[950] Ring My Bell

I pick up the phone.

I think, well, I know, it’s incredibly important to pick up the phone. When I was growing up, and bill collectors were harassing my injured dad for years, I did not pick up the phone. I’m not speaking to being habitual or disingenuous. I’m speaking to being open, available, and accountable. I can be found. I got my first phone at 15, and from that moment for the last 18 years, day or night, if you have my phone number (and pretty much everyone who might read this does or did at one point), I’ve been available.

 

Just in case that wasn’t enough, if the phone was dead, lost, or otherwise not in my possession, I lived and worked in various locations with phones! I was also plugged into social media and have a dozen email addresses. My phone number has been the same my entire life. My oldest email address is still in use. I’m here in the middle of nowhere, and if you happened to search for the business name I came up with my freshman year of college you can find me.

 

We make a choice to call or not to call each other every day. Most of us probably feel like we no longer have much in common or shared history. I figure a good amount of people feel as though they’ve “outgrown” versions of themselves that would have rolled with me or my dreams. With the windows into each other’s lives, we got both the myth that the grass was greener, and the sobering reminders that people are just people doing their thing, be it over there, or next to you, and maybe they can’t “entertain” you anymore than your spouse did the first few years of your marriage.

 

I try hard to interrupt thoughts about “could’ve.” While I think people can express a level of sincerity about their plans or thoughts, I don’t think they know shit lol. I think we all adopt narratives because they’re necessary for survival, then we find ways to make excuses for why our feelings do or don’t conform to them. The “wisdom” one derives from that process is either a measure of what you’ve choked down or the conscious resistance to being dictated by ever-ambivalent or malicious forces.

 

It’s work to find a goal, set it, pursue it, and sacrifice for it. It’s work to discover how it might need to change. It's work to assess the landscape and consider how even your best ideas might no longer fit like they might have yesterday. It’s just work all the way down, all the time, if you’re doing it right. Always be assessing. Even when I’m doing “nothing,” I’m working on the next plan. I’m working my way through my more accessible goals. This is work to figure out what killer line is lying dormant in my head to help me orient how I’m going to go back to work.

 

For the last year or so I’ve been renting space on the land. What you’d think couldn’t be more straightforward “park here, come back and get it when you’re done” has been a saga of poor communication, mud, property damage, and now several hours of pipe-dream wasted conversations. The latest engagement had me on the phone with a couple of guys looking to rent space for storage containers. They move pallets of shit, load the containers, move the containers. I forgot to say “allegedly” because none of this operation I’ve seen, nor am thinking anymore I much wish to be a part of. They, sometimes, answer the phone. I’m doing other things with my life and time.

 

My hedging of opportunities is always at play. I’m not going to dangle at the end of someone’s goodwill or disappear in a cloud of smoke they’ve tried to blow up my ass. It’s the lowest bar I can reasonably expect from someone. Talk. Answer. Don’t fucking lie and waste my time.

 

But that’s not what people are on, so it’s what I always have to be on. This plays out at every level of my life. Who do I hang out with? Byron and Hussain answer their phones. What jobs do I take? The subcontracted company for the prison called me, my supervisor called me, they confirmed interview dates and me getting hired immediately, and got me in a week early when I asked to start sooner. I became someone’s go-to scrapper because, even if I couldn’t do the job, I always answered the phone.

 

I’ve been criticized pretty regularly when I “insist” to be acknowledged. You can feel the tension in conversations or texts that I would dare point out that you didn’t follow through or functionally lied about where you were coming from. It’s my problem either way. Either I wait indefinitely for you to come down from your mountain, or I commit the egregious faux pas of respecting my time and taking my ass and mind to somewhere I can be appreciated or feel like I’m getting somewhere. I can’t win unless I truly own how little I wish to fuck with people who don’t pick up the phone. That ownership struggles against a desire to remain open and accommodating to the same chaotic life that often doesn’t carry out my plans as intended.

 

But then again, in the chaos, I still pick up the phone. I call you back at 5 o’clock when I get back to my car from the prison that doesn’t let me have a phone. Then I tell you my schedule and what days I have off. I give you my work email and office extension. I contextualize it further and make sure you realize I’m running several games at once, and while I’m technically “open” to what we may do together, shit changes quick, so we need to establish a routine, commitment, or pattern of communication that doesn’t sweep away the effort thus far. Almost everyone I talk to is completely full of shit about what they intend to do, either as a function of lazy language, or just because they don’t feel there’s anything riding on being accountable. What makes you or I any different from the worst consequences of that behavior? Are we planning and prioritizing, or being dragged along by the angriest or most chaotic forces?

 

I’m itching and impatient to move on my best day. When I have more money, more opportunities, more pieces working well than I already have, I may be downright tyrannical if I’m too close to the excuses and the nonsense that amounts to the failure of phone answering.

 

I’ve tried to make time the locus of my value system. I want my time. I want to spend my time around the people I care about, on the subjects that keep me interested or might have the greatest impact on society. I want to fill every waking minute of my life plugged into something meaningful. I’ve experimented aggressively with giving my time to things I thought would meet that criterion. When the things get bought, the friends disappear, or the goal achieved, you’re left with your experience of time in any given moment. Is it filled with resentment for old friends? Is it filled with anxiety about things you can’t control? Is it idle and depressing or bored?

 

No. It’s planning. It’s thinking. It’s watching. It’s writing. It’s wishing. It’s moving on to the next person who might pick up and the project that might take off. It’s learned that if everything else fails, the process and patterns remain the same. I’m not addicted to making excuses for how I spend my time or the horrors my phone is going through in looking for a signal. I’m right here, and always have been.

[949] Ratchet As I Wanna

I must be pretty miserable if I’m writing 4 times in 3 days.

I’m realizing the extent of the “value” in my ability to consistently listen and observe. I put value in quotes because it’s a kind of value that doesn’t translate into as much money per hour as a FedEx employee makes. It’s the kind of value that is overflowing with platitudes by people who “can’t imagine” working in the social work fields. It’s a value that slaps you with irony when you realize how little someone you’re speaking to is capable or willing to do for you as you do for others. It’s like a secret you have to keep with yourself. Valuable in a sense that you know it exists, and you watch its power, but you can’t expect it when you need it.

 

The people who most often listen to me complain have learned to mostly wait it out. They’ve known me long enough to anticipate some regular level of anxiety or overwhelming thought pattern, but every year I get older the rants get shorter, the volume decreases, and whatever addled hope which provokes my despair dies atom by atom. People need to talk, right? They need to complain sometimes? “It” all becomes overwhelming or you have a flurry of feelings or things that confuse you that just need to come out in messy and incomplete ways. I think it’s a literal process built into our potential for well-being just like you get actual diarrhea or puke when you need to rush order the expulsion of disease.

 

Any expression of stress or confusion causes a sympathetic response in people who aren’t broken. It doesn’t matter how articulate you might even attempt to be in your expression, if you dare try, you’re basically begging the other person to feel bad, unprompted, uncontrollably, and whether they mean to or not, they’ll lash out. That lashing can take a few typical forms, from personalizing what you’re saying to diminishing. If you’re not aware they respond like this, you and them can get stuck in a resentful spiral of persistent miscommunication. I’m thankful I’ve danced that dance so many times I know when to pull out.

 

In any event, it’s still kind of disheartening. I want to be able to bitch too. I’m actually human. I know this seems hard to believe, but it’s true. I don’t want to be a perfect Zen master navigating an endless array of problems, personal, existential, or external, with a measured series of blogs and dedicated practice. Sometimes I just want to scream, or revel in the misery and hatred for all of the little people and their small lives that manage to have an outsized impact on my brain or weekend occasionally. Is that too much to ask? Is it not fair of me to wish to be received with the benefit of the doubt?

 

I give people credit. I get chastised for giving people credit. It falls to the same kind of “value” game. Do you truly value an individual and their capacity to change? No, truly, do you? If you don’t have a rock-solid conception of where you stand on a question like that, you’re either a decent counselor or you’re handing out paperwork and shooting the shit with a prisoner who will be back within a year of their release. You’re either working with messy, ratchet, families to put together a safety plan, or you’re targeting them for removal because you “already know” who they are from reading a report. You’re shooting first because you value your fear and life over any remote conception of oaths you took.

 

I give people credit, but I don’t trust them. I don’t trust them because I watch what they do with the credit I give. It’s that simple. I don’t trust you to listen to me. I don’t trust you to understand where I’m coming from. I trust you to be all up inside how you feel about things I say more than I ever trust you to read them or interpret them. What would make me think otherwise?

 

A familiar refrain at this point is to point out that you have to look for good things in order to see them. You have to, somehow, use whatever may be wholesome or righteous about someone or thing and use it to placate the negative consequences of their behavior otherwise. I think this is a weak mantra opted into by people completely terrified of speaking towards how far and wide negative consequences go. This is the “good Christian” narrative downplaying child ass rape. This is the “you’ve only one family” narrative that masks the complex machinations of generational abuse. This is every cliché offered to choke down hostile and exploitative work environments.

