[1046] Tee'd Off

I keep missing something when I write. I always used to write in order to feel better. I needed it to get my stomach settled or to get my head to stop hurting. When it became clear I was just always going to be an “on” person, a kind of regulating mechanism. I used to find useful bits of insight. I hadn’t really landed on as many pieces as I needed to shape and grow confident in my identity. If anything, today, I’m hard-pressed to tell you what I haven’t asked and answered about myself. The only thing “new” is my propensity to hyper-focus on doing a handful of new things every few months or years.

Take something simple, like band shirts. I’ve been buying a lot of them. I bought a heat press and 10 blank black t-shirts. I’ve spent what I easily consider “obscene” amounts of money on them so far. Until this shift into, basically collecting, band shirts was kicked off during Riot Fest last year, I reflexively balked at the $30-$40 price tags and completely ignored every table. Now? The shirts have come to mean something more. They stand for a “style” choice I almost never make for myself. They signify I’m supporting an artist directly who I’ve almost certainly been stealing their music their entire career. People have been noticing the shirts and complimenting me or saying they like a band. They’re more comfortable and fit correctly unlike the random shit I’ve bought from American Eagle or Goodwill. A mostly black wardrobe means you don’t have to think about visible sweat stains.

But I’m also feeling “fuck you” every time I buy one. Fuck you universe who says this should constitute more debt or something seemingly unreasonable. Fuck you teenage me who didn’t have the presence of mind to budget for shirts that would be vintage and extra cool today. Fuck you overpriced monopoly Ticketmaster which makes the whole spectacle of even seeing an artist expensive as fuck, so why not double it and at least take home more than a memory? I want all the shirts in the same way I wanted to obsessively write down animal names, collect Pokemon cards, or approach 50 different tasks at once in developing the land. I’m manufacturing meaning in a sea of otherwise ambivalence.

You know what shirt I absolutely don’t want? Your stupid brand, fest, or infinite lineup. I don’t support Rockville or Wonderoad or Bonnaroo or any of the way-too-many festival names as though they haven’t almost become parodies. If anything, going to so many shows has made me deeply appreciate the 400 person venue and the different palpable energy of a room verses the expanse of “festival types.” I’ve never had a concert touch what Steaksauce Mustache did at The Hi-Fi, but Anxious, and Knuckle Puck both earned t-shirt buys with their energy in the same room. Legacy bands like Earth, Wind, and Fire don’t need me buying shirts, but I’d slap a sticker on my speaker and testify to their unique power and energy across a stadium forever. I also bought a sticker printer.

I need shows and shirts and time-consuming activities like reading or watching everything because the alternative is darkness. The alternative is thinking, endlessly, about how often things get fucked, how hopeless they feel, how alone I generally am, or some narrative about how I still might not be doing “enough” in spite of any benchmark achieved. I need a story of indulgence and largess not because I’m blind and greedy, but because it’s what I’ve been working towards. I’ve arguably jumped the gun in overburdening the credit cards, but also, to this day, I’m in no more debt that I could have comfortably paid off had I not gotten fucked on the house flip. I can’t take the double whammy of not having anything to show for the time, effort, and investment. So I’m going to carry on like I invested in “the universe” and now that fucker needs to pay dividends.

It’s hard to get a handle on how angry I really am. I don’t do a lot of angry things. I don’t yell. I’ve even managed to dial back being particularly cunty in the road-rage vein. I’ve never just gotten used to or okay about the shit storm that is our politics or capitalist environment. If I ruminate on that stuff, “little’ things start to nag deeper; perhaps a proudly ignorant and defiant client or an entitled cunt baffled by the dynamics of a rock concert pit. I get angry that people praise and compliment me. I get angry at the idea of paying for glasses as my over-used contacts scratch my eyes. I get anxious about what I’m wholly prepared to say to the person who, for reasons I cannot grasp, thinks to treat me like I don’t exist or won’t react to them touching me or dictating something they have no business speaking to. I never know if it’s really appropriate to crack. I don’t have to. I don’t want to discover how much I needed to by surprise.

