[969] Insecurity Blanket

I’ve just had a thought about a “binding force” as it pertains to my work environments, and what I attempt to not fall prey to when I’m alone.

It would be too simple to call it a kind of “mediocrity.” It functions that way, to be sure. It’s a consequence of a lack of accountability. It provides a sense of security. Let’s just talk about what it sounds and looks like.

At DCS, no matter how bad a job you are doing, the person “in charge” will do one of two things. They’ll intervene in your behavior, take up the conversation that needed to be had, and attempt to fix the problem. Or, they’ll defer to their boss, their obligations, talk about how many counties there are, and basically ignore you. They will speak to how there is functionally no real oversight without a companion Avengers-level threat to kick people into motion.

The security comes from the size of the organization. Even if someone tried to watch, they can’t, unless the problem gets too large and provokes a death or lawsuit.

At the methadone clinic or in prison counseling, it’s much the same, but the problems are less variable and if anyone dies it’s only a junkie, right? You can remain poorly organized, fail your audits, and bleed employees, provided you’re just another operation that was bought by a national conglomerate. People are watching, rather closely, but only the bottom line. They’re not concerned with your performance across anything human or factoring in anything practical.

The security comes from the size of the bank account, addict population, and number of clinics under one umbrella. A few dozen or hundred can burnout or die, and it’s an overall rounding error on the books.

Maybe you want to sell books! What does becoming an author at a small publishing company have in common with big bureaucratic structures? There’s deference to all of your other obligations and priorities. There’s trading on the goodwill of the highly conscientious to obscure the lack of organization. Provided the ownership tows self-soothing party lines about the vision and purpose that you can recite in harmony, no need to scrutinize, be on time, or connect with the language underneath the business book buzz words.

The security comes from following the templates laid out by larger organizations and infusing them with elevated interpersonal baggage to help gin up the fog about who is responsible.

It’s a lot easier to identify failure points with smaller structures. There were 5 employees when I drove a taxi. If you didn’t make your shift, that was you. There weren’t offices for the schedule to get lost in or a lack of clarity on who to contact about where you were supposed to be. The number of times I’ve been maliciously classified as “independent contractor” tries to lay this “I don’t want the responsibility” backdrop bare. The smaller you are, the more personal it feels, and the less you can avoid the difficult conversations around what you did or didn’t do or don’t know.

Whittling down further, in a partnership or relationship you see similar dynamics. You can usually tell if a relationship is healthy or not based on how people respond to each other’s concerns or perspectives. Are you “too busy” to find the mental space for your partner? Is it wholly beyond your control to inform how they might feel about your living arrangements or social dynamic? Do you think God will step in and provide where you can’t?

When you’re just alone, and perhaps this is why I gravitate towards sentiments about being an individual and finding a personally honest thread, you can witness how this (in)security force works in you. You too tired to practice? You deserve some indulgence? You ashamed to speak to how you actually feel or think and wish to blame whatever happened to you or maybe belabor a traumatic past? The excuse, just like the responsibility, is open to you in every moment. Whether or not I play my guitar and the reasons I give myself for doing so are on me. I can’t stop the rain in my desire to complete my wood shop, but I can decide if I want to bare the humidity and set up a tent for when it stops.

It’s a singular thread and conversation with yourself from which all catastrophe or great things spring forth. Do you even acknowledge how much you can take responsibility for in any given moment? Do you respect the power you’ve been given? How many people do you reflexively find fault in before you get to you? Do you ever get to you? As someone who appears to be in the business of courting blame, I can’t say I hear nearly ever how it’s your fault.

This is why I own when I’m a dick. That’s me being accountable. I meant it. I knew when I turned up the snark. I didn’t “just react.” I probably spent months trying to play nice (or dumb in my language), and you didn’t get something fixed or even really try to make it better. At DCS, this meant sometimes destroying families. At the methadone clinic, people died. When you overwork yourself, you don’t just take years off your life, but the world closes in on you, and it does not appear like there are other opportunities or outlets for recognition or dollar amounts you deserve.

We seek security in the story we tell ourselves about what we can or can’t do, say, or see altogether. This is how I can immediately see when people are almost complete failures when it comes to a personally honest account of their life. It’s all the little things. When my stomach drops at the thought of going into work, I write about it. When my relationship with a new friend or coworker creates competing impulses, I explore. When the work I set out for myself needs to account for new details like increased financial or physical costs, I do the math and modify as needed. I’m not just feeling my way through the dark and yelling at you when we bump into each other.

When I look around my house and I see the sheer amount of shit I own, it’s hard to deny how many of my “problems” are part of a narrative fantasy to help keep me oriented around my preferences. The only real debt I truly have is a lack of a meaningful collaborative project. I’m not financially burdened as much as I’m boxing myself into a quasi-stable mode of living that comes with getting “real” jobs and eating time with toys and distractions. I like being able to go to the comedy clubs and concerts. I’d like considerably more a team of 5 people making a credible attack on various levels of power or speaking in organized and deliberate ways on how to achieve practically sustainable living and working arrangements.

I can get a job, buy toys, keep the bills paid, build my little castle, and play my music. I can’t talk you into joining me. You’ll help me here and there, but our mission isn’t the same. I discover time and again how many missions do not comport with my own, because mine attempts an outsized recognition of what I’m capable of and truly desire. I can continue to reiterate that I don’t just want money, or what’s in my Amazon cart, or even time. After all, I have time now. I’ve had considerably more time in the past. But time without the money, or the friends, or an actionable plan just leaves me to spend too much time finding things to get angry about online. I’ve been home for the last 3 days or so and it feels like an eternity. I look at what I’ve built and think, “That’s all?” I have a fucking problem lol, and it’s not much to do with “me” than it is “us.” There is no us in my world, or it comes in spurts, or resents how I conduct me.

And I don’t mean to overstate this, because I have irons in the fire, and collaborators, and friends good for the things they’re good for, but it doesn’t scale. The connection breaks when you try to attach it to a long-term investment or vision. It gets routinely undermined by how incensed you feel about what you probably are fucking up and can’t cope with owning. I like to remind you when I don’t miss a day of work, cancel class, or show up late because I’m celebrating my attentiveness. I like to show you how many hours and dollars it takes to run a proper experiment in salvaging or sustainability because you need to feel the work before you comfort yourself with the narrative.

I cannot persuade myself only to sit and play my guitar, or my videogames, or disappear indefinitely into shows and YouTube. I don’t have kids. My bills aren’t incredibly high. I’m not the head of any organization. But who I am, or the tools I’ve been given, don’t exist, can’t exist, unless they exist relative to my experience, work, and recognition of the world around me. I live in nation teetering on fascism. I live in an environment poised to make us all extinct. My brain doesn’t shut off just because I travel somewhere or find some new preoccupation. It’s all happening all at once and in every moment.

I can bare the weight of that perpetual existential crisis. I’m not going to kill myself or drink myself stupid. I’m not going to get depressed and retreat. I’m not going to stay silent. I’m going to keep calling out “you” for not bothering me for anything but the placation or indulgence of your feeble feelings. I’m going to keep questioning what you’re really working on and point out the elaborate excuse-ridden nature of the children’s game you’re calling “adulting.”