 

I see plenty of “good” things. [Side note, I happened to hear the argument of the last paragraph neatly following an argument that “good” and “bad” don’t exist, so, you know, take whatever you might from that.] But I do. I’m one who persistently writes about what he is thankful for and what is going right. I frame my shit circumstances in digestible bites and timeframes. I offer myself to initiatives and things I can help or work on. I did so 3 fucking times today! I offered to help these messy pipe-dream guys, and said I’d take on extra work with my guy who’s built things around my house, and tried to reengage the addict who needed his screening. I don’t get to be the guy characterized as constantly wallowing in misery or looking for an excuse to handicap my decision making.

 

It’s just kind of disheartening to consistently be at the end of people’s judgment at what I’m unable to do perfectly at all times. I didn’t handle my girlfriend slitting her wrist in front of me particularly well. I don’t keep my cool when I’m taken for granted and cut off for over a year or yelled at over things so inconsequential, I can’t even remember them. I’m the dick when I want movie theaters to be silent, you to respect my time, rules to apply evenly, or in my desire for an explanation for something that does not make sense save the arbitrary whims of a given power. In broad terms, I want “common sense” and people to “be cool.” I can’t find it, and they aren’t.

 

But forever, if I try to express this in any form but like this, to my 3 followers, I will be met with this gross protest and insistence I’m not being understanding or forgiving or I’m just taking things too seriously. All of a sudden, I’m talking about “you” specifically, and bringing to the surface every insecurity you have about your complicity or, very wrong, assumptions of my opinion of you. I’m either talking past people, or I’m feeding their ego. I have real conversations with like 3-ish people, and not regularly. And I feed that ego so I don’t make a bad or sad day worse. I feed it so I can play a game around a type of connection that doesn’t really exist for me. Not because I don’t want it to, I just don’t know how to be listened to.

[948] The Nightmare's Supposed To End

I’m really rather annoyed. It’s been going on for at least a few days. I know when this happens it’s because a lot of little things all stack up on each other in short succession. I have an approximate idea of what they are, but I haven’t made an exhaustive list yet.

::begin skipping block of bitchfest now::

 

My back is fucked up. Not sure if it’s from sleep weird or if I’ve hurt it some other way. The idea of buying another mattress or rearranging all of my stuff to access one of the 3, also not great, other ones I have sound miserable in turn. My head was hurting. My nose running and throat is dry. It’s still appreciably cold at my house because fate I’m sure has decided I won’t have an adequate heat system until June. All of my plans for having “fun” or otherwise distracting myself from my myriad shitty thoughts have been cancelled, closed without notice, or aren’t open to begin with. My job is starting in on getting to me with all of the indications of shitty leadership, lack of accountability, and ensuring I’ll have to choke down some pathetic and psychosis-inducing set of behaviors in order to cope for the months-long sentence. I didn’t get to pay down the amount of debt I was going to. I didn’t get paid for setting up what sounds like an over-enthusiastic rich kid’s pipe-dream distribution center on the land. I actually made the effort to get to and from work in spite of the storm for another symbolically significant reason for me that will be otherwise wholly ignored an unappreciated. I wasted gas and time gong into town yesterday being unable to coordinate the things I planned to do. I’m unable to get it all done today, and I’ll be waiting around Sunday, maybe, for the next attempt at getting the heat fixed, precluding my willingness or ability to get half of what I might’ve gotten done today had anything ever made sense for me over the last few weeks. I’m staring down sitting here, cold, watching TV, until Friday, where a very on-a-whim concert is scheduled for a band I’m about as familiar with as any one-hit wonder from the 90s. I don’t have my tools for doing a few things around the house. My tooth is chipped slightly. I’m worried I’ll lose my eyebrow piercing after losing the ball which required buying more shit from Amazon and a need to send half of it back after I figure out what gauge the thing is. I’m tired of TV. It’s too cold to play instruments, which my throat and body being what they are wouldn’t prove great for anyway. I haven’t been able to get my fucking bowling ball drilled after 3 weeks of lies about when the pro shop would be open. The guy who reached out to me about getting screened for probation cancelled. The dead cat I found just felt disconcerting. I’ve come close to getting stuck in my yard 3 times because I had to park the dumbass renter’s motorhome at the top of my driveway. The scam of credentials and how to obtain them is becoming ever-more obnoxious. All of the people I talk to with any regularity seem overwhelmed or cagey. My cats tricked me into thinking they could just sit next to each other for longer than 10 minutes without fighting for no reason.

 

I’m fed. My stuff is still here. I don’t have to look for a new job yet. The truck still runs.

 

When this kind of disparity in my thoughts starts to take root, I begin to feel like every worst thing about me. I want to cause trouble for people I don’t like. I want to feel a righteous surge of satisfaction of demonstrating what kind of power I retain precisely in the moment the world would otherwise try to render me helpless. So much of the bullshit in my life is the end result of negligence, dishonesty, or ambivalence, and in the face of that you can go limp and “accept” the things you can’t change, or you can attack and continually remind yourself just how much change you’re capable of at any moment. That’s the temptation and another source of stress just sitting there idling and waiting to actually move.

[947] Hills To Die On

It happens fast, but not too fast.

I made it 13 days. I got to day 13 of a new job before I emailed regarding policy and practices. I got to 13 days before I “complained” that something didn’t seem right to me about what I was told or what I’ve experienced vs what is written down. Now, I’ve started my “incident tracker” of all of the disconcerting things of my work environment and keeping my records for the things people will lie to me, but worse, lie to themselves about.

 

It started with inclement weather yesterday. Any reasonable person in authority should have told people to stay home. They did not. I challenged their lack of proactive responsible engagement. Today, it’s being told, after weeks of it not being an issue or even mentioned, to take out my eyebrow piercing before entering the prison. I read the rules, and I’ve counted half a dozen violations that have been ongoing for a year or more from the staff currently employed. I want the same privileges they have, not least of which because it’s a pain in the ass to remove my piercing and get it back in.

 

I consider things like this worthwhile hills to die on. Why? I’m speaking to a fundamental truth about fairness. I’m speaking to what it means to be reasonable. I’m desiring a world that has grown up about what constitutes “professional.” I’m aware of explicit violations of policy that don’t seem to bother anyone akin to the one I seek. But, most importantly, I think when you allow yourself to repeat nonsense like “I encourage you to go back and read the policy” after I’ve told you I have, quoted it and shared it, and denoted the arbitrary enforcement, you’re telling me as explicitly as polite bureaucratic nonsense allows, to go fuck myself.

 

I have a problem with this, because when I play by your rules, you don’t wish to engage. When I try to speak plainly about the absurdity or arbitrariness, you try to punish me, and if I just shut up, I start to eat a hole in my chest and obsessively think about how fucked up it is I must bother with your type of entity or person at all. This gets in the way of me doing work, feeling well, or otherwise engaging in life. As you can see, I’m writing again. That’s not happening because I’m merely processing, accepting, or moving on from something that has exhausted all the words I might have to say about it.

 

Really think about this as it pertains to your own life. You’re always making a choice. You’re choosing to remain silent and keep the checks rolling. You’re choosing to not politely, but firmly, and consistently, engage in finding the person or the language to challenge the shitty power structures that be. I’ve so built it into my ethics as a person, that I feel obligated, mostly because literally no one around me is ever the squeaky wheel. It matters. You become a function of the arbitrariness of “the world” or the ambivalence of those in power. Then what? You see the shitty consequences as they play out across our culture and time. To me, it’s a direct fucking line.

 

It's important when you engage in this kind of cage rattling that you’re clear about outcomes. Could they fire me for being politely annoying and inquisitive? Sure. Everywhere is “at-will” employment these days because, we’ve literally built a lack of accountability into our social working fabric. Do I give a fuck? Not enough. Nor do I feel it is that big of a risk. I’m scrapping off a few layers of respect-for-myself skin in getting a job altogether. When I leave, it will be in service to healing, not in lamentation for the paychecks that never were.

 

For me, for always, it’s about bringing attention and awareness to things no one wishes to think about or speak to. I actively suffer perceived injustices. I think you do too no matter how unwilling you are to speak to them. If I should suffer, particularly unreasonably, so should you. The magic of being adult and thoughtful individuals is that across so many domains, we really don’t have to suffer. It’s a choice. I, in spite every common notion of what you should or shouldn’t be speaking to, will make you speak to that choice explicitly, or I will maintain a level of considerably less agreeableness. This isn’t a game, a distraction, or me pathologically looking for dumb fights. This is about living within principle and practicing what is best.

 

I don’t think things change unless you feel the pain and the consequences. You can, of course, be so psychologically broken that any degree of pain just makes you break down further. I’m not willing to treat people tasked with building up and embodying pro-social and accountable ideals, for inmates no less, as feeble minded and unduly put upon in my insistence they engage. That’s a privilege, to ignore things, which you have not earned from me, particularly if you’re going to deem yourself capable of designating how I conduct my life or appearance.