The amount of people who have asked me, ”Well, then, is he really your friend?“ when I’ve described the circumstances around the kid being in my friend’s care and the speeding and gun pull is getting high enough to mention in a blog. I’ve never made excuses for that series of circumstances and wouldn’t play along with the logic I couldn’t see. It’s also an undeniable crisis I still wish we could be rid of. I don’t know what to make of getting blown off. I can’t tell you the next time I won’t get angry at the words, ”I’m sorry.“ It feels as though my safety net is under attack. I’ve literally auditioned another friend for being the one to call in an emergency. I don’t think I have much of any real responsibility towards the situation but to keep speaking to it as honestly as I see it.

I’m not ungrateful, but I’ll stray. - not quite Tegan and Sara

There’s a version or mode of me that has every book I own read, an instrument practiced at least 30 minutes a day, and every video game beaten in the next 6 months. And then what? When I’m feeling lost for what to do, I start to vibe and feel gratified at the prospect of hunkering down like the world’s most accomplished introvert/nerd. I get home, dick around online, put on the next show, and retreat to the meandering middling task-handling for work or chores or needing to eat. Can’t retreat when you’re in Chicago next week. Can’t pretend you’ll know your focus or energy on your next in-office day. You’ll totally forget Secret Invasion came out or get a surprise perfect day for working outside. Best play things in stride, no?

When I played guitar 10 hours a day for months, I was becoming what I felt was a decent musician. When I read every single thing I could find, watched every lecture, and wrote extensively on a topic, I was confident I could earn my PhD or obliterate the ”lazy“ and ”ignorant“ person who couldn’t be bothered to learn anything before they spoke on it. When I decided the land was the place to live, I sacrificed fucking everything by way of comfort and self-respect, sleeping in my car, on a couch, and working non-stop at as many as 3 jobs at a time. I’m not meant for whatever it is you want to call what I’m doing. The average person sees 3.2 live shows a year. If that’s true for you from 15 to 55, you’ll get to 128. I beat that by 1 tonight between now and last year.

I’m growing increasingly fond of having a handler and being pointed in a direction. James Bond is an employee. I don’t need a mythical daddy, but I do need a sponsor or benefactor or nominally malicious overlord. I can function better when I’m housed within something. I keep working my job. I got through school. I’ve never been fired. I can memorize the rulebook. I can learn the language of your field. I could be something if you’d just give me a chance.

[1045] Out Of My Mind

Let’s do an “all over the place” one.

Things are considerably less mysterious. That is, I see what it takes over time. I start to see how the dynamic is shaped and what compounds. I’ve reached a milestone, so to speak, in surpassing my “fun things” number from last year this weekend. I’ve been to 66. It is day 169 of the year. That’s 39%. What have I noticed? There’s no shortage of openers saying something like, “I can’t believe I’m on tour with so-and-so.” A good portion of artists are still psychologically arrested by 2020, and 3 years later, are so grateful to be touring again. Labels matter in getting exposure. Pockets of “different” companies profit from the entire chain they put bands on.

I’ve gotten, regrettably, considerably more jaded about the fame or money any given band may achieve. There’s an incredible amount of talented people who take the time to learn how to do just about anything with their instrument. Can they conform to a model that has them filling an arena? Can they box their creativity into something uniquely them, yet familiar, spontaneous, but in time for tour, rebellious, but safe for the radio? You know music is a business, but recently, the veneer of the work ethic or star power has worn off when fat little marketing trolls take the stage after Weezer to remind you the bars are still open! Can’t you help a humble promoter out and share your pictures with the right hashtags a little sooner too? Did you check out our meet-n-greet tent!? The only charismatic member of the band whose name you know won’t be there.

Shift.

When I hang out with one of my friends, the sentiments, “I just don’t give a fuck,” or, “People don’t give a fuck” are a common refrain. Why try too hard at work? The state doesn’t care. Your coworkers don’t care. You’re not getting a raise. You won’t get in trouble. No one notices half the shit you do or don’t do on any given day. It’s just reality, you, them, the fucks aren’t there, and you’re not wrong for not then insisting we infuse the space with fucks indeed. This will only serve to alienate, draw the wrong kind of attention, and highlight the overall no-fucks-given environment that your naivety wishes to lay at everyone’s feet.