Don’t get the impression that any of this matters, either. It only matters to ME. It matters that I write the blogs, build the wood shop, get the pallets, be on time, or achieve a level of technical sophistication in how quickly I can move my fingers along an instrument. I don’t need you to come on board. I don’t need you to invite me into your thing or entreat the baggage I would bring. I know that the things I need have nothing to do with me at all, they just exist at the ends of my patience or willingness to manipulate. I have gained considerably more patience over the years and my heart isn’t in manipulating.

I am going to ask that you pay attention though. I can’t make you read the blog, but I can make sure it says you should recognize how bad you are at being honest with yourself. Are you happy, full, or fulfilled? Are your days filled with meaningful interactions or mildly gratifying indulgences? Does something call to you when it gets too quiet? Did you reach out, speak out, or take a punch in a worthwhile fight? Did you sacrifice something that matters in service to something that matters more? Whose fault is it, me for pointing it out, or you for running away?

[968] Glass Aye

 Awareness builds.

I was thinking again about Waking Life and the first time I saw it. I was struggling for a way to orient my perception. The movie clued me into something I couldn’t yet articulate. It was thoughtful, but with an ease. I knew it had hooked me and I knew I’d be watching it again and again like a toddler forming the anticipatory framework in rewatches of its favorite Disney movie. I still think about the movie fairly often. It’s why it’s my favorite movie. It lives in me. It helps transform who I am in an active way. It can be relied upon like a friend to offer the words in a way only they can.

I consider myself a function of the different things I’ve become aware of. When I was a mess of uncontrollable feelings, I learned how to describe those feelings in a manner that allowed for more control over time. The more I dictated, the more I could direct. When I felt at the mercy of butterflies and anxiety, I dug through history and philosophy and so depersonalized “my” problem that it transformed into a mere thing to be dealt with like any other. I discovered intentionality.

This is different from “choosing not to feel.” I felt. I felt deep, but I was able to identify the compelling feeling as a complex mix of bad and good. Bad, in that it was desperate, compulsive, and depressed. Good in that it seemed to motivate and invigorate in a manner I suspect is not unlike methamphetamine. I didn’t “get better” at my feelings until I acknowledged, until I learned, how to give them the credit for how complicated they were. I had to nod to the contradictions. I had to track what they were tangibly netting me.

People don’t do this. If they’re lucky, they get old enough to get too tired to fight against what might be their “hidden” inclinations otherwise. Liberated old ladies or people who’ve had serious health scares carry a similar air. It’s like the veil is lifted and it’s easier to prioritize and assert who they are and what they want. I think no matter who you are, it’s work. You don’t pursue healthier relationships, leave religion, or stand up to any prevailing opinion or crowd unless you’ve first decided there’s work worth doing. You only have so many mental and physical resources, and overwhelmingly people seem to decide it’s not worth spending them going against the tide.

Well, unfortunately, we’re modern. We have instant communication. We have individuated algorithm means by which to isolate and embolden opinions. We have the most significant gap in wealth distribution since there’s been people, and those in power do literally everything in their power to instantiate “business as usual.” Whether it’s actual business in keeping the cash flowing, or psychological conditioning in keeping you too busy, angry, or exhausted to volunteer for some of the most distasteful work there is.

Is that speculation? Am I being hyperbolic? I think I’m just aware of things like January 6th and Trump. I think I listen to the capitalistic reasoning for destroying the planet and endless greed in my Nazi Senators’ facebook posts. I think I watch the word-for-word thought soup and salad spew out of the entitled and incensed when presented with the opportunity to work against their indoctrination. We’re just running the same story with more dangerous weapons and catastrophic means of communication.

Most often, when someone is telling me a story, it’s a pretty dramatic one. They’re experiencing relationship drama, they’re sick, their job is every level of exploitative and doesn’t pay enough, or the most recent article they’ve read about gas or the environment or the economy portends imminent calamity. They’ll trot back to work, pop on Netflix, and plan their next vacation, but boy oh boy, don’t you know the end is nigh? Don’t you know that “life” is always happening and we’re helpless to do anything about it? We can’t even leave the house without encountering a sign that questions the merits of how we define gender! What is the world coming to? Has anyone ever been so harmed?

Ignorance destroys.

Ignorance, deliberate or otherwise, destroys life. You eat the poison mushroom and die. You burn the witch. You turn off that damn science program because The Big Bang is an atheist plot to send you to hell! Ignorance destroys relationships, the concept of a family, and any dreamy future envisioned by sci-fi. It’s not hard to spot. It reflexively shuts things down. It doesn’t push a conversation to a later day, it denies there’s anything to be acknowledged altogether. This is how people “snap” or sometimes emotionally breakdown into places from which they can’t recover.

Ignorance is so good at its job, it’s a law of physics. Entropy. You can justify being ignorant your whole life, and on balance, you’re nothing but a universal dictum and destiny for every one of our particles. Isn’t that neat? You can smear shit on the walls of Congress, shoot at Muslim boogeymen in the woods, and tell Jesus you really didn’t mean those thoughts you had about your teenage daughter’s friends, and it will all devolve into so much dust. In the meantime, you keep your community, your “strong opinions” and sense of self. Your brain, by itself, can’t tell the difference between the pageantry and the life. It’s just there to fuck bitches and form patterns, and it’s probably out of bitches.

What’s the value of being aware? You’ve climbed the mountain, you’re wise enough to know you know nothing. Okay. So now what? You’re still labeled by all of the in-groups and not allowed to enter. Your individuated dreams may not comport with your physical location opportunities. Hey, wait. I just equated becoming aware to becoming an individual. That’s probably not a correct thing to do. For surely, if you’re aware, you’re keen to observe the constitutive parts of your being. Aren’t I frequently attesting to merely passing along ideas of those much smarter than me? Aren’t “my” values ones demonstrated for me?

Let’s make it worse. Groups of ignorant fucks build all sorts of things. They make things to worship. They make laws. They make endless streams of propaganda. They make a fuck load of money. I’d argue this is the wrong layer of analysis to claim they’re building or making anything but the bed we all get to die in, but if you need fast and dirty practical analysis fodder, they’re offering it through a firehose.

Maybe your awareness allows you the ability to manipulate and navigate the muck above. Feels a little cheap and like a waste of your potential though. Gaining awareness bestows upon you potential. Why waste it on the mercy of the crazies? Why obtain potential at all? We can keep getting abstract, or we can pretend we’re embodied and have things or people in our lives that mean something to us. We don’t have to know why they mean anything; we just have to be aware that they do. It’s the only way things can make sense.

Do you want to destroy your family? Most people might reflexively reel at the question and say, “No!” A savvy pollster would recognize a few problems in the phrasing. A person perpetually open to analyzing word choices and underlying motivations or primed thinking can’t take the question or answer seriously on their face. Some people think their family will be destroyed, even go to hell, by accepting a gay family member. Some people think their family will be destroyed by a Russian bomb aimed at a hospital they’re hiding in.

I still don’t think I’ve answered the reason or value of awareness. At least for me, it plagues my thought. I’m always in a form of doubt. It’s like a low hum tummy tinnitus. “Hmmmmmm, maybe.” Maybe she “loves” me, maybe I’m “smart” enough to pull something off, maybe you appreciate I “give a shit” or am a “hard worker.” Wouldn’t it be nice if it were true? But my goddamn awareness and “individual” perception won’t let me take the win. I don’t believe anything; I’m constantly weighing everything.

