undone. I'm not ashamed I like TV or just spending time chilling with chill people. I appreciate that immediately I'm prepared to throw on the work gloves and not stop until the job is done. I've reflexively thrown myself into months of debt to help check off things on the to-do list. My baseline is to accidentally overdo it when I'm not paying attention or practicing the patient, calculated testimony about what I've done, am doing, or plan on. If I want the world, I want to ensure it's balanced enough so that the pull of the moon remains a mere wobble.

[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.