At scale, you get essentially failed fascist states and wholly ambivalent corporate identities subbing in for any given right or obligation a mere mortal might’ve conceived in the way-back times. If you’re me, you make persistent flailing attempts to subvert the entire paradigm with quickly diminishing gains. I won’t stop trying, but I won’t pretend I think I’m going to ”win“ save plugging into a kind of network or thread of enthusiasm I’ve never personally encountered in life. I’ll be 35 in just over a month. The odds feel stacked against me.

I think of it like all of the creative types moving to creative cities. You know where you need to go if you have a certain drive to act or sing. Hell, you know where to go if you’re a solid engineer. If you’re just kinda smart or motivated or can pretty much learn to fit in anywhere, I guess you just drift. If your business is people, and not necessarily ones with money or connections, it’s your job to keep picking up the cigarette butts and old gum marring someone else’s picturesque landscape. I’m pretty much just a tumbleweed custodian in my field.

Rev.

We get hundreds, if not thousands, on the same page though. It takes crews to get these festivals set up and organized. It takes all those names on every one of your favorite movies. The drives to my different shows across the Midwest have hundreds of small-but-large-and-profitable companies across the landscape none of us have ever heard of. On my best day, I can get me and 2 other people in the same room. When I do so, are we talking hopes and dreams? In a sense, if the dream is to resolve the current frozen hellscape of our arrested lives and prospects.

The shows I attend so rarely ever have a ”that person is definitely here alone“ person. When they do, it’s the weird dancer, or bizarre hat wearer, or odd configuration of ill-shaved hair. So many people have friends. Don’t catch yourself listening to what they talk about all through any given performance though, or painful reminders will blast why you often prefer to be alone. My friends are busy. My friends are tired. My friends have obligations. I don’t know what’s going on with all of these people and their friends or family, but they must not be from around here.

This feels like the time to point out the disconcerting number of tattoos I noticed of state outlines, presumably where they are from, that people must identify with to a degree I feel as though were I so afflicted by Indiana, I’d likely kill myself.

One performance today stood out for how goddamn insufferably hokey it was. I was so uncomfortable. First, and I’ve said this a lot, I fucking hate ”hippie“ types. Every stunted thought experiment they never run gets answered by a pathological implementation of ”love“ or ”togetherness“ or some feel-good sentiment backed by nothing but the most inane pageantry available to the devout of any faith.

Michael Franti not only asked you to turn and hi-five or say hi to your neighbor, but to form giant circles together and have someone dance in the middle. He insists you hug the friends you came with, a lot. He knows that no matter how confused he gets or divided we are, love wins! Include strangers in your general jubilation! Doh-see-doh the entire park! Then, everyone gets a turn on stage, the main one or the mini ones set up in the crowd and visited every other song. Let’s hold a small child and encourage it to sing, through 9 increasingly excruciating false endings to 1 of a dozen songs that felt like the dog from Blue’s Clues or a Teletubby were poised to step on stage. It was gross and insincere, and I was happy to deny and annoy the drunk mom who poked me in the stomach to say, ”You have to do it“ in beckoning me for the dance circle portion. I’m only here to get a better spot for Jason Isbell 2 hours from now…the fuck I do.

A good faith steel-manning of that behavior would be entertaining the idea the he actually believed what he as saying, there’s nothing wrong in democratizing the space and inviting people who were clearly eating it up to stuff as much as they could fit. It’s fine for that to not be my vibe, kind of people, and there’s no harm, right? I’m not so sure, but I don’t wish to keep revisiting my trauma.

Hussain asked me what I was doing yesterday. I sent him a picture of a stage. His response: ”Fuck“

Shift.

I’m thinking of going approximately 20K in debt. It would be for the supplies to finish my fence, garage/wood shop, solar panel pergola, driveway, wood-burner set up, and above ground pool. That’s estimating another 7k. I’m not entirely sure if it’s because I’ve grown so ambivalent to debt, or because I actually want to shift into doing a ton of big fun expensive things at once, and am sick of hearing the excuse that I don’t have the money, time, or help.