But, that isn’t entirely true. Mostly because I don’t have a good concept of the word “belief.” I feel or see the consequences of what people do in my life. I don’t “believe” my dad loves me. I’ve watched him respond in supportive and caring ways to literally everything I’ve ever said or done in life. Belief doesn’t factor into it. Dude demonstrates and does the work as dad. Friends inconvenience and sacrifice for one another. Byron, Hussain, and Corbin have all lent me cars. I think people do what they believe or they don’t really believe it. I know I’d reflexively be keen to be, not-quote/unquoted, friends with people I haven’t talked to in years. I believe nothing that’s transpired conversationally rises to the level of disownment. I still think I’ll be relevant again one day when the kids are grown and the divorces kick off.

As such, I feel and see the things I work on and embody. I ride few highs like when I’m collecting bricks or pallets. I wanna learn how to make shitty wood look cool or become useful? I have it! I can go do that right the fuck now. I can make the things I’ve written or said out loud dozens of times real. I can manifest. I can celebrate that my muscles still work and that I’m young and healthy enough to take this impossible to understand existence and build something from it. More than “something,” but something meaningful. Something that stands as a demonstration of my values.

So much of that story is filled in before we ever get here. You need to love Jesus! You need to love your family! In spite of abuses and contradictions! It doesn’t matter how you actually feel, play the goddamn part! Get your education! Get a job! Vote Republican! Defend your nation! Buy fucking everything! Meet the standard that exists for reasons no one can remember, but we’ll be damned if your hair is long or you’re pierced and tattooed! Don’t fuck anything that isn’t your wife and she better be a girl!

And it’s not all bad, because you get fed, and you do learn things, and some of the values actually translate into healthy ways of living. You have a considerably small incentive to rock the boat, particularly if you’re not trained to look for what’s meaningful to you. Isn’t it obvious? Continuing to eat! Continuing to garner the love and connection from your peers and family. What the fuck kind of question is that to go looking for what’s meaningful? You’re just trying to antagonize and stir the pot!

What if your awareness builds to the point that you find it incredibly meaningful that as many of us survive and survive objectively well for as long as possible? Well, fuck. Now you have to find a way to incorporate the crazy. You have to work within the absurdist nightmare of the consequences of fundamentalism and pure deadly irrationality. Fun… You have to “fix your face” when you engage with harrowing abusive or neglectful tales that literally cannot be made up and you will never see dramatized on TV. You’ll have to take all of the tools you utilized to pull yourself just a hair over the fog and see if they can be configured in a way to appeal to a crowd viciously addicted to smoking.

And today, you have to do it in competition with literally anything that might go viral or a power broker who can silence you for any reason. You’re up against the evangelicals, monopolies, bored money, your own ignorance, instantiated power, and bad luck. Your awareness bringing you any peace in that moment? You feel like a super hero yet? It mostly feels like a torture and taunt. “Good luck, fuckboi!” Jaunty condescension wins the day and insecurities stay safely buried.

Still, something deep echoes. In my basest conception of myself, as one among and apart of all, I know I cause ripples. I know I want those ripples to come from coherent, rounded, invested and accountable thoughts. I haven’t yet found a word to replace “selfish” in how I think about this. I just say the good and bad kinds of selfish. I think I’m an incredibly good kind of selfish in attempting to genuinely help people with the tools I’ve used to help myself. Whether that’s a literal physical tool I can lend you, or my healthy productive body, or the words I’ve used to find peace for my gut and head.

I’m old enough to see how my ripples have played out, whether in shitty things like incensing the wrong cunts in power or in building new, less dramatized, friendships after gaining a broader awareness of what I got confused about previous ones. I retain every piece of the puzzle that got me so far completed. I be ratchet. I can be case manager. I can be sadist. I can be not-doctor indefinite open ear. I work to be in a mode of learning, trying, and experimenting. I practice honesty and writing. I show up and do many things I don’t want to do because I’m aware of how they speak to what’s actually meaningful.

How would you trust yourself to land on or stick with a “meaningful” thing? What if you thought your kids were gonna do it for you and they don’t? What if you’ve invested decades of your life with an ill-suited partner? What if you’re mentally or physically unable to pursue whatever it was anymore? What if it changes over time, as it almost inevitably will? Was the effort worth it? If I had to sell everything on the land, did I just waste my time if I have to “start over” somewhere else? You probably don’t know what’s meaningful if that’s your mindset. I wouldn’t trade the things I’ve learned and become as a result of moving out here for anything. I shaped my environment and it shapes me in return, if I let it.

I learn pretty regularly how unwilling people are to let me shape them lol. I’m just another person in their environment, after all. Not a particularly important one or with any special insight into their lives or thought processes. It’s not like I have a kitschy book or catchphrase bolstering my bid for your attention or vote. I’m no more aware of what you “really need” than you are. I only know what gets my blood pumping. I only know the infinite well of motivation or direction I draw from as I do the work to account for my experience. I only know the glory in reveling in the completion of labor for the highest ideals. Popsicles and ice cream tastes different after yard work and hauling things.

I may be stuck in the present, but I live in the future. I have dozens of woodworking projects in a truck parked on my land right now, and dozens more I’ll be retrieving tomorrow. I have tools and intention. I have working limbs and a healthy-enough brain. Before I had the pieces, I had the blogs telling you what I was after, and before those I had all of the other things I built or was trying to build. I want your individuated awareness because it is an infinite sea from which nothing I could predict or do can build. I can’t write the song on your heart. I can’t love the way you can. I can’t work out what you find meaningful. I can’t train your patience or bravery. I, good kind of selfishly, want everything you can be and for you to know how much power is really there. It’s more powerful than a god or shitty abusive family members. It’s considerably more powerful than your opinionated friends. But it’s a lot of work, perhaps an infinite amount, in order to inform the entropy how you’re going to breakdown.

[967] Love Me Knot

Maybe just consider this a first draft of the many things I was thinking about on the drive home.

My last day at the prison was on Friday. I left early. Almost no one showed up for my last two classes. I considered it another marker on the “people don’t care about you as much as what you can do for them” score card. I don’t say that to suggest I wanted or needed people to show up or lavish praise and attention. I say it to speak to the incongruent nature of what people profess and how they behave. Most, if not all, of the counselors have cancelled classes for good and bad reasons, often without notice or at the last minute. This led to the quick, “They don’t care about us” sentiment you hear often. Me? Never missed a class, never cancelled a class. Did you show up? No. Especially not when it might’ve mattered in a different way. Shout out to Boaty.

I left the job because I got another lined up. Unbeknownst to me, I can’t start for a month given their training and HR schedules. What did I do next? Volunteer myself for shifts at the place my buddy is working. I still need money, right? I’m still in debt. So, do whatever is available to get it. This is my automatic response. I don’t think, “I have a month off, I can get caught up on so many TV shows.” I didn’t think about things I could do around the house to organize or pretty up the space. I didn’t think about playing my guitar in a more dedicated way. I said, “Get back to work.”

Then, I find myself in a text exchange with my newest friend. She speaks regularly to her desire to “play.” That’s her vibe, desire, and drive. The idea that she would get straight back to work elicits a “Ha! I’d be enjoying my time off!” Different strokes, perhaps, but also resounding as a decent point. I don’t *have* to be anywhere. I could organize this time around a certain kind of play or fun. I could just relax. Is that precisely what I want to do? Not really.

When I started to entertain the idea of not just going back into some job environment, I discovered the energy for more grounded thoughts about the logistics of building more of my fence. I came home and, in spite of being pretty freakin tired, I organized a few things, showered, and started typing this. I made lists of things to buy and calculate. I thought about how lucky I might be to have an uninterrupted week to collect more pallets. You know, I am falling asleep as I type this. I’m gonna try to pick it back up in the morning.