 

So I’m going to keep writing emails, keep asking questions, and keep looking for the next person to annoy until you look the other way, or tell me explicitly what kind of intractable cunt you’re willing to be about nothing, for nothing, and just because you can. That’s all I want. Own it. Like a monkey flinging shit in your face, I can make you own it. Then I can go back to giggling to myself and sniffing my fingers. There’s no law against it, right?

[946] On Coming To Work In The Snow

There’s a storm a’brewin’.

This week has seen most of my coworkers circling around a foregone conclusion. They weren’t coming to work. If (x) number of inches of snow hits, if the roads are too bad, or if they feel like going in the hole for PTO that will have to be paid back, they aren’t coming. Some handed out homework to inmates in advance, almost positive if they weren’t going to be here today, they wouldn’t be here Friday either. Some cited their distance to work and general inability to drive very slowly for what would be well over an hour. Some were content to eat up their time off. Most telling to me, they all wanted to know what *you* were doing, including my direct boss.

 

We look for license. We want to be part of the group. This is nothing new, special, or confusing. I refrained from placing myself into an expectation of not making it in. I didn’t want the license or forgone conclusion of it all. I’ve lived in Indiana my whole life. I’ve driven in every kind of snowy conditions available. I know the difference between iced-over and sliding uncontrollably, and driving between 20-30 mph in the tire tracks wherever they may lie.

 

In a world that made sense, when every single one of your coworkers has the same instinct, reasonably or otherwise, to not risk the drive, your company wouldn’t force you to gamble with your time off, money, or safety. The State emailed their policies and guidelines for inclement weather, so did the parent company Centurion, and so did my subcontracted company RepuCare. No one simply stated, “It’s going to be bad, just stay home, you won’t be penalized.” The same form of tomfoolery and gamble was made regarding Covid. Many found out weeks after they came to work anyway, they could have had paid time-off while they were sick. Now it applies retroactively, because prevention and safety are the afterthought, not the rule.

 

You might recall, I work on spite. No one can make it? I can. But also, I feel like I’m resisting the nature of several bad games at once. Do I wish to be safe? Sure. Are any of us ever, really? Not in my experience. What do I gain by playing along with even the ancillary presumption? Do I want to engage in a conversation about “going in the hole” and paying back time I took off? That feels gross and insulting. Do I ignore what I’ve learned about snowy conditions and driving, just this once, because we’re all in on the “let’s take off” joke? What else am I doing with my time? Before pausing to write this, I’ve been watching CEUs.

 

I really don’t like groupthink, not least of which because it seems to only work when it portends lazy and excuse-ridden ends. We don’t all get to collectively think about actual safety and prevention, we get to collaborate and lean into our apologetic reasoning precisely when it feels like we’ll be able to get away with something. We’re not going to get organized and start to think about how we might shape the organization we work for to let us off nicely for the snowstorm. We’d rather practice the easy and self-sabotaging narratives.

 

I’m not looking for you to give me license to care about myself or the things I do. That’s an extremely important distinction for me. I don’t really care what everyone else is doing. Everyone else seems to fuck themselves, fuck me, or otherwise handicap who they could or should be as a matter of routine. There’s an, not weird to me, argument for getting stuck in the snow as a visceral analogy for the ambivalence displayed by my “leadership.” It’s easy to shift the blame at that point, and even more illustrative of the propensities I despise. “Why didn’t you just stay home?” No, why didn’t you exercise your power to make staying home the most reasonable and easy thing to do? Let me choose to stay home and maintain the meager amount I’m squeezing from your cultural exploitation of me. At least now, I get to own the nature of my “Fuck you, I know the score.”

 

So I’m at work, watching trainings on addiction and trauma. I’m trying to get my hours in for higher-order certifications. I’m learning of the amazing people with incredibly long outlooks and deep clinical experience. I’m seeing people who have accountability and statistical evidence built into their bones and practice. I’m watching the heroes who don’t get signs planted outside of their offices nor shout-outs on the news. I’m seeing who I should be more like, even if the topic of being deeply involved in peoples’ lives for decades isn’t precisely where my interest or motivation lies. I’m working out a way to incorporate their lessons and my knowledge and ability into something that lends itself to the overall health and stability of society. To that end, I see a direct line from disassociating from toe-in-ground wishy-washy posturing and my capacity to make forthright and bold assessments of how I manifest my larger project. I wouldn’t be here, reflecting. I wouldn’t have a few more hours under my belt. I’d be home, watching TV, cold, thinking about how much I don’t like the penalty for doing so.

 

Okay, the more concise less abstract portion is over. Now I’ll try to tie it into my other recent experiences and conversations.

 

One of my coworkers, unprompted, asked me “theoretically” what I thought if I had a friend who told me a guy she was seeing hacked her phone to find out what she was lying to him about. I told her what the 16 year old version of me would have said, “Bitch, that shit’s crazy. What the fuck? You need to run. Totally uncool. Fuck that guy, awkward ass controlling ass behaviors. Shit ain’t gonna stop there.” I also told her what the current counselor would tell her. “That’s an incredible violation of trust and boundaries, and while I don’t know the particulars of how you’re balancing that kind of behavior with what you perceive otherwise that you’re getting out of the relationship, it’s a major concern for me, and both in my experience and from what I’ve learned reading, it seems unlikely it’ll be an isolated event or not escalate into more controlling behaviors.”

 

She’s also a counselor. She’s in therapy. She relayed that her therapist has told her she’s never been in a healthy relationship, and has told her many, if not all, of the sentiments I expressed about her current enthrallment. Other details include, he’s married, her coping skill is drinking, and she is confident were she to break things off, she would have to find another job, because she could not handle seeing him every day.

 

I don’t tell you about her because I’m trying to be judgmental or shitty. She’s relevant because in the span of 15 minutes, she invited a stranger into her life’s baggage who told her things she both knows already or has heard a dozen times before, and she demonstrated, quite explicitly, the same kind of downplaying, excuse-ridden, avoidance patterns that underpin the “lesser offense” in the dance to get out of coming to work.

 

She used broad language. “He checks all the boxes.” Okay, what are those boxes? “We fuck and have intellectual conversations.” Okay, so he checks two boxes. Anything else? A move back to broad language. “He’s just someone it feels good to be around, I don’t have anyone else like that.” So he checks a companionship box as well? Is he the only person you can fuck? “Psh, no.” Do you have anyone else you can speak intelligently with? “No, well, yeah, but not that I’m also fucking.” Do you have general supports in your life, friends or family? “Sure.” So he checks boxes that aren’t so unique, falls well within patterns of unhealthy relationships of the past, and you already know what you should do, but… Eventually, as I kept returning to the idea that she needed to unpack her word choices and get very specific as to what she means regarding who she cares about and what “trust” or “love” were going to mean in practical application, she said, “I don’t wanna do all that work.”

 

Exactly. I know you don’t. Very few people wish to do the work. There are many reasons for this, not least of which they don’t understand, or feel as deeply, the consequences of doing the work. They prioritize how they feel, who’s giving license, where the next excuse lies, before they even consider the overall or long-term impact. It’s not a factual calculation. She feels a familiar gratification or guilt or undue confidence to pick dramatic and feebly expository language in service to his poor behavior and her lack of accountability. I don’t care how good you are at exploring your bad relationship, we’re prone to do this, root for those we care about, and subsume the best practice to the narrative. I’d never have been in any relationships if I leaned into my perception of my exes and their personal issues or dissatisfaction with me. People deserve you at least trying, right?

 

Just like you can’t “save” an inmate or your partner, you can’t save your coworkers either. All I can do is hold the value of open and honest communication high in my mind, and practice how I engage in it as often as the opportunity presents itself. I worry about the holistic example she is setting for other people. I worry about her and how she’s otherwise coping with things in her life. I worry about how prevalent the controlling abusive archetypal man is given this kind of license to never face consequences and enlist those he terrorizes into doing so much work in service to his bullshit.

 

So much hides in the loose language. If you can’t clean up and explicate your language, you’re subject to all the forces wholly ambivalent to how they play out in your life. “Love” in a lazy way, blink and you’ll find abuse. Heard it all before? You’ll start to forget how to listen and turn information into a tool you can use. If you can’t own how fragile, self-destructive, and otherwise ignorant and afraid you are, they win, by default. That’s what it is to exist. Get there first before you start building a personal bible with endless dictums converging on what you’ll give up to a god in lieu of taking responsibility for.

 

I remember that disconnect. I didn’t have a concept of “personal responsibility.” Things just happened to me, and I suffered them. I suffered beatings from my mom for “bad behavior.” I suffered the oppressive directives of institutional environments. I suffered my poorly understood feelings any time I was surprised or backed into proverbial corner. I was a walking ball of pain with months-long headaches, endless anxiety and stomach butterflies, and a form of know-it-allism that kept me stressed and charged to argue way more than listen. 