Ultimately, I have “the” job to lose in the broadest context. This begs an entirely different question of that “comfort” one shouldn’t get comfortable with when you’re plugged into a space where no one gives a fuck, but I’ve found myself willing to suspend getting so antagonized by that thought with new performances pounding through my head every few days. Make no mistake. My job is easy. My job is placating. My job is not what I want to do with my life, does not bring me fulfillment enough to ignore what’s wrong with it, and does not pay me anywhere near what it nets them. Fuck my job and the harm they cause in the name of “harm reduction.”

Shift.

I have so many tools. Music tools. Tool tools. technological tools. Crafting tools. Massage tools. I can only use one at a time and in service to the most haphazard ideas or projects. I have as many books as I have tools. By now, I’ve forgotten why I was so interested in getting half of them. My book shelf, slowly bending forward like an arthritic spine under the weight of so much wasted potential and initial enthusiasm. I used to be so smart. I still am, but I used to be in a way cooler way.

I want a “thing.” I want to turn down the dial on the “mutli-potentiate” bullshit and just have a thing. I know so many families are miserable thinking that was going to be there thing before it sunk in families are made of fucking people. You’ll hear that sentence differently if you’ve worked in child welfare or had a slutty step sibling. Turns out, just like you can’t actually dance or sing the pain away, you can’t “love” your manipulative immature ignorant and petty family into a place of mutually prosperous mental health states. Go figure.

You get a tool to fix a problem. This presumes you’ve accurately diagnosed the problem, know how to use the tool, and care to fix the problem in the first place. I think I have a lot of tools for an incredibly hard problem to diagnose. I think it’s a multi-faceted problem to do with my relationships, or lack thereof, my willingness and capacity to focus, learn, and do in spite of any meaningful spirit animating the behavior, and my existential concerns regarding time, will, and ego. When I say something like, “I’m not ready to die,” I think my behavior overtly suggests as much over highs and lows and long periods of time. I try to exude less desperation and more indulgence. I try to ask more questions and run new experiments. I recognize the next level and continue to explore. Thankfully, I know I’m in charge of my sobriety and need to put myself first or I might have a tattoo of a state that sends 10 years to Indiana for abortions. I suspect that person can’t diagnose their problem anymore than I can mine.

[1044] Reason Seasoning

I haven't talked religion in a long time. I just watched this "Skinny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets" series though. My brain is kicking off down some heavily compacted trails, but I'd still like to see if there's anything new.

I'm very much in the "religion poison's everything" camp. Whatever you may wish to claim is right or wrong about human behavior, there's a familiar, comforting, and easily digested religious anecdote, adage, or idiom to summarize and excuse away any remote lesson or inclination towards accountability. At bottom, every book, every tradition, every gathering of thousands boils down to "Because God!" The unprovable, ineffable essence of what us boring nerdy types recognize as self-satisfied circular-reasoning and infinite regress. Every single religious tradition terminates the same way.

As such, you take whatever fiendish inclination between thought crime to child molesting to child torture then molesting then murdering, as long as you punctuate it with "God's will," or spin-doctor it into your next trial and lesson, it never actually has to get dealt with. And why should it? It's the same people perpetrating that get attention, power, money, and literally thousands of people crafting their day-to-day excuses to not think for themselves or find their agency. Arguably, beyond the wholesale corruption of critical thinking, the thing I hate most about religious types is the unearned pride and piety bestowed by thirsty empty sheep looking for a strong daddy.

This isn't shaping up to be a blog where I feel moved to qualify anything positive about religious experience, so don't expect this to look "balanced" or "fair" or giving much a shit about your personal story as it pertains to your Jesus. You've been warned.

Anyway, now that I deal with addiction, I get to see new, but precisely the old, patterns manifest in ways I haven't written about yet. It could be notions of "purity" and "submission" that plague the minds of those who literally can't see a paradigm that would allow them to be independent. You're at the mercy of the eldest man who I don't think it would be unfair to say you're addicted to. We're addictive creatures, trying to indulge the positive feelings at all costs. Literally, we will die to feel good, and I don't think this is framed as dangerous as it's registering to me in this moment.