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In this precise moment, I’ve got perhaps a dozen of things to do that don’t involve “regular job” kind of work. I need to wash blankets, buy groceries, weed whack, check my roof for a leak, get more pallets, organize clothes, do dishes….but that’s the thing. Once you start listing the things, they start to look like a list that can be more or less accomplished in a day. Whatever can’t, starts turning into project that needs budgeted and prioritized. Pallets are gonna be gas money and hopefully a healthy truck and trailer throughout. Same rules if I start plotting my fence continuation, but add nails and a trip to pick up my air compressor.

I also understand the work I give myself with these projects falls considerably more in the “want” than “have to” category. That then bumps into how much I “want” to add more debt or court injury or sweat to death. I have to note that the landscape I’m working within has changed. I didn’t used to get opinions from neighbors about what I was doing. Will my effort be met with more bullshit or the county telling me I’ve crossed a line and need to tear things down?

Or what if we think about the out-patient clinic? Why not spend this entire time networking? Why not go out and make introductions and get what I want, even if it’s exasperated by all of the dead ends? We still have this disability paperwork to fill out, which I know is stressing out Hussain who’s concurrently working two jobs and needs to start on his paper for his doctorate. Shouldn’t I buckle down today and see about getting that 50-page document wrapped up?

I just feel generally tired. I’m exhausted by the idea of sitting around and watching TV. I don’t have the get-up-and-go mode engaged to approach anything I’ve mentioned.

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I let myself sleep a few more hours. The dishes are done, things moved and organized around my house, and I found one pair of my shorts. I’ve only managed to eat dark chocolate freeze dried raspberries, and I’m listening through a “meh” list of artists from an Altpress article. My thoughts swung to the idea of “learned helplessness.”

I think one of the biggest things I hate about people is a lack of desire to improve or change. When I think about how little ill-will or anger I hold towards most people, I have to wonder how I consistently garner the kind of resentment, suspicion, or silence that I do (as though their contingent). I think some of these thoughts were prompted after watching Peter Boghossian get into an all-too-familiar altercation with social worker students in Portland.

Peter set up a Socratic thought experiment outside of the social work building. He started getting yelled at and told to “fuck off” from people on the roof. They read his sign with the proposition that “there are only two genders.” They gathered around eventually to all-but berate him into silence. They didn’t ask or care about the exercise he was doing. They reiterated over and over and over again about the “harm” of posing or asking questions and how they might be perceived. Mind you, they never said “misunderstood,” the only thing that mattered was the perception of those who were so distraught they had to go home verses look at a sign.

The kid my buddy is fostering has a kind of learned helplessness. He can find all the intention in the world to hang out with friends or locate and smoke his weed, but when groceries need bought, he’ll idly wait and make comments like, “Bro, we need food.” Yeah, get in the car and go get some, you ain’t got a job and you’ve been given the money. He’s certainly experienced a litany of traumas throughout his life and grew up generally impoverished. He has something of an excuse, though it is dwindling rapidly.

If you’re attending a university and have the capacity to pass your classes, you have the privilege and obligation to figure out how to fucking talk and listen to people. The irony that these people are going into “social work” is not lost on me. Do they know what people even are if a sign is going to send them home in tremors and tears? A sign and thought experiment, mind you, employed by a literal scholar and philosopher who is as much fodder for indiscriminate ridicule and dismissal as the “white” caricature they employ for all of its insisted upon derogatory connotation.

Literally one person who’s behaved like the students in the video I’ve watched has apologized to me. One. Kristen’s the only one who it dawned on her that berating, assuming, and swimming in shitty rumor mills isn’t, like, friendly or respectful or appropriate. Allie literally ripped off part of my house lol. I can read old emails where I’m constantly apologizing for being impatient or misunderstanding or picking the wrong words. People in my life? I’m the enemy to be isolated until death it seems. The cunty addict I worked with? Bet the thought doesn’t even occur to her that reading someone’s open sharing as “fuck you” is incredibly insensitive and shitty. But it can just sit there as a reason to not engage with each other indefinitely. You think my mom has ever apologized for being a psycho lol? You think the cunts at DCS have wiped the smug off their lips as they target the best employees or families?

I’m a big believer in not apologizing if you don’t feel it. I rarely if ever felt it growing up. I, most often, didn’t even realize what I had done wrong because, again my mom is a psycho. Or, I felt shitty, wanted you to feel shitty, and said whatever I said and meant it. Why add insult to injury by offering a lie? If I extend that rationale to the people who’ve been shitty to me, here’s my standing problem. You don’t even recognize the nature of how fucked you are, and you don’t care to learn, and you won’t improve no matter the consequences. There’s no apology coming because you’ve done nothing wrong.

Say I believe some of my clients and their capacity for growth and change. What world are they plugged into? One in which I can as easily discuss the improvements I’ve witnessed in their behavior and capacity for exploration and accountability, but also can’t be bothered to own when it screams at you for no reason, breaks your shit, or blocks your ability to do something worthwhile. “No one cares about us” starts to ring true. The reasons for staying selfish and sober for your own reasons gets incredibly obvious.

Once I figure out that I’m just tired or hungry as reasons I’m not up and about, the mess of existing among so many cunts creeps in. The question isn’t whether I want to work or not. The question is whether I’m resolved to beating myself stupid against the bricks of intransigence, ignorance, and indifference. Do I want the thoughts of how isolating my project is to toy with me, or can I situate them front and center and get on with it?

[966] The Music Man

I’m pretty sleepy. I think I’m still gonna try to capture some thoughts. It’s 1:06 AM the night of a Beach Bunny show I’ve returned from. After the show, I got a burger at my new favorite burger spot in Indianapolis. There was a gentleman playing classical guitar pieces outside of it, and as I walked up, he was playing a piece I’ve practiced in the past. He got a dollar.

As I’ve veered hard into the “live shows” sort of category of monetary focus, a few things about music are unfolding. Music has always occupied kind of a weird place for me psychologically. Band was a thing I “did” more than “enjoyed.” I never got the inclination to practice outside of the classes I took. That’s not to say it wasn’t gratifying being a bigger fish playing-wise in the small pond of high school or that I don’t like we won 1st in jazz band competition. But overall, it was more that I “did” music, not growing to appreciate it and feel it for its many layers.

I don’t know if it’s a function of getting older, or just my general curiosity peaking deeper into music as a whole, but my relationship to it is evolving. When I first started listening to music in a more active way, I did kind of the same thing I’m doing now. I downloaded everything I could, ripped all of my friends’ CDs, and began building my library. I took pride in the mix my Ipod would spit out. Now, I’m buying as many shows as I can fit on a calendar, and opening every article cluing me into new bands. I’m watching shows that dissect songs and interview artists.

A few things are becoming apparent. I’m hesitant to keep “going hard” on the music line. The “magic” of amazing tracks or emotionally evocative pieces I’m starting to conceive of as the work or process that brought them to life. It’s starting to feel accessible, and like I might want to write and record songs. I don’t really like how that feels, and I don’t really think after I’ve steered myself into thousands of dollars of recording equipment, I’ll start pumping out appreciably decent tracks.