 

This is the only thing I’ve ever found that helped. Writing. Trying to take loose words and turn them into specific action. Do I ever “hate my job?” I hate poor leadership, a lack of accountability, and watching demonstrable preventable harm happen as a result. Do I rush to tell you how much I “love” you? I prefer if you can experience my concepts of “commitment” and “honesty” and “working together” and if “love” spills out of my sense that we share those values, I won’t fight back too hard. Do I want to do all this work? Yes. When I started? No. I called myself names. It was messy large blocks of text sewn together with dramatic angsty feeling.

 

I had to learn how to give myself permission to do and view the work of better understanding myself. I don’t stop at, “I’ve heard that before.” I’m not ashamed of the aspects of my lived experience because I know they share universal themes. I’ve “sat” in the pain and confusion and disappointment and shattered expectations for so long, I just reside there. I’ve incorporated the depths of the pain into, if nothing else, the action step of exploring it. I know I’m going to die, and everything I care about will as well. I know pain isn’t temporary, but I also know it’s naively understood. I know it’s impossible for me to find the balance and deliberate choices to make without owning the worst consequences or a willingness to look at what happened when I didn’t feel I had the power to do something differently.

 

We’re all responsible for each other and create endless ripples through our personal lives, institutions, and world at large. If you don’t want to take responsibility for that, perhaps better said, if you don’t care that the consequences of eschewing that are coming regardless, to me, it’s a kind of self-righteous suicide. I don’t really want to talk to the person unwilling to do the work. I’m extremely suspicious they’re as proud of themselves and their intransigence as they put on as well. It only works if you work it, and you’re not powerless over your addiction to self-serving denial-ridden lazy bullshit. It’s about asking yourself what your responsibility is in any moment, and then feeling that responsibility move you through the world. You’ll never feel it if you don’t ask, and you’ll never know what the “right” thing to do is no matter how often you profess otherwise. I certainly won’t trust you, as my concept of “trust” isn’t predicated on how good or bad I feel fucking and talking to you. I know my role in life before I get too bogged down in the consequences of my role as “counselor” or “employee.” 

 

I show up for myself, because I’m responsible for everything I touch or wish to be apart of in the future. It doesn’t always feel good, in fact rarely does it feel good, but the alternative is much worse.

[945] Jerkin' The 'Ol Hate Boner

I don’t understand “lazy” hatred. I don’t understand hating something just because you can. Put another way, the “reason” I didn’t like Miley Cyrus or Nickleback had nothing to do with how well I knew the words to Wrecking Ball or Photograph. I did it because I was young, and that was a “cool” cliché thing to do. Am I fan of “I’m like a cool rebel” pissing in the street or albums where I can’t really tell the difference between songs? Not particularly, but now at least we’re talking about slivers of what might be understood about a given artist.

Aren’t there so many things worth hating that you could be just as lazy about? Can’t you like hate fascism before you tell me what Trump did for Black colleges? Then, at least before we pretend you’re going straight to Politifact after saying so, we’ve at least picked an appropriately shared and coherent frame from which to discuss the nature of influence and power.

 

Can’t you just hate disease? My god, how quick we could have gotten through the pandemic if people just hated being sick! You want to pretend you’re not living among modern day miracles of technology and knowledge before you just lazily hate the idea of being sick? I hate being sick so much I chug Nyquil and sleep until I’m done coughing! You think I won’t get as many shots as I need to avoid losing lung capacity altogether?

 

Can’t you just hate evil? Can’t you hate it when the evilest thoughts creep into your mind about what you might do to yourself or other people? Can’t you hate that you have practically no control over what your mind is going to make you think in any given moment? Can’t the atrocity that is your potential, or wasted potential, and the evil it lends itself to be worth a million memes?

 

Or pick any major atrocity happening exactly right now that needs no “both sides” argument. Chinese internment camps spring to mind. Mandatory minimum sentencing. The environmental disregard of basically any major company. How do all of those slip between your fingers before Jordan Peterson?

 

How do you justify the energy, the shares, the likes, the smirks and “lols” for a position weaved together via meme? Is that not indication enough you might be a touch batshit? Like, you know, not like some difficult “know” like just what percentage of gay you might be. You know explicitly if you’ve read someone’s book or watched their lectures. And when you haven’t, that’s what will prompt you to chime in? You saw the comic? You have meme groups dedicated to your hatred?

 

This shit isn’t even hard, and you’re like getting worse at it as you get older. Here’s a few clues you have no idea what you’re talking about:

 

1. You’re completely unwilling or unable to quote from the people/thing/example you’re bitching about.

 

2. Your entire position rests on personal experience, support from a raucous peanut gallery, and memes.

 

3. You are perfectly unable to check the sources of your information, dare you share an article or two, against any actual fact-checking publication or publication that detracts.

 

We don’t need to go on all day, because most people are “arguing” via meme spam, silence, and unfriending well before we discover that mental health problems are also a growing concern as we age.

My theory, people hate themselves. They hate themselves so much, they do this hate performance so their lived reality more aligns with their basest conception of who they believe themselves to be.

 

They’re taken out of context all the time! So fuck everyone else, they don’t deserve a fair shake. Their good ideas are ignored or resented. Time to take idiot-proof truisms and turn them into “You’re a Nazi!” You have to obliterate meaning and respectable conversation when you don’t mean anything to yourself or respect what it means to be alive. You’ll teach your kids to do the same, passing trauma and lazy abusive cliches. It’s the circular-logic of life.

 

I’m particularly sensitive to this notion of hating for no reason because I think it underpins so much of the bullshit I catch or “friendships” I never really had. You know what I haven’t liked or “hated” about the people in my life? Stealing from me. Leaving me to clean up after them. Lying to me. You know, things, that happened, or cost me something or measure of distress that, in theory, weren’t just about their “personality.” I wasn’t made “uncomfortable” by exes or things people said. I couldn’t handle getting screamed at for no reason or the consequences of self-harm. You know, SHIT THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.

 

It’s never seemed to matter to onlookers my intent, version of events, or attempts to reconcile. I’m just the enemy. I hate that, have always hated that, and will continue to. I don’t think anyone deserves to be treated like that, not Nickleback, not the prisoners I’m going to be counseling regarding their addiction, and not you, wound up in whatever hateful narrative that grants you license to do it others. It’s a sickness, both in heart and head. I know my mom is sick like that. Do I hate her more than I respect what I’ve learned about that illness? Have I shared a million memes about my childhood? Like, I read a fuck of psychology and philosophy books, and keep my distance after delineating what about her illness I don’t want infecting me.

 

You owe it to yourself to carry on like more than a lazy fucking cunt and idiot. And if you don’t, I’ll be the first to recognize and point out how bad you're hiding what you're really saying under that cough.

[944] Puurrrson

I find my cats remarkably annoying. It’s remarkable because I’ve had pets a good portion of my life, and only ever felt compelled to describe them as annoying now. My cats growing up were in their own world and de-clawed. My dogs were intelligent and chill. It might have been annoying to clean up dog poop or cat puke, but those weren’t things you could blame them for. Brushing isn’t super fun, necessarily, but petting a soft animal tends to be.

Pets are all about a qualitative verse quantitative discernment. The joy, companionship, compliments, or sense of ownership and responsibility tend to massively outweigh the negatives. There are hidden benefits you might not even consciously realize in being able to relate what you’re thinking or doing to something alive verses the incidental face your faucet might make. One of my cats just showed up one day. The other I got from a pet store thinking it was kind of messed up for me to leave a, formerly, mostly outdoor cat alone for days at a time. This means, of course, they don’t get along or play with each other.

What makes my cats annoying is that no time spent cuddling or in my lap is enough time. The outdoor one, Scampi, has a homing beacon for shit I don’t want him to jump on. He’s always underfoot while cooking or using the bathroom. He’s tried climbing on me 3 times since I started writing this less than 10 minutes ago. He’ll dart out the door when I’m about to leave for days, leaving me wondering how he’s navigating the cold. He’s straight up hit/clawed at my face when he’s gotten annoyed that I showed the other cat, Maxi, any attention. Fuck this cat, and the endless stream of farts after he gets into the trash or opens my fucking toaster oven to lick a greasy pan dry.

Maxi likes to sleep on top of me, and both cats start shit where no shit need be started. I’ve yet to throw Scampi out to live back outside courting worms and ticks. I haven’t taken Maxi back to the store. They’re cats. I’m a human. Everything about them starts and ends with me. My cats aren’t annoying, I’m allowing myself to be confused about our relationship, my responsibility and agency.