I've heard a lot of, "I just don't want to deal..." from my friends as much as any client. No one wants to deal. They don't want the headache. They don't have the time. Whether they're addicted to their vape or to some desperate conception of their duty or destiny, they don't fundamentally feel situated to deal with the heart of whatever their own issues may be. It becomes very easy to get enmeshed in family issues, client issues, indulgences for their own sake, or a feverish "busy-ness" pointed in no real direction in particular. They want to feel good. Maybe not even "better" than "good" or "good enough."

That's part of the religious impulse, no? You want to feel better about the infinite. You want to matter. You want to think you've created a kind of noble and lasting example in your attempt to start a family or in how hard you've worked to get letters after your name and higher paychecks. You want to pay your respects and keep the traditions of your elders alive. You want to think someone's paying attention and keeping score. It doesn't matter if in your heart of hearts you "don't believe in anything," as one woefully incomplete phrasing tries to caricature it, it matters that it feels better to "believe in something" than your insignificance and lack of connection. Jesus is a thousand times easier to understand emotionally than "quantum" anything.

It just feels so fucking boring and disingenuous after, well I spent years reading/arguing this stuff, but with an adult brain and 15 minutes, some deeply consequential layers of this shit needs to crack. You can be a perfectly good person without anything religious making its way into the conversation or your identity. Your car takes gas, not God's will, and for whatever scientific description you want to use about the combustion engine, the same scientific principles and rules apply to what's going to make you "go" as a healthy connected individual verses an incidentally alive node in a narcissist's cult.

I genuinely wish for the shedding of religious indoctrination to happen as quick as possible. I wish the people who hold it harmless would spend more time in good faith analyzing what they think it's been teaching them. Every form of abuse is justified "because God." Every opportunity to hold someone to account is a move to kick the can all the way to Hell. You reduce yourself to the dog who got in the trash. It's never going to walk up to you, apologize, and begin picking up and putting it back in the can. It's going to live in fear, or oblivious pride, and wait for daddy to decide what comes next.

It's always and of course the religious household where you get the most abuse and allegations. If you build church bells to sound "duh" on the hour every hour, we would still carry ourselves as if noticing a cross on the wall is tantamount to a Safe Space sticker for runaway teens. Where else are you going to find the worst kind of predictable tragedies of human behavior than where there's billions of dollars and adherents fundamentally situated to pretending? They pretend they weren't abused. They pretend to know what it is to be accountable. They pretend to have an identity. They pretend with every single word meant to obscure. It's easier to say "sin" than, "He made an 8 year old suck his dick."

There's so many parallels in my thought right now, it's hard to put it together. People defend the wrong things in the exact same ways with the exact same language. Your abusive partner, Trump, religious pedophile, terrible drug use influence..."He didn't mean...." and you're off to the races of excuses and reinterpretation of words and actions that have about as definitive a meaning as you could ever ask for. Every second you experience a moment of hesitation or confusion about something you haven't studied or don't have the mental faculties to entertain..."It's part of a larger plan." Yes, someone's always Ocean's 11ing things in the background.

People will escape! Then they will still say, "You can still trust God!" As though I should be surprised that an entire lifetime spent being punished for having your own identity could lend itself to any other conclusion. No no, dear traveler, what all of these rich sex and violence addicts were doing with all of their influence and time, never being held to account, that's the "fake God" stuff. The "real God" stuff is do literally everything they've ever said and done that doesn't rise to the level of pedophilia or violence that leaves marks. Nailed it!

I get annoyed when Hussain will say something about sex or relationships that is as purely distilled "purity culture" cult shit as you could stomach. Even if none of his actions reflect that of a controlling husband/ownership dynamic, he can't shake that it just feels "right" that you have your one woman, and anything else is grounds for divorce or disassociating. This, with I guess his tongue sticking straight through his cheek, as he tells me the permissibility of having 4 wives in his culture. You see, you can't "cheat" or be "open," but you can corral four bagged women to be at your beck and call if the money's right. You don't get that stupid convoluted headspace without religion.