I think about how popular or deeply felt certain tracks are that I don’t care about. I think about all of the songs and artists I’ve connected with that others don’t like. What’s the nature of the connection? It’s as though no song is particularly “great” or “iconic” more than different types of songs are going to find pockets of timing and promotion that thrust them deep into the collective, at least in your language, consciousness.

I get tired of hearing what a “genius” any given artist is. When you hear constant fawning over the instrumentation, phrasing, or tone, I just feel like there’s a tendency to redundantly overstate what is the same technique any good to great musician is going to have to learn. How many times can you talk about an athlete’s motion before you point out, “Yeah, their arms and legs have to do that to run fast.”

The Beatles’ documentary was illustrative. Playing things at random, throwing out phrases here and there. Just like that, a hit single is born. Getting its first taste of public perception after being sang by The Beatles, of course. At a certain point in an artist’s popularity, it’s like giving too many props to the hedge fund manager’s kid for “starting his own company.”

When I listen to artists talk about their work, it often feels empty and cliché. You mean, songs evolve over time and mean different things to different people? You’re shy about sharing what the song actually means or how it was actually inspired because it’ll ruin it for someone else? That chord progression came from ripping off an old beat or rhythm previously ripped off on another song? You spent days in Pro-tools trying to make something that didn’t sound quite right sound good? You hate your own voice? Those words came from a low and lonely place and you really wanted the background noise to make the listener as disoriented and uncomfortable as you felt, or the opposite of that? You’re a stickler for good and personal lyrics?

These things aren’t unique. There’s an inherent “magic” to your individual experience or capacity, perhaps, but the story of how you exercise or display it is old news. Add what’s happening in modern times where few are really learning their instruments more than mixing sounds together and the superficial depth of the expression screams a little louder.

I like that I’m seeing these shows and learning of newer artists. I like that I have more points of reference and inspiration. I like that I am getting more to think about than other people’s problems or work-related bullshit. I like the suggestion that maybe my life is actually trending towards me being able to play or otherwise engage music in a way I’ve dreamed about when I was younger. I like that I can connect to so many shows and songs in spite of what I guess would sound like a pessimism for how they were conceived.

The concerts serve as a provocation. Are you dancing hard enough? Do you know the words? If you’re not having enough fun, trying to distract yourself from the pain in your back or feet from standing, what are we to make of the power of the music to take you outside of yourself? I’ve had two girls at two different shows make it a point to ask and/or apologize if they bump into me while they’re dancing or having fun. Are you fucking kidding me? WE’RE AT A CONCERT. If your anxiety or politeness is working harder than your “I fucking vibe with this song!” I think there’s something wrong. My first concert was Ozzfest, Warped Tour a week or two later. This was 2006 or 7. No one was apologizing for throwing themselves into you or fighting their way closer to the stage or kicking you in the head from crowd surfing. And that’s how it was supposed to be.

I make up rhymes or poems or goofy words for songs that lend themselves to improvising over. Most are duds, but when I can capture a moment or a feeling or my brain’s working really well, sometimes it’s really funny or flows easy or hits a chord in a satisfying way. Whatever the medium, it’s like there’s an eternal baseline we’re trying to return to via creative expression. How do you find that vibration? How do you stay there? Why, if it connects with millions, doesn’t it with millions or billions more? What makes it wax and wane in popularity or relevance? How many singers can have “the most beautiful” voice that just speaks to your soul if you’re listening close? Why are we paying the less than brilliant producers just as exorbitantly as any other with an occasional hit?

I want some things to retain a “magical” sense. I don’t want to know that a part in your song that gave me chills was an afterthought. I’ve had songs get “spoiled,” at least briefly, with new information about what they were about or in noticing something about the lyrics or artist. Ultimately, I let the songs connect because I want them to. A line from Fall Out Boy rings in my head often. “The songs you grow to like, never stick at first.” That was, in fact, a song I had to grow to like. I’m letting many more “small” bands occupy more of my listening time and effort than my “favorites.” I’m still debating investing the time and energy to see Rise Against, Senses Fail, and The Used in Cleveland, and all of those bands I’ve rocked as hard out to as any I’ve ever. I know many of their songs. I’ve also seen them all before, twice with Rise Against, and that appears to tell me I don’t “have” to work that hard to do so again, even if I’ll enjoy them like any other band I don’t skip when the shuffle plays them.

This is definitely my first pass in thinking about music in this way. All technical and exploratory like the docu-series and Rick Beato extrapolations I watch. What makes a song great? You do. How, when, and why? That’s more interesting to me than following the artist in their process. Maybe I’m just envious or deeply suspicious about the nature of a musical connection as much as I am of any other. I don’t know.

[965] Ouch

I’ve found myself to be saying over the last few months, “I attract a certain kind of damage.” Many girls that I’ve either dated or fooled around with seem to have the same traits when it comes to a heightened anxiety, depressive episodes, or there’s this switch that will turn on during conversation where the…and I wish I had like a term for it…but that “I can never win” kind of exchange takes place? No matter what you say, apologize for, deference you pay, faults you acknowledge or concessions and appeals for peace, every response you get is a provocation, assumption, or escalation.

I know now how to recognize this as a fairly significant struggle with mental health. “Normal” people don’t turn every slight or perception of offense into life or death. What I haven’t figured out is how to approach this.

Consider the other direction. The guys I most get along with I could frame the same way. Everything I say is meant to be a cutting or biting joke, and you’d be super off base if you read too far into something. I’m always looking for the next thing to do, show to see, or fun activity. I show up and try to actually help or fix things at even the suggestion that I might be able to contribute. This is/was the dudes I’ve rolled with.

I’ve listened to a few things that speak to the cultural influences and standards of women that would speak to a perpetual anxiety or sense of inadequacy. I know the ways men and women tend to act towards each other, and the often domineering or dismissive attitudes of men don’t bode well for women’s health. But, also, I think we’re living in a particularly unhealthy culture psychologically, and these tendencies go almost perfectly unnoticed if you’re not trained to pay attention to them.

Last night I had another one of those conversations that makes you want to analyze each line and point out the contradictions, assumptions, bad faith, and general confusion. It sunk in in a new, or maybe just stronger way, I needed to just be quiet. What might have gone on for hours I barely let happen for 5 to 10 minutes. The result was the same as it has been with others. I was told not to bother talking to or reaching out again, she deleted me from facebook, and I’m left just kinda sad. A similar situation happened a couple years ago maybe, and she didn’t speak to me again for a year.

Now, I don’t know how many of you are disengaging from the people in your lives you’ve known for years because someone tried to tell you about a podcast in which they learned some things about the history of the attacks on Roe v. Wade, but if that’s you, you might need someone to talk to about what’s really going on.

But I know it’s never genuinely about the topic at hand. It’s about how we get manhandled by our feelings and use them to color everything we hear and see a narrative shade that services a poor idea of how to protect ourselves. You get judgmental. You get scared. You train your amygdala to normalize compulsive reaction, not unlike an addict, and the path out of that takes an immense persistent effort that you physically might not have the energy or esteem for. It’s a deadly psychological trap. I’ve experienced this kind of response from nearly everyone I’ve ever spent more than a few hours with.

A ubiquitous and poorly understood survival pattern is playing out in destructive ways, and I don’t think we have an understanding or larger prevailing narrative as to how it works. We, in turn, get overwhelmed or confused by the dismaying details of how it plays out individually. Unless you’re a really weird person like me, you don’t engage it so long and methodically that the pattern becomes undeniable. It’s like emotional climate science. How do I know “relationship issues” and “communication barriers” and “self-sabotage” and concerns over bad definitions of “violence” or “toxic masculinity” or power dynamics of “ists” and “isms” have something fundamentally in common? I keep trying to attend to the details when things go awry.