I question how much I actually enjoy having pets verses the things about animals I didn’t have to deal with before I found myself living with my ex-girlfriend’s cat. I don’t like buying litter, food, and medicine. I don’t want to have to remember or plan on feeding every day. I’ve bought like $400 worth of things to try and automate as much as possible for as long as possible. I need a cat door that doesn’t let in the current strays I see on my camera. I like the idea of occasionally petting an animal considerably more than really any aspect of the upkeep. My neck and back cannot abide sleeping in ways that doesn’t constantly “disturb” the animals wedged around me.

How likely is it I get rid of my cats? The probability is almost zero. Animals present you with a constant reckoning. Can you really not be bothered, not afford, not care, not remember, or not try? What does it say about you, if you let your feelings, small, incidental as they are, trump your obligation and choice to care for a pet? There’s an overriding quality that pervades pet ownership that can hardly be reduced to words. At least, there must be if people are willing to put up with the kinds of animals I encounter in other households.

What else would I be doing? Hanging out with friends? It’s not either or. Looking for another housemate or girlfriend? I don’t know that I’ve ever genuinely looked for that more than rolled with the moment. Is my life so occupied and fulfilling I’m just above errant cat dealings? Hardly. I re-did the math around my rural lifestyle and each time it really sinks in how ridiculously low I’ve managed to get my bills. One paycheck pays the internet for the year, 2 the electricity, 1 more my property taxes, car registration, contacts, and if I’m really feeling frisky, 1 more knocks out car insurance. For those keeping score, that’s 2.5 months making $20 an hour. Another way to say this, that’s 400 hours on the clock to buy 95.5% of my time doing otherwise if RENT got the math right. What wouldn’t you do with 5% of your time in order to have a place to shit, shower, and sleep for a year? If anything, my major push is to condense that 5% of time into speed-renovations so I can actually focus my time verses merely have it available.

This is how I train myself to ask what is the quality of what I’m doing. It takes practice and examination. Quantitatively, I’m around $8,000 in debt. Qualitatively, I know more than half of it is what I’ll spend each year on bills, car repairs, or buying tools/toys throughout the year. I don’t feel absolutely miserable like I did when I had the same amount of debt in service to a new car. When I glance over my shoulder at my table saw, I’m filled with hope and potential, not regret. Prioritizing respect for my time and attention is how I leave functionally zero effort “free money" jobs, and persuade myself I’m not sacrificing larger conceptions of my being in taking on more “normal” soul-sucking roles.

I think I have insight into how people weaponize their feelings by being informed by this. I had to work and earn my perspective, but you don’t have to work to feel in and of itself. Whatever peace, clarity, or motivation I derive from organizing my life this way, every person has their version, healthy and productive or otherwise. And you have to ask what would happen if they didn’t have whatever feeble version they were clinging to if they’re unwilling or unable to do the same kind of work. I, of course, want to vehemently defend my decisions and place in life. I just happen to think it’s objectively better to have more time to do “whatever” with, even struggle with the potential aimlessness or wasted anger on cats, than it is to be enslaved, metaphorically or otherwise. It’s a perfectly debatable point. It may only be answerable at the level of the individual, such as there is one well-enough defined.

An individual is a type of focus. If it’s whatever a lens happened to rest on, like a cat, then you can’t expect anything more than you would of a cat. My unfocused lens is annoyed by cats. My focused lens reminds myself to not let the cat’s folly be my own. My focused individual gives myself the gift of a 5/95 split thought and reminder that small steps are still steps. That quality of my feelings needs to constantly be jostled back into the quantity of time I’ve spent trying to shape a deliberate perspective and type of work. I’m not okay otherwise. I’m not in a good place when I’m not doing the right kind of work. And if I don’t have the focus, can it really be said that I’m working more than “doing” or “killing time?” My TV shows don’t mindlessly run in the background, but it’s the wrong kind of work to memorize every character’s name.

I don’t know where to sort a recent Instagram post of former friends getting together to paint one of their houses. It’s hard to say why I follow them save the familiarity. They posted that they wouldn’t have been able to do the work without the other 2 that came over. The house appeared to be about the same size as the one I just got done painting by myself. The first shot even looked suspiciously like the same studiously-taped window. We’re all working on dramatically different things even if they look or sound the same. I can paint a house, just not with 3 friends. And I don’t want to work to maintain those kinds of friends more than paint my next house. Perhaps most people who have some relationship-ending problem with me know this as well.

Not cats, though. They don’t give a fuck what I want or where they sit with me psychologically. I can keep them fed, warm, and healthy until they die and it’s only going to have cost me money that could have been burgers. It’s a lot easier to get through life when you understand people like the pets who prioritize their coat or comfort or act confused you’d get angry when they lash out or fall to temptation at the trash can. It also feels fair to think of people like that. It feels like the underpinning Randian or New Left thought-policing fascism. “If you trust cats to vote, it’ll be law the right to eat your face!”

It feels fair to understand other people as though they are pets because the work you feel you’ve done to understand or take care of them is constantly betrayed. They want nothing to do with you anymore than your cat needs a warm cushion and scratches. Pretension is as much a self-protection mechanism as much as fascism. Both destroy the means of understanding the nature of work. It’s not to ingratiate and enrich. It’s to orient.

I’m working for the privilege of a focused series of directions that I think will most reflect my values. I understand that statement can be hijacked and co-opted by anyone. I don’t need more nights out with good-enough friends or acquaintances. I don’t need more stuff. I don’t need more attention. I need things to make sense. I need to feel like I have the tools and time to create the means by which things can make sense.

I genuinely wish I never clenched my jaw again. I wish I were never anxious. I have this remote dream of finding this level of chill and self-assuredness that just carries me through doors without having to touch them. I think I’ll get there when I have the money to put so many details of my annoying-cats aspects of my life on auto-pilot. I don’t find the zen in daily routine feeding or scooping. I’m not content in half-truth conversations about desire and shared goals. That’s what mostly constituted my college relationships. I want a counseling business as much as I’ve wanted any nondescript business. I want the freedom. I want to be able to demonstrate what my effort and personality has conjured without the self-loathing and confused bureaucratic baggage.

I don’t want to resent people anymore than I do my cats. I don’t know how to do that while considering them whole individuals who make the decisions they do. I don’t know how to do that thinking and writing about how and why they’ve clawed at me. I can accept my cats on their terms because they aren’t going to change. They’re especially not going to change for bad or nonsense reasons. Cats, at least in some cat form, desire my food, scratches, and warmth indefinitely, selfishly as any animal. I can’t pay people to take what I’m offering in time or otherwise. It’s an offer of a very particular kind of work they don’t feel they need or want or whatever. It’s dirty and chaotic, and they insist it must be lonely. My cats are terrible at pretending they aren’t lonely.

[943] Little Big Planet

Someone I respect for their reporting is Matt Taibbi. He’s, broadly, an even, detailed voice about things most of us are keen to glean from the headlines. I recently listened to him downplaying the idea that January 6^th was an insurrection attempt. His criticism mostly focuses on the media and the language they use. He points out all of the things that Trump or the republicans don’t have, like control of the military or people generally smart enough to stay organized and persistent. He says coups don’t have selfies and shit smearing if they’re to be taken seriously.

I think, just like anyone I respect who gets something so wrong, he’s missing the mark because his lenses are too focused. Anyone who is otherwise consistent in their ability to offer measured analysis of detailed issues, until they aren’t, commits the same error. When I get myopic about my struggling or misery, I’m usually tired, hungry, need to shit, and in the wake of too many little things that have annoyed me back-to-back. When “smart” people get lost in the weeds of their analysis, the direction of the wind can become wholly obscured.

We live in infinitely complex systems. Not “incredibly” not “vastly,” but infinitely. There is literally no telling what to make of every force working on you, through you, in any given moment. When you pause, you might notice your breath, heartbeat, temperature, hum, an itch, a tightness, a dryness, the lights, and you won’t have even moved on to what it takes to get you up and out and worrying about what you haven’t done with your day.

In that spirit, people can be forgiven for their missteps. This is why we have concepts like forgiveness and accountability. You can’t be blamed for a miscount if no one taught you how. You can’t live in perpetual shame and blame without functionally killing yourself and often many things around you.

Jordan Peterson has been flirting with the same error as Matt Taibbi. He tweeted that Joe Rogan is to be trusted in a way CNN is not. What’s the level of analysis there? CNN and Joe Rogan aren’t even measured at the level of the individual. Is it legacy then? Aggregate truthful statements or apologetic retractions? It’s a generally bizarre and imprecise thing to say. Are all CNN news anchors complicit? Are purported news programs to be measured on the same level of popular MMA comedian pontificators?

I happen to think that we’re living in incredibly dangerous times, big and small. I live in an area where there’s unlikely to be Proud Boys roaming the streets, but they’ll be sourced from my neighbors. I think local governance has been under attack, and it continues, with little to no repercussions. I think small, irrationally motivated groups are all it has ever taken to reshape history. I think I’ve never had good healthcare coverage. I think our financial systems are wholly corrupt. I think my version of an appreciable “middle class” life is as much of a mockery of what I expected to have growing up as anyone else’s who might still be paying off student debt.