Let's get back to "deal with it" as a phrase. We just don't want to deal. We don't want to deal with climate change. We don't want to deal with the fallout of our toxic friends or habits. We don't want to deal with our oppressor be it at work or in abstract attacks from the government. Why deal? It doesn't feel good. No one in our various religious contexts is showing us what effectively dealing means. It's not even really an option because it can't be conceived of. What are you not "dealing with" in your "addiction?"  After a few weeks/months you can pretty much be physically fine if not in dire need to recalibrate your dopamine and serotonin over the next 2 years.

I'm interested in what moves us past this whole "religious debate" that doesn't get to the heart of making excuses and fantasy worlds verses working within our actual power. We talk about "raising consciousness" which I think looks a lot like people showing people things, but without an appreciation for how or why they learn so it doesn't really matter how often it comes up, it never sinks in. You could very easily discuss the assumptions and illusions we're situated in as conscious beings altogether to persistently derail what that next conversation space could look like. I don't need another cult-leader, rich god-guys-is-an-asshole story. Do you? Are you ripe and ready to fall for NXIVM or Scientology if your Jesus or Mohamed wears off?

These crazies, these cultists, these monetarily powerful playing on human weakness fucks think in generational terms. We can't be persuaded to get half a dozen people into an intentional community, but you have millions on the same smug team regularly donating, indoctrinating, infiltrating, and humbly requesting through speakers outside the baseball stadium that you meet them halfway in a discussion about who's more likely to burn for all eternity as though we're not literally on fire already. Blame Canada!

You don't want to deal? You don't want to accept? You don't want to try? You don't want to touch an ounce of the anger you hear from me when I type? You're the piddling middle-ground that doesn't protest when the Nazi sits at your table. You're the $10 donation affirming private air fare for your spew-daddy while your neighbor starves. You're the held-harmless "individual" "who's just trying..." every overtaxed phrase about caring for them and theirs or what it means to be "good." They're not trying. They're not just. "They" aren't real or a person. They're a water molecule without the language of "flood."

We're all part of more waves than we can conceive. You can disappear into it, or you can adopt the buoy's perspective. You can learn how to be weather and impact resistant, bob and weave, act as a warning and help others navigate. It's dangerous to give your checking capacity to anything else. You need to be able to recognize the impulse, what ignorance looks and sounds like, and feel, as deeply and radically as the ideologues do, a sense of purpose and direction. Religious thinking is arsenic sprinkled on food and you say, "Oh! Almonds! Want a bite?" It's where you go to feel good about not taking responsibility. It's where you go to celebrate addictive thinking patterns. It's how you get to Hell. "You," of course, not me, because I don't need your daddy. I don't need him molesting the kids I try to place. I don't need his money. I don't need his excuses or story for my behavior or sense of agency. 

Why the fuck do you?

[1043] One Step

The ten second version of my Saturday night/Sunday morning is that, on a trip back from Fort Wayne, I pissed off the kid, he pulled over and kicked me out of my friend's car while waving his airsoft gun around and ranting about how he does whatever he wants and what it is to be a man. The several pages that come next are going to build the months, if not almost two years-long context around that moment.

Most of you know my friend adopted a kid. It was a kid from his caseload when we were at DCS. He's known him since he was 7 or 8, and he's going to be 18 in July. He's, by the numbers, the highest you can score across categories recording trauma. He's had, or continues to have, every "behavior" dumbass eager Christian foster homes blithely discuss before they figure out they can't handle it. He's adopted the hood gangster affect, changes how he talks, walks, and is always, always, "on" in some form of aggressive tip, be it in name-calling or slamming cabinets in pouring himself milk. That is, to hear my friend tell it, if there's anyone else around and it's not just the two of them.

This is the same kid who found his dead brother, cousin, and cousin's fiancé after, in the months before the murder double homicide, my friend warned the kid if he kept antagonizing his brother, something like that tragedy would be the result. My friend had made a certain kind of pact with himself, that if he was ever going to foster or adopt, it would be this kid or this other little girl with her own sordid story of abuse and behaviors that he could navigate in a way others couldn't.