This means, most often, I learn how I can’t help. I learn there was never a conversation happening to begin with. I learn the utility of using me as distraction or not-therapist has everything to do with getting wrapped up in a self-serving narrative waaaay more than it has to do with circling around a shared conception of a problem or reality broadly. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I actually want things to not suck. I actually feel the pain and struggle and sacrifice of what it means to fight. I’m not saying I’m losing my life or limbs, but I’m aware of the burden of my obligations. I have to, every time, politely tell you, hours or the next day, that I hope you get better when in the moment I feel myself getting heated over something I intellectually know does not deserve vitriol in return. That is hard and takes practice.

There’s a reason the pill, the mindfulness practice, or the therapist doesn’t “save you.” You can’t be “fixed.” You have to be oriented. You have to be processing in service to something larger than any given myopy. The processes that are turning out so many people who deeply suffer are legion. They require the shared attention of people both aware and earnestly willing to adopt the pain of feeling like it's a battle that can’t be won.

I think it’s important to allow yourself this kind of “professional distance” from the people you are close to. It’s not like any of us is a perfect adjudicator or perception generator, and there’s no telling what mental health crisis lie in waiting. For the time being, while I feel about as clear of a thinker as I’m ever going to get, I’m going to grant the reality and significant size of the problem as I see it. I’m going to remind myself that “your” thing is almost never actually about “me,” and to the extent you don’t even acknowledge you have a thing, there is no real you and me.

I can’t roll with your thing if you can’t. I can’t forgive you if you can’t forgive yourself. I can’t work with you if you can’t work on yourself. I can’t speak with you if you can’t be honest with yourself. I can’t justify spending my time if you’ve never any for yourself. I can’t trust the laugh or the romance if you can’t find your funny or security in who you are or what you enjoy.

We all struggle, and I’m thankful the nature of mine has the machinery for identifying and attacking the structures, concepts, and patterns I didn’t ask for and wouldn’t wish on you. How and whether we ever do anything together that we can share and take pride in is going to depend on whether you convert the overwhelming weight of existence into a defiant dare for it to add another pound. In my experience though, you can’t handle a questioning or detracting facebook comment, let alone maintain respect for an ongoing discussion about the topic.

It’s easier to pat ourselves on the back for listening to the one’s doing the work then practice it ourselves. If you listen to smart and studied people discuss Ukraine, you might feel plugged in and aware. If you reel at the idea that you might have to experience a modicum of discomfort or inconvenience at physically or financially supporting a refugee, Ukrainian or less-white, you haven’t done the work to find your shared humanity. You might listen to world-class scientists or historians tell you about the planet and our place on it, but if you literally vote for fascism or reflexively defend the convenience and familiarity of fossil fuels, you’re not engaging the problem. You’re playing grown-up. You’re virtue signally. I’m sure there’s billions of memes about Roe v Wade and maybe dozens to thousands of people who’ve any real appreciation for the long march the fascists have been on to get here.

You’ll never run out of excuses. There will always be a reason, maybe even a good one, to not do the work. But you don’t get to have it both ways. You don’t get to be the person you might desire at your deepest levels and keep up the façade that you’re at all concerned about the work it takes to get there. At least not around me. Here’s another brick in the wall of words I hope helps us pay attention to the right things. Here’s yet another invitation for you to throw another pound of silence or accusations on top.

[964] Not Long Now

 

There’s more on my mind about switching jobs. I guess you can call it an improvement that I’m not in physical pain nor willing to have the same argument for months before I leave the prison.­ I don’t know if it’s a touch sadder that I’m leaving a population in which they truly do need all the help they can get, or if that’s more of an annoying detail that, if I had things my way, I’d still be able to work with in a proactive and consistent way I try to afford to everyone. I’m thankful I have the memory of all the people who seemed dismayed I was leaving the methadone clinic who never had the inclination to reach out. I’m not saying anything you don’t already know.

People are often attracted to my “spirit” for lack of a better word. They aren’t “convinced” of things by my words or logic. It’s always “the way” I say something, or my mannerisms, or tone of voice or body language. I’m confident, and people feel it. I’m smart and people pretend to immediately understand everything I say. I work hard and can quickly bring to mind how my values translate into my concept of living a meaningful life. ­This is what I think about when I’m offered so many opinions, forlorn or otherwise about my decisions regarding employment or worthwhile pursuits of time.

No matter what job I get, the fundamental truth is that I don’t want a job. This isn’t lost on me. If I’m going to have a job, it at least needs to maintain a kind of sense that doesn’t leave me tense and angry for, albeit predictable, bad values-destroying reasons. There’s plenty of growing pains and a messiness to many work environments. I’ve never had a problem with that as such. I can’t abide gross negligent ignorance of the mess. The consequences are tucked in every wasted minute a coworker needs to decompress and every mockery of your time spent on something useless and wasteful.

It seems ridiculous when I think about it, but there was more coherence in working for Showplace than anywhere I’ve worked since. You could count on about when you were going to leave. You knew what your role was. You knew the theater had to be clean, the popper not greasy, and the tickets torn. Plenty of people sucked at their job, but the job was clear. I advanced through to become management. It felt like a team. There was a palpable difference when our head manager was molesty dickhead and many people quit. Had I the perspective about jobs that I do now, I might have at the time as well.

It seems like a thing that shouldn’t be so regularly violated. Where’s the leadership? It took how many years to find people on a genuine Left political axis that weren’t Bernie Sanders? How, in social work, are there so few fucking people with the grasp of what it means to be human and what we need to thrive? I can’t really wrap my head around it. When I relayed my complaints to my buddy’s mom, she said, “It’s the same thing at the post office,” where her leadership sucks, and the people on the ground who do well or know the work get fucked by shitty decisions and a total lack of awareness or care.

I don’t mind taking direction or orders. I think a lot of my complaints in work environments suggest that I have some broad problem with authority or anyone else’s opinion. That’s really missing what I’m speaking to if it’s where you’re coming from. Juggling chaos is not the same thing as steering a ship through the storm of life or business decisions. And you have to think, in a social work context, you’re dealing with people who at some level are psychologically situated to give as much of themselves as they can. Workers bleed themselves dry constantly.

I don’t feel good about leaving. I’m not looking forward to readjusting to a new work environment and work personalities. I’m upset that I have to do so at all. Why can’t I just find a decent job that pays me what I’m worth and cares to put people in charge who are capable? What kind of insane unfair ask is that? Do I rail against capitalism? The irrational and insane human spirit? What I’m not going to do is pretend it’s “mature” or acceptable to merely adopt stupid fucking catchphrases of complacency and excuses because everyone’s too dainty and a bitch to hear how they’re fucking up.

If I don’t get the counseling business going, I need to heavily consider just getting into a trade. There’s a kind of liberation in moving shit around or building shit. It doesn’t talk back. Now, I’m not so naïve as to think there aren’t idiots and shitty bosses and whatever else, but perhaps I could make something more of myself on my own when my preoccupation becomes about things instead of people. I know it’s always, somehow, about people, but still, maybe I can just fix your toilet and move on with my day.