Fundamentally, I’m not happy. I’m not content. I’m not in a privileged headspace that can deny my anxiety about what I think and feel is coming. I want to move, I want to build, I want to invest, but I don’t even trust that anything I do in service to those desires will last. I mean, maybe a couple years, but not so far back in my head is still the idea of selling everything and attempting to escape to a different country.

I consider myself lucky that I have so much writing. I can see instantly that, more than my ability to ceaselessly complain, I’ve been identifying or calling out issues that haven’t been resolved for at least a decade. This suggests to me they aren’t going to be resolved and no one is aware, capable, or cares enough to even try. I don’t think there’s a political party that’s clued in and effective. I don’t know of any local or independently organized movement. There’s a few speaking explicitly, Sunrise, Diem25, individuals on the Left, but operating major levers of power? Hardly.

Sometimes, it’s enlightening to read an account from an “average Joe” on the ground during a historical tragedy or genocide. Provided you weren’t in the path, as if you knew, of a roaming violent hoard, you’re basically presented with an off-grid survivalist challenge. You have to get food, have places to hide, and keep your wits about you in who you talked to and about what. You just kind of wait, in relatively extreme discomfort, for the killing to stop. It seems like one would need a fantastic imagination to consider the practical reality of this in an American context.

That’s precisely the pacifying impulse. We have every reason to write-off our dramatic thoughts. That is, except the countervailing evidence. The problem is, we don’t know how to weigh it. There is no objective measure of “insurrection.” There are only modern definitions of words and how many or most use them. We’ve used such hyperbolic language in our media, all the people “slammed” and “eviscerated” for what might be whispered disagreements or passionate-adjacent speeches. So, we sleep. We pacify. We wait to be compelled. We program ourselves to default to a passive environmental selection process that may or may not leave us alone or shuffle us on trains.

I also recently listened to an absolutely brilliant Know Your Enemy podcast with Pat Blanchfield on how to understand politics from a Freudian perspective. Where an initial impulse to see hypocrisy or point out contradictions, you can instead ask yourself, what is it that the belief the hypocrite is holding is serving? Why do Evangelicals like someone who wants to fuck his daughter? Why do pro-democracy Chinese dissidents find themselves incapable of the irony of escaping only to rally for American fascism?

At bottom, there’s just an immense amount of suffering. It isn’t coherently organized. It can’t be approached through some kind of talk therapy or mass psylocibin trip. At every level of our being, something is being violated. You can take a snapshot of any given life and just apply traumatic statistics. Most sexual violence happens from someone you love or who is in your family. Most people are still reeling from child-rearing practices that are almost designed to induce long-term trauma. The U.S. has the 6^th highest divorce rate at 50% in the world. You can flip a coin on your romance narrative. 43 million people have student loans. 31.1 million don’t have insurance, and most of us are familiar with how shitty what’s on offer actually is. Jobs aren’t paying enough. With your master’s or doctorate, you might be able to squeak out a middle-class life if you’re willing to work in what have morphed into human factory farms for addiction, “education,” or ill-defined “services.”

Most people start from a considerably worse place than what I considered my cohort. Most people are fat, and ugly, and on the losing parts of many a bell curve. Their jobs are stressful. Their kids suck. Their cars are breaking down. Their family incidental or fleetingly familiar with the intimacies that you may regard as constitutive of your being. Why did Trump get elected? Have you ever just looked at and listened to the people who support that? Do we need detailed historical analogies and 24-hour speculative punditry? Why do people believe even one lie, let alone an endless stream shot from a water cannon?

At the top of hierarchies, at the bottom of hierarchies, we all hate to fucking be here. Every unifying narrative is just and only that. It’s a narrative. We’ll rally behind Spider-Man and the Avengers. We’ll light candles and incense for a series that was cancelled too soon. Whether we pick up a liberal narrative about the underlying hatred and racism or a conservative narrative about downplaying the underlying hatred and racism, whatever our mind finds most satisfying is to be believed. Maintaining perpetual doubt is not necessarily conducive to survival, let alone a semblance of happiness or Insta-worthy posts.

In modern times, we talk about inequality in ways that feel dead or inarticulate to me. Not even a hundred years ago, the rich and poor were dying of things like Covid, or considerably more treatable conditions. Even now, we get a vaccine in a year because the rich, connected, and talented are at least selfishly aware of their own mortality in a way that our over-riding cultural narratives might otherwise dismiss. We’re not all in this together in the most important and forward-thinking ways. We’re desperately clambering to insanity-making narratives about our own worth and what we have the power to control.

What else can you do but wait? My feeble and disorganized attempts to rally people to connect and conceive of different ways of living have been feeble and disorganized. People don’t just fail to talk, but the more I do, the more I chase them away from the thought that they should even bother. I’m not in ongoing dialogues gaining perspective from my “friends” at different levels of their social and professional hierarchies lol. I’m just “ranting,” courting likes from my 3-5 fans, as we all watch our respective struggles or indulgences. There’s no shared goal or uniting quality beyond ever-winnowing history.

The crazies have an enemy. The crazies feel at home and like they’re defending something. “Us?” We’re writing op-eds about how leaders are failing us and reporting on the front lines of those patrolling the streets with guns actively campaigning to normalize their behavior. They’re “proud,” we’re scared. They’re lashing out about their powerlessness and confusion; we’re retreating into intellectualized fairy-tales about how bad we really feel as well and how it’s manifesting.

Do I hate “everything?” Is “life” constantly annoying? I grew up in my abusive household with ticks I haven’t completely shaken off. I’ve experienced the repeated “grind” and “burnout” of abusive work-environments. If I don’t choose debt, I can hardly dream, because my goals are not to merely live cheap, alone, in the middle of nowhere. If I don’t resolve myself to endless complicity in systems that destroy people, including my best conception of myself, I court becoming an explicit victim of those systems myself.

Do you pull out and feel guilty and speculative about what you “could” have done? Do you “radicalize” and tie yourself to some movement, moving almost certainly for the sake of it, because you’re psychologically stuck? Do you ignore how you’re perpetuating the abuses and exploitation that molded you? Ask yourself what narrative you’re already perpetuating and why it feels best.

At a conceptional level, what do you do when presented with the infinite? Many pick the “godly” thing, in lieu of the “right” thing. It’s a convenient and familiar narrative that has evolved to morph with what objectively may be a more rational or more right way of existing. It’s confusing, often deliberately. Just like the family member who molests their child. God loves you! He’ll also pretty much ignore the systematic ass-rape of little boys and righteous genocide. Woo! Everything you could ask for and more.

I think there’s a lot to be said about the storm of consequences of unremitting crazy or violence, but the most compelling story is the one actively worked and shaped. It’s why I feel adrift and useless if I’m not “doing something” or able to show you what my effort is manifesting as. It’s why I have to write. I am always looking, always processing, always trying to locate a source of inspiration or thing to incorporate into how I move in the world. I think we’re living in incredibly dangerous times, but not so much that I’ve arranged to sell everything I have and flee.

It takes an infinitely small shift a fraction of a degree to not embody the out-and-out hypocrite moniker invoked from an outside judge. “If you care about babies…why not after they’re born!?” You’re in an entirely different realm of existence, let alone discussion, with a charge and question like that. Even if you hate yourself, you care about yourself first. You care how you feel above all else. So, no, they don’t care about babies. They haven’t figured out how to care for themselves anymore than a baby has. Perhaps you and I barely have. I know every day I’m going to want to eat, and desire to witness some “progress” on one or dozen of my goals. I know I wish I wasn’t haunted by the prospect of abandoning it all to survive.

Most people don’t see things the way I do. The ones who are close are more than an infinitely small degree away from empathizing with my experience. They aren’t feeling the same obligation to move more independently of what the environment dictates. They’re undoubtedly watching my experience, my flail, and figuring their form of carved-out suffering or captured privileges will suffice. And we’ll continue to watch each other on our respective ice drifts. We’ll continue to take seriously that we really know anything about “most people” beyond our shared suffering we’re not interested in addressing proactively. I mean, after all, I’m not suffering, not really, not like them over there.

[942] And, I Stress

I just got done watching a movie in which a reviewer said something I agree with. They were sad about what the movie “could be.” There were elements that were interesting or entertaining. There were thoughtful twists and intriguing narratives. But it was messy, and kind of got away from itself. The tone was disorienting and it’s as if too many thoughts went into how it unfolded.

I used to think it very weird to criticize movies or art in general. I can appreciate a pretty face and broadly prefer order to chaos, but my perspective heavily skews towards “I don’t know” or “I can’t recognize” what it is people like aesthetically or artistically. I like things that make me think. As such, most of what constitutes life I’ve already categorized into neat, uninteresting categories which do not serve that purpose. I’m not watching movies to get lost in each one, nor reading to confirm my biases.