To my friend's credit, while it is an extremely weird habit and pattern, his "adoption" of disaffected white boys and seeing them all grow up, not precisely in the best place mental-health wise, but not having committed suicide, all with professional jobs, homes, or a connection that sees them reaching out for decompression or hang-out and come-to-Jesus sessions that don't spiral more than they need to. That this kid, with his extra-special aberrant status would kind of fall into his lap feels like so many mile markers on a highway we've been driving down for 20+ years.

The last few times I've written, I've wondered why so many "simple" things about what I desire are so hard or expensive to achieve. I've asked how much agency or control we really have under the spell of our pimps or cultural paradigms. Rarely anymore am I looking for the lesson, more than underlining or reiterating things it can be hard to build into new normative behaviors. Regardless of your trauma, level of emotionality, discomfort, or specific story of woe, you either discover and practice the littlest pieces of control and accountability, or you don't. It takes one moment to eschew your better demons and best ideas, and so practice, and honesty, and articulation deeply matter.

With all that in mind, if your goal in taking on a child is to merely "keep them alive," my friend is doing very well. If it's to expand their horizons and attempt to plug them into the larger world, no one is more keen to travel with the kid, take him to art galleries, buy him things related to cars and video games, and invite him along to the shows or activities he might otherwise be doing. Most parents, at least the ones concerned about how "the world" is going to perceive their children, know the task is much harder than keeping them fed and culturally enriched. And don't get me wrong, my friend knows this as well.

Here's the big "but."

This kid is mean. He's mean-spirited. He's volatile. He's aggressive. He's as unaccountable a person as I've ever encountered in life. I've worked for DCS. I've worked in prison. This kid is meaner and more disingenuous than people barely older than him serving years of their life for things he glorifies. Anyone who's been or has a teenager knows they're irrational and a certain kind of frustrating or "crazy." But you also probably have a strong instinct of when you're feeling particularly hormonal or out of control, and just being mean for mean's sake. It's unclear if the kid can differentiate, but again, to hear my friend tell it, when no one else is around, he's otherwise pretty decent and "normal." So?

We're beginning to shape the "have it both ways" portion of the narrative surrounding this kid. The fact that he can turn off and on whether he wants to be decent is not points in his favor. It shows that he's being as deliberately malicious as I accuse him of being. If I thought he was just "stuck" in some form of extreme PTSD or disassociative acting out, I'm backing off. I'm not writing this, forming some damming opinion, nor expecting him to behave in any other way than someone who functionally doesn't have their brain in their possession is going to behave.

My friend is extremely indulgent and entitled. I don't mind those character traits in and of themselves as, obviously, so am I. This influences his approach to creating a "stable" or "therapeutic" environment for what I call his "charges" more than "disaffected white boys." You're depressed? He'll take you to the woods and do some shamanic acid session. He'll get food with you and smoke you out. He'll let you rant about your blind spots and the consequences they've wrought indefinitely. It feels bad to be broke, abused, neglected, and lonely, like so many of us are, so if you get around him or he decides to care for you, let's flood your experience with the opposite of the pain.

The strategy has kept many a potential school shooter or suicide statistic alive. The strategy is incomplete and is being taken advantage of by the exact kind of mean-spirited violence engine that thrives on chaos. My friend drives a Camaro. That is, he did, before he functionally gave it to this kid who doesn't work, barely does chores, can't refrain from getting suspended or expelled every few weeks, and uses it to drive a series of high school girls back to their apartment to fuck and dismiss with some regularity. When my friend's cars are busted and the Camaro still works, he's coming to borrow my, also old and broken vehicles, because he doesn't want to leave the kid without a car.