[963] Love Bugs

I don’t know what it says about me, and I’m not keen to summarize it with the impulsive answers I’ll provoke in speaking to it, but I root for the happy ending to love stories. I don’t care if it’s an anime or a CBS cliché. You’ve been estranged for years or forged a bond through a shared journey and hardship or are the exact “wrong” people for each other as you slowly find how you fit; I’m rooting for you. I don’t regularly seek out chick-flicks or have Hugh Grant stutter his way into my dreams every night, but I don’t hate it when it seems like they’ve figured it out by the end. And then there was that one day I sat on the couch for 7 or 8 back-to-back watchings of The Notebook in high school. Simply saying “I didn’t want to get up,” wouldn’t capture the nature of whatever hole I had fallen into.

If you’ve followed my writing forever, you’d know what a little romantic lover-boy I once suffered myself to be. Before the science and philosophy saved me, I was at the unmerciful swell of my feelings and hopes about who I could be with the prettiest girl, both inside and out, that I could imagine ever having the privilege to meet. What a coincidence! The girl of my dreams sits next to me in band!? There must be a God. I think about this given the last scene of a This Is Us episode I just finished. Kevin kept his valentine he made for Sophie when they were both in elementary school. He wrote her name down on it after looking up and seeing her for the first time as she joined his class. 40 years later, after their respective whirlwinds, they’re reconnecting to raucous applause from onlooking family.

Scenes like this are everywhere, and they’re getting modern renditions with an elevated consciousness that it’s not just pretty white people who have these kinds of stories. Hell, this scene played out at his fat sister’s wedding! Everyone can get in on this love game. Represent. It’s this kind of selfish all-encapsulating romantic notion now free to be explored with fill-in-your status signifier suggesting that we’ve somehow evolved on what it means to qualify a good or healthy relationship.

Certainly as a result of the work I do and the nature of the environments I spend the most time, but I’m pretty much always hearing about unhealthy relationships. The nature of their discontent is often more obvious and elevated given the drug use or various levels of abuse, but as far as I can tell, they’re just the dramatic versions of what I’ve been privy to listening to my entire life. I still think about my uncle beating my mom’s sister and no one doing shit about that. I think about how my other uncle spoke to my grandmother when I was growing up. I’ve heard countless stories from one friend or another about their boyfriend and the creepy ways they would impose emotional guilt or try to exercise control. No one has shared with me the valentine they’re still holding for when “their person” comes back around to finish the love story.

Moreover, when you consider the criterion that we tend to judge the “best” kinds of relationships, the answers people give for why they lasted are always a touch dark. “Happy wife, happy life!” Some people cheat and just don’t bother to open up the chaos of getting caught. Many figure out how much time you need apart to better appreciate their time together. For the ones that offer things like, “You have to communicate,” they’re suspiciously sparse on details as to how that communication is conducted, and if you catch snippets, it rhymes with a kind of capitulation for the sake of “peace.” Or maybe you “marry your best friend.” Great, perhaps both of you are terrible at making friends or defining what good ones look like.

The other place I get any remote perspective on how relationships are going is through the happiest of happy pictures from all of my not-exactly-but-still-kinda-rich white friends. Now the babies are incoming and extended families are all showing you the same genetically-bound smiles. I don’t know their actual finances, but I know they all suspiciously waited 10 years to even-out financially before the kids started dropping. They aren’t living in sheds lol, I can tell you that much. Whatever “arrangements” or difficulties they experience the rest of their lives, they’re statistically the most likely to stay married, for better or worse, destined to be the gray in their grandchildren’s first Christmas pictures.

I don’t know how to introduce the next thought I have about the concert I just attended, so glad I got that out of the way with this. The lyrics to so many of the Badflower songs had to do with this depressive hatred or anxiety about yourself. I had the thought that if I were half my age, maybe I would have found them as compelling as a My Chemical Romance or Linkin Park. Sometimes you get these moments that really drive home where you are or where you’ve been psychologically. I’m not actually an angst-ridden teenager anymore. I literally give life advice for a living. I’m not crawling in my skin, I am okay, and you almost certainly hate me more than I hate myself, if you hate me at all, because I don’t.

But it’s not just this era or a “phase” for many people. Not everyone grows to recognize tropes or the value of your favorite artist mixing up how they write their songs. You can constantly be getting into relationships that don’t respect, reflect, or even recognize who you are or what you need. Whether it’s with a person or media, your brain is going to run a pattern on the provided narratives. I can acknowledge that I’m rooting for the characters. I can check my impulse to fall down the rabbit hole like that’s how it’s “supposed” to or “ought” to work. I don’t have to morph my dissatisfaction with my own life not resembling the magic into an affinity for emotionally distressed music.

I’ve had the luck and privilege to be in 3 decently long romantic relationships. Leaving aside how none of those girls care to talk to me again, each taught me a considerable amount about myself and what needs to be meaningfully shared. You can’t fuck your way to happiness or sense of togetherness. You can’t pawn off your feelings on some intellectualized version of what your relationship allegedly represents. You can’t genuinely connect, trust, and rely on someone who isn’t, at the very least, comfortable with themselves. You constantly trying to attend to or build them up is called codependency.

The two longest commitments to me in life have been my dad and Byron. I value commitment, not the number of years by themselves. Sacrifice comes with commitment. This is one way people artfully abuse control or mask insecurity by how incensed and pious they get about infidelity. They pretend it’s commitment. They pretend they’re not reacting to the implicit understanding of their ownership of you. I’ve been plenty jealous of my girlfriends or fuck-buddies and whatever other attention or action they got that wasn’t from me. I didn’t turn that into rage or moves to control. I just wrote about how I hoped they considered it the same kind of fun or novelty that I would and would still come home hopefully because they liked me more.

As a society, we appear to have committed to the romance version of most stories. Marvel climbs higher and higher. We still habitually rally conversations around the machinations of billionaires. It’s hard to find a show where there isn’t a family doing everything they can to stay together or budding romance that the protagonist needs to attend to like the universe was designed with their heart in mind. I consider myself thankful that I’ve learned how to build in more checks and awareness. I don’t want to be Iron Man (well, I do, but not really) anymore than I want my high school crush to “come to her senses” and call me out of the blue.

It’s a considerable amount of work to have the kind of relationship I think I want. It’s an ongoing deep and meaningful conversation about how and why you’re together. It’s doing more than spending or capitulating in service to a self-perpetuating ignorance pattern. I want the romance of saving shows you like to watch together or the struggle to figure out how to achieve our highest ends. I want the idea that “you can always leave” to not resonate like some idle threat and escape hatch. I want it to be a boring fact jokingly referred to as we dive back in. I think people get comfortable, and they spend incredible amounts of energy to disguise that comfort as growth, connection, or commitment.

The 20 years of growth for This Is Us’s Kevin were neatly summarized by his Alzheimer’s mother telling Sophie he’d be ready for her one day, but she wishes he’d grow up sooner (imagining them both to still be in college.) She wished Sophie could recognize how great her son was when the timing was right, and luckily for them, she did by the end of the episode. To This Is Us’s credit, no one gets a happy ending, just another series of difficult situations surrounded by…rich supportive family members…wait...

No one will pull you out of the fantasy. You don’t have to eschew it completely or hate yourself for liking it or how it makes you feel. But you also need to recognize it for what it is, or you don’t get the opportunity to build an actual life from your actual values. How deeply disturbing it might be to fully appreciate how script-like the nature of your love or connection can be. How easy it is to laugh and cry with the characters verses the voices in our soul. Could I go out tomorrow and find a girl who is brought to tears by the words from a sad-band and endear her to me? Yeah, probably. Do I give you or myself the leeway to describe that behavior in anything but the most suspicious and damning manipulative terms? I mean, I wrote the blog. God forbid my first instincts merely fill out a prescription.