For example, a “cool” car, to me, is one that works, gets good gas mileage, or operates as a useful tool like my truck. My opinion on color, body style, year, special features, engine rumble, yada yada is non-existent. We already know how much I’ve suffered the anger or resentment for not being able to take in the scenery of whatever we might be wandering through or past. My own sense of presented “style” is what makes the mot sense for the sheer amount of mud and dust I tend to experience. My curls are almost always pulled back out of the way.

To say any given movie needs to serve a purpose might suggest you haven’t seen very many. Sure, many want to make money. Obviously, there are genuine entertainers and writers hoping to make people laugh and feel. The impact of any given piece of work has always felt incidental to me. Whether or not someone is a brilliant performer, painter, or other kind of artist does not dictate what the masses or observers are going to respond to. Joshua Bell performing on a 1.5-million-dollar violin, on the subway, to maybe the appreciation of 4 people, one a child, over the course of an hour comes to mind.

What could have been? What might you make out of the experience of a world class musician on a world class instrument if you caught the pedigree, ear, or dialogue of classically renowned music? You’d have another check on your list of experiences? You’d feel it resound in the depths of your soul? You might walk away with an autograph?

I’m the kind of person who stops and watches street performers. I dance and sing to songs playing in stores. I saw a performer in Colorado doing something of a circus act. As much as I noticed and appreciated him practicing his craft, I’m also the kind of person watching the people who walk past. He had about 30 people watching him when I joined the crowd. He ended the performance with more than double.

Why? Did they all appreciate his show like so many $100 a ticket buyers for Joshua Bell the night before his performance in the subway? They clapped. Many gave money. He’d clearly been to some sort of school for crowd work. Did any of them walk away thinking to themselves, “That would have been really cool if only he had…” We know people buy-in to the crowd and environment as much or more than whatever’s going on on stage.

Our experience is just that, ours. When I find myself struggling to figure out what to do, I try to pay attention to what anyone else might be suffering or sacrificing their attention to. It’s our struggle, unlike so many dictators. We’re all, mostly, trying to live well and die peacefully in our sleep surrounded by loved ones. We’re all attempting to do meaningful work and find recognition for those things about us it’s impossible to put into words. Certainly, I’ve continued to talk and never feel complete.

I take on a lot of things at once. Until recently, I’d never really describe my life like that. I take on what I think matters, what I think I can pull off, and what is worthy of someone like me. But, it’s a lot. Where I see people find the focus, or limit the pain, of pursuing one thing in earnest, I want it all. I want to flip houses, and start a business, and evolve my space, and read everything, watch everything, and make fleeting stabs at staying decent on several instruments. It’s not structured, it’s not consistent, and at least for the last few months, it’s felt like an incredible amount of stress.

I think I conceive of stress differently. To me, it’s inevitable. Things piss me off pretty much by default. It’s stressful to have a problem with…existing. So, you build it into a certain kind of ethos and coping strategy. It’s not going away; it’s a chronic condition. It becomes a challenge to yourself to pick what kind of stress you want. That’s maybe harder than it seems with a lot of unknown unknowns in terms of consequences. I had to start by denoting the kinds of stress I didn’t want.

Let’s say in relationships. I used to be the open ear for all of the drama in my friends’ relationships. Trust issues are core. Communication staticky at best. Whom has the most feelings for whom, and when, and why, if so, did they so disappoint? I didn’t want any of that, so I stated my values about sex or commitment that, let’s say have yet to be fully appreciated by anyone flirting with partnership. I didn’t want to cite my mortgage as a perpetual reason to justify my inability to change jobs. I want to continually experiment and explore routes to both independent wealth, and free exercises of my time.

This shit is hard to live up to. It’s not just hard to carry your giant torch burning with all of your values, dreams, or intention, but it’s fucking raining constantly. I’m proud of the work I do in getting this house flipped? Well, just take it on the chin and move on when your buddy’s dad comes down and says most of it needs to be redone because the aesthetic is wrong. It’s an aesthetic you can’t recognize and was in fact discussed and decided upon weeks ago. It’s “wrong,” seemingly likely to devalue the house if not fixed, and you’re left adrift, wondering if this vitally important and specific thing needed to happen no matter what, why does it no longer feel like “our” struggle to convey to me how it needs to be. I don’t need it to be that way, and, not for nothing, I barely know what I’m doing.

What is the work for? Mine is the experience of any artist. To grow in your craft. Every exceptionally rich and famous person has been told drastically more disparaging things than “this has to be redone.” All in all, it’s not even an overwhelmingly time consuming or difficult task. But it hits deep and is extremely stressful nonetheless. Before you find the temerity to judge the work, are you asking yourself what you could have done to improve it, inform it, or understand it?

When I at least have some consistent beat or obligation, I tend to even out in my pursuit of constant stimulation. Even a bad job can be a consistent job or subject of gratifying focus. I haven’t had that in a while. The work on the house is in spurts. I’ve, not once, returned to the house where a thing discussed that might be done in my absence was done. It’s not “our” struggle. It’s my series of limited crises, until I get around to doing the work. It’s my increasingly desperate search for evidence that things will be okay or progress when I’m not there. I’m struck down again when I get to learn my work isn’t worth what I thought it was either.

Meanwhile, I have already hours-a-day level problems in attempting to navigate insurance companies and bureaucratic grudges. I have a replacement outdoor unit, and now a wood burning stove, neither of which are installed or keeping me warm. I need to find a job, a car, and keep my pissy and combative cats alive. It all exists as a measure of my chosen mental fog. It’s “better” stress that, once I work my way through, I might have a lot more money, working knowledge of things I didn’t previously, and if the cats are good for nothing else, an inability for too-late critical feedback is a major plus.

I wonder if I’ve learned how useless it is to ask for help. People rarely seem to understand me, even if they can appreciate the jokes or just before the resentment for the work kicks in. My buddy’s dad said, “I wish you guys would have called me.” We have, a dozen times, and with him not on site, he’d either offer advice that didn’t quite fit, or we couldn’t make sense of it. He flirted with changing the decided-on wall color. It was suggested that the floor I laid down in the kitchen would need to be pulled up to accommodate where the cabinets would sit. This has been an emotionally traumatic roller coaster. It’s not because of the work in and of itself, but because my face is pressed right up against a burning “What is the work for!?” sign, and I’m not coming up with good, emotionally gratifying and consistent answers.

There’s always the “one day” narrative. I know “intellectually” how things can play out if we crank out a nice house and I learn to match the “right aesthetic.” It gets a little less fun and meaningful at that point. It feels less like learning and more like the same parody of “professional” environments. It’s not lost on me that this house should in no way resemble mine for a “normal” market, but I return to, it’s not like I’m getting paid for my time, and by the time I do, I’ll have made considerably less than minimum wage. I’m dealing in a certain kind of “promise” currency, in which I promise to keep myself available and working indefinitely, and they promise around the time I’m in my late 30s maybe early 40s, I’ll have everything I expected of myself by 30, and maybe 5-10 grand in 10 months.

Man does not eat faith, hope, and dreams. I have zero real genuine belief or inclination my buddy nor his family would fuck me or are less than sincere or capable of supporting what we might become. I’m still poor, and my inability to find a satisfactory monetary path makes the idea of tearing down what I’ve been working on all the more searingly painful. The idea that I’ve lent myself to this task over one just as important and potentially lucrative and revolutionary in how I wish to construct it, starts to feel like I’ve betrayed myself or have been incredibly naïve, again, to make such a large bet on something I don’t understand.

I need structure. The unfortunate reality is that it will most likely be imposed by another stultifying transitory work environment. Whatever guilt I might conjure for not having done “enough” in service to any of my chosen stressors will get to compound in the hours I’m driving or stacking or taking direction from someone born to be middle-management. Are we in it together? Am I not persuaded that it’s my burden, nay, responsibility, to weather every critical review or unintelligible insurance form? I have to keep myself warm, even if the cats are quick to jump in next to me. Who am I kidding? They’re first to jump on top.

[941] Centered

I need to get centered. There's a certain undefinable point I feel you reach in life where nothing you say, pretty much ever, gets to be classified as anything beyond a kind of indulgent bitching. At the same time, there are credible problems everyone faces, at all times, be they pertaining to health, social environments, or the struggle against whatever constitutes an unforgiving and unrelenting existence. Maybe some day I'll stop qualifying my need to vent and organize at the top of blogs. Today is not that day.

I'll start with the first scene that keeps coming to my mind. In an episode of “How To With John Wilson,” John finds himself at the residence of an extremely rich man who bemoans how his dozen high-priced vehicles are stored in $500,000 dollar garages with lift systems. “I'd love to go subterranean,” he states, describing the hassle of having to pull a car out and lower the car above in order to drive it.

John also finds himself attending a baby shower for the wife of the Bang energy drink CEO. It's a costume party. The CEO shows John around his house, and appears incapable of saying anything, about his preferences or otherwise, without tying it back into his product line. He lives in a mansion, and discusses the property that will be the biggest in the area, on an island, they have in development. He seems like a hollowed-out shell of a human being, wholly subsumed by the overwhelming narrative woven into his drinks and financial success.

I dream, often enough, about being “rich.” That's the superficial understanding of the dream. I want flow. I want to be unburdened by thoughts that I find incredibly boring and taxing for their resemblance to brick walls through which I can't burst my head. How many hours of my life have been spent worrying about my car breaking down? How many tense hours has my jaw been clenched as I pretend, through sheer wishing and will, that my engine will keep it together until the next stop?

Ever busy, when one aspect of my busy-enough day is going right or wrong, it's no struggle for my mind to race to the cascading series of issues that will arise. Car won't work? Okay, is a friend's available to borrow, or is an insane amount of debt in rental fees coming? When you make plans, like buying cheap concert tickets, it feels like the universe is punishing for your hubris to think you could anticipate your ability to get there. Is that money wasted? Or just an opportunity to spend more, maybe on Uber?

I didn't get this job I had forgotten I applied for and, in my heart of hearts, don't want anymore than any other job I've applied for. My mind, in spite of myself, let the thoughts about what a consistent paycheck could enable. I envisioned a new (old) car payment, perhaps some of the toys I didn't see fit to add to my Christmas spree. I went ahead and just paid my internet bill for the year. Why not? They're getting the money anyway. It's all debt at a perpetually existential level. I'm not *realistically* leaving this plot of land any time soon, no matter how much I cite the encroaching fascism and speculate on exit strategies.

I'm one snapshot of everyone's situation. I know I certainly have it better. That becomes the default cliché mode of thinking. Well, who has it worse? Who's sicker? Who's poorer? Who's currently getting physically beaten up by people they love? This is how we curtail what may otherwise be a persistent fire to change our circumstances. What more could we ask for than to be alive in the first place? Isn't it enough that the worst of all possible tragedies didn't strike today? I get sick of my fucking self when I initiate a “grass is greener” protocol and some disingenuous weighing system of plight and privilege.

I suffer most when I let myself desire things. I start to act impulsively to usher the envisioned future of obtaining those things. More often than it feels currently, when I get what I want, I'm able to “get to work.” When I think of all of the reasons I'm unable to work on what I please, the darkest modes and feelings take over. What the fuck is the point of constantly struggling, not to push your limits and learn about yourself, but to merely hang on with some pathetic prayer to nowhere that “it” or “things” will “get better?” Would any fish fight so hard upstream if it knew there was zero chance of breeding before the trip?

I forgot which philosopher imaged Sisyphus as enjoying the labor of pushing the boulder up the hill. Find joy in the struggle, you'll never be sad. Find purpose in the fight for fighting's sake, you can always return, like overworked cliches, to a stable conception of your place in life. You can temper your goals and be reasonable about your purpose like a character from In The Heights.

I think I've worked incredibly hard to not just persistently speak to, but actually demonstrate work in service to my values. I don't know the first time I wrote that I wished to be in real estate or flipping houses, but I do know the second I was handed the tools and house to work on, I began turning it out faster than anyone else involved was prepared for. I'm not “stuck” in getting this counseling business running so much as literally half a dozen bureaucracies, around the holidays, don't really care to help people, answer questions, nor return phone calls and emails. The world isn't designed to help and improve, it's to “conserve” around whatever you wish to make of the evolving systems.

In this precise moment, I need to fix my truck. In a world that made sense, I'd have a car I could afford that ran well enough to not need thousands a year. I'd have an appreciable job that paid for that car, and a house that didn't start as a shed. I wouldn't need a Masters to be “middle class.” I could count on the things I plan because I could budget and only dip into credit cards for dire emergencies. Not a single moment of my life since graduating college has operated that way. I've scrimped to make up for negligent and lying roommates. Rent payments beckoned. Cars broke down. The jobs on offer are incredibly difficult or horrendously managed. I'm fighting to maintain a basic conception of myself, well before I think of “more.”

The totality of it all comes to a head in a moment too. It's the lunge of the engine after 3 days of crossing fingers and toes as you baby it down the rural road. It's after I've hopped out of the shower only for a muddy not-my-problem to call to me from my front yard where my last feeble attempt to make “passive income” gets stuck in the fucking mud. It's when your annoying fucking cat keeps trying to jump in your lap, verses play with the other annoying fucking cat, which you only got to try and keep either entertained.

Am I capable of fixing anything, ever? Or am I always at the mercy of circumstance? I went into more debt getting a replacement outdoor AC/heating unit. You know what I can't install because all of my tools are at the house I'm fixing up? The house I couldn't complete months ago? I get to anticipate the energy bill as I sit next to a wasteful, inadequate, space heater. But I should be thankful, right? People like my house-fix pictures. I'm not literally freezing to death.

I feel sick at performing a kind of “glass half full” version of the world. I'm about balance, right? But within a concept of balance, you're allotting for a seemingly endless torrent of bullshit provided you're able to square it with some hopeful or meaningful narrative. All sins wash out in judgment or forgiveness of your god, right? Let's couch all of our sense of accountability in death, just in case we might otherwise be prompted to fucking do something else or better in life.

I'm sneaking the best parts of my life away like crumbs from a cake that was never offered to me. I have to dress up living in poverty with terms like “hood rich.” I have to elevate concepts like “grit” or “resilience” when sense or decency can't be found. I have to retreat to my coping mechanism because I can't pull myself any further from dreams or desires without turning wholly self-destructive. There's always a missing piece. I wanted x, but it didn't come with batteries. I got x, and batteries, but a newer model was released, cheaper, improved, the next day. I went to return the first one only to discover THE GOVERNMENT BROKE THE MAIL! So I retreat and try not to recall what I know about x and its evolution. I personalize the responsibility for appreciating my lot and the conditions I'm forced to work under. Who really needs the latest and best anyway? I can't fix the mail, hell, I could barely, and if I'm honest not really, afford x to begin with. I'll get by.

Yeah, maybe, until you can't.

My ex was/is incredibly high-strung and never felt “stable.” I'm sympathetic to this, but I try considerably harder than she did to not turn my feelings against the people I'm trying to enlist in changing the feeling. My best friend is the complete opposite of her. Things are pretty much always going to be okay or are considerably better than we've maybe the ability to consciously appreciate in any given moment. His style betrays my sense of urgency when I've got the tools and intention to use them. Her style builds a wall of increasingly unjustified doubt and resentment for anything that might qualify as good. My experience attempting to balance either most often results in qualifying opening paragraphs and a search for the next things I could conceivably work on when dealing with either creates their different kind of barriers. This blog feeling like the most pressing and worthwhile.

It's really easy to trick yourself into a sense of “accomplishment” in buying something. I have a goal of eating every day. I'm not done with my obligations or work because I hit a drive thru. I think we have a severely stifled conception of just what it is we're buying ourselves. It certainly isn't time. We're buying into narratives about the value of how that time is spent. Provided the money you make covers some bare-minimum you consider a worthwhile existence, whether it took you 10 or 100 hours, it'll feel “worth it.” You buy yourself friends or work associates who will feed your self-soothing narrative, excuse-riddled, comfortable, complacent idea of who you are and where you fit. “Everyone's car breaks down! Fix it and move on!” you'll exclaim, happy to pretend you've never heard of planned obsolescence. You can afford the fix, right? You can't afford yourself the endless burden of shaping a culture that would otherwise design itself to fuck you and everyone like you.

It's easy for me to believe I've bitten off more than I can chew in my ever-feeble bid to shape the world. At the same time, I know it's a battle worth someone like me. I don't really get a choice if I'm going to do more than splash about kiddie pools of human interaction. I don't get to be a hermit. I don't get to pretend I'm more afraid or exhausted than I am. I don't get to front like I'm a “family man” or “do-gooder” only concerned with the story of my effort more than the tangible accounting. I am living spite, after all. I'll break my dick off while getting fucked just to reach back and fuck you with it harder.

I don't know where that comes from. I've yet to discover a more consistent or resolutely truer way of describing what keeps me moving in the world. Surely it's some preverbal survival instinct. I don't want to mythologize it though. I don't want it to look like my best last option for bothering to live at all. I don't want to be incidentally at the end of yet another unconscious force dictating the rules, lending itself to personalized cliches and hidden insecurities. I want the things I want for good reasons. I work on the examples I wish to set. I create what's in my mind's eye. I at least create an incredibly messy version of what's in my mind.

“Things” would be incredibly easier for me if I could ever believe the timelines people give me for how things work. People, mind you, who've watched their culture be revolutionized by science and technology that's tantamount to miracles happening nearly every day. When you really drill down into how you're pissing away your time, it's no secret why you might only aspire to so much, or why you're comfortable writing off my anxiety as a quirk of my nature and not a black mark on your sense of responsibility. This, regardless of whether or not you can seemingly do anything more than I appear to be doing. Where's your perspective?