[962] Own It - Again

There’s a dozen ways this could start. I’ll just speak to the first thing on my mind.

My neighbor told me he’s not crazy about me finding more pallets to bring to the land. “They don’t have the best curb appeal.” He also reflexively blamed me for a nail he found in the tires he bought because he saw me hauling things in the bed of my truck. He also told me about a plan for $50 a month rock plan that’s less robust and considerably more money than the $200 my other neighbor asked for. I really just wanted to come inside and go to bed. I moved to the middle of fucking nowhere so I could play with pallets and be left the fuck alone. If I wanted a discussion about curb appeal, I wouldn’t be looking at the series of broken vehicles and half-stripped RVs across the street, or the abandoned bus, or various array of animals and odds and ends my fucking neighbor has dashed about his property and RV.

A few things have been weird about today. There’s this incredibly enthusiastic prisoner who has created a lot of programs and holds his own classes. He talks and talks and talks. He has found his calling, and runs it ragged. He likes to compliment and try to reinforce people in their good habits. He’s also…you know, kind of a dumb prisoner who thought citing evolution as something to question was speaking to having a wise and individuated mind.

He, not half implored me, to consider continuing to work in the prison when I mentioned I will probably be moving on to somewhere I might do more of the job than navigate the broken personalities of the staff. He said something to the effect of, “If it’s your goal to touch and affect change in people, you’re never going to find a population more ready to do so than prison.” Little does he know, that’s not really my goal.

I feel like I’ve spoken to this before, but listening to him go on and on about the big wide world of possibility makes the insular and selfish part of me really want to shine. I want money. I want time. I want independence and self-determination. I will not suffer any and all stupidity or injustice just so I can [incoming social work cliché] “plant a seed” that grows into a healthier individual. I don’t mind helping people. I do get some kind of positive feeling in watching people grow and get a better grasp of themselves. But that feeling is not why I do anything.

I do things because I hate. I do things out of spite. I do things because I am my own worst enemy and challenge and if I don’t push against something I conceive of or deem worthy, I’d just sit here watching TV indefinitely. I get more gratification taking an aptitude test that tells me I scored in the 95th percentile and should be considered for the job of lawyer, analyst, or CEO than I do most anything else. I like screaming from the rooftops the idea that I both deserve more responsibility, but when given the keys won’t do shit like buy fucking Twitter.

And I don’t feel bad about that. In recovery, we’re always telling people to put themselves first. They have to be in charge of their recovery. You can’t do it for your kids or wife. You have to do it for you. I do shit for me. I’ll find better jobs for me. I’ll find a new battle for me. I’ll write the narrative that explains each step I’m taking and why. I’m not getting carried away on the hopes and dreams of the gang-affiliated maybe white-ish-supremacist persuasive talker who also happens to empower a lot of other inmates. I would employ him though, because that mother fucker does get shit done.

My “power,” or whatever you may conceive of it comes from owning my shit. My shit behavior, my goals and dreams, and my aberrantly whorish intent. I feel good about how mean I am. I want to tell the dumb junkie coworker cunt, “See you on my caseload!” on my last day so she knows what I think about her battle to find this job and stability after her struggle with addiction. It doesn’t matter, actually, if I’m smart or decent looking. It doesn’t matter how many things I own. It doesn’t matter how well I perform at a job or how many friends I do or don’t have. What matters is I own it all, good or bad, the display of cards as they’ve fallen.

I know if and when I’m prepared to do the work to change things. I own that capacity. I know you have to practice the directions you want to go. I want to continue in the direction of owning my own business. I want to continue on the pursuit of more of my time. I want to keep playing with whatever wood I find and put it wherever I deem suitable.

My capacity for insanely selfish behavior isn’t this thing that’s just constantly running into every layer of my interactions. It feels as though that’s precisely what I’m navigating from others though. Why am I a good listener? Because you’re always fucking talking. Why am I content to do my own thing and take whatever I can cut out? Because I can barely convince people to acknowledge they have their own things they want or wish to do, let alone to do them. The only time people have a strong opinion they’ll even pretend to fight for is when it’s in opposition to whatever the fuck it is you plan to do.

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It’s the next day and I’ve made a run to pick up some of the free pallets. One of my new trailer tires was flat. I still managed to get there, get them back to my house and unloaded without much issues. I’ve picked 4 ticks off of me, at one point was covered in ants, and I haven’t eaten yet today. I haven’t eaten since last night, and most of that was puked up last night because even a little drinking and then excessive head-banging and moshing means significantly worse stomach than I anticipated.

A few lines have been ringing in my head. “If you don’t have the time to do it right, when are you going to have the time to do it over?” With regard to the things out here on the land, I never have the time. I will never, without an insane amount of money, have the time to digest the career’s-long information that goes into building things amazingly well. I won’t have the time to take classes. I won’t have the time to watch dozens of YouTube videos that are only nominally relevant to what I need. I won’t have the time to sit and talk with my neighbors about their opinions about how I should have done it.

I’m not trying to do it over; I’m trying to do it different. Different looks different. Different feels different. Different is asking a different question and presenting an answer you haven’t heard before.

Also ringing, my neighbor made it a point to tell me how much he was cursing me for having things in the back of my truck, intent that it was me who let the nails loose on the road. He then went on to offer the “advice” that I get a small loan to get the kind of privacy fence I’m wanting. His wife came out briefly to get something from the car, and their tone of voice towards each other suggested to me his opinions had little to do with me. And for the record, I never offer words, to any of my neighbors, about what they are or aren’t doing on their land, even when his dogs are shitting all over mine. It’s something my fence will eventually address.

I consider a certain aesthetic a degree of heightened privilege. I consider it almost excessive. I already live in a somewhat regal manner the broader you conceive of humanity. It is so much money for things to be “pretty” or “proper.” It might cost me $200 in gas in all of the back and forth to get these pallets. It will save me thousands in the equivalent amount of wood. It’ll be hours and experimenting and sweating to turn them into anything remotely useful. It’s already a workout. It’ll be a learning experience. It will be an exercise in creativity. It will be a sustainable practice. It will be a litany of things that aren’t the baggage of “a small loan” to get a fence. The decadence that bemoans an aesthetic is a naïve and pathetic state of mind. Feel free to create and buy nice and pretty things. Keep your fucking attitude about it away from me.

While it might not sound like it, I’m in a pretty great and comfortable place. I’ve been seeing some amazing shows, found a new great burger place, and should likely get this job where I’ll still only work 4 days a week with 2 of them at home. I’m playing my guitar a little more, I’m getting back into the swing of salvaging things as the weather improves. My debt is “good” or “inevitable” debt like car fixes, taxes, and food way more than indulgences and I’m still perpetually 3-4 paychecks away from it being settled up again. These rolfing appointments have been an absolute dream loosening me up. I’m walking better and my posture is correcting. I’ve gotten over my initial enthusiasm bump at the idea of new girl to hang with, so I can stay mellow with banter without my brain acting like things are more complicated. We’re still pushing to be in business for ourselves. I’m bowling every weekend. Like, the next time you hear me complain too sincerely, I’ll be in a particularly bad mood.