The kid's "therapeutic environment" consists of constant access to vapes, I think Delta-8, weed, all of the accompanying parts that enable smoking from torches or pieces or batteries and surely a dozen other things I couldn't name. There's a tightrope you're walking at any given moment regarding his stability, and that's not to be disrupted. If he doesn't have a car, he doesn't get to go to his usual spot to get the "lesser" drug from the reliable spot and people they've coordinated to facilitate. Drug use is literally built into this kids DCS safety plan, because for years every other form of intervention has proven to cause more harm, stress, and drama than anyone involved, including the judge, cared to keep returning to.

It feels like now is the time to tell you, as I was being kicked out of the car, the kid referred to it as ,"my whip," which it absolutely is not, and he's had a melt down upon the realization of such in the past. Yelling at my friend, "That's not my car, that's your car. I don't have anything around here, none of this shit is mine for real," not an exact quote.

Anyway, some of the consistent interests the kid has shown are in guns, violent Youtube videos, Grand Theft Auto, and cars. He and my friend will talk cars indefinitely. The kid will bring out and clean his guns, airsoft or otherwise, like he's a war veteran trying to stay vigilant. They'll spend hours flipping through different skins and modifications to their in-game characters and cars. I can forgive a kid for being boring and single minded or having shitty taste in music. But he uses his interests to help bolster and glorify his thug-life narrative and demons.

On the way to Fort Wayne, there are decent stretches of straight highway. The kid, smiling, seatbelt-less, gestures with his head back to my friend, "You know, we have to come back out here and see what we can hit (speed wise.) We gotta make a pact though, that if one of us dies, it's not on the other one. You don't gotta feel bad or there's no heaviness or bad blood." Also not a direct quote. As far as I can tell, the kid has a familiar suicidal impulse that I want nothing to do with. I certainly don't want to be in the car with him as he's racing past 120 miles per hour weaving through traffic and riding asses from old people to bikers.

The kid does not seem to retain the capacity to genuinely appreciate the chance he's been given. He was literally on his way to a mental facility or prison before my friend stepped in. On his super speeding racing stints he'd say something like, "I got this bitch all the way to 125 even with your fat asses in the whip." I'm as much for jovial shit-talking as the next person, but that's all he's ever on, and he's proud of the danger and, at least while I'm around, almost never corrected or redirected. It's precisely here you start to flirt with terms like "codependent" and "enabling."

My buddy has his own list of stressors and drama related to his family and a bank fucking him financially. DCS has always played games. His jobs require a lot of time and driving. If the kid was a saint, his life would be particularly stressful the last couple years. With the kid as an ungrateful, hateful engine of chaos, we've seen even periods of remote stability get shaken by a stiff breeze. For every little seeming win, he's just as eagerly prepared to regress and destroy and throw what's been accomplished out the window. I don't care if for the first time in memory the kid is waking up and regularly taking out and cleaning up after the $800 dog he got last week if he's prepared to wave a gun at me when I yell at him to slow the fuck down and stop driving like he wants to kill us all.

We're at the point now where I want the game called. I want to press charges. I want consequences to send the kid where he belongs, which is not in a struggling household with a single foster parent who does not have the time, energy, or intention of the mental facility the child needs. Would they do right by him? Probably not. We live in Indiana and a country that doesn't train or care or invest in dealing with kids nowhere near his level. Is that his, or especially my, cross to bear? I don't think I've for a second supported him getting this kid well before I had any instantiated opinion on the kid for a dozen reasons related to getting our own shit together first. There's many reasons I don't have kids, even if I went to zero concerts the last two years and had thousands to spend on them.

The problem has reached the point where I'm feeling very "me or him." I want nothing to do with the kid. I'm watching my best friend functionally abandon me to the whims and chance of his kid's behavior, and I'm so devoid of how to conceptualize that, that it doesn't even make me feel angry or like I want to move into a space of judgment and resentment. I think my friend cares. I think he tried. I think it's an abject failure. I think I accepted the nature of our dynamic being that of, "You know, I'm not really trying to take the bullet for you," when we were having those discussions as teenagers. I'm not taking a bullet, or high-velocity air rifle rounds, from this little shit.

I handle crisis or crisis-adjacent situations all the time. To even talk about my "anger" related to the situation might give you the wrong impression that I didn't make a calm deliberate call to the police as I heard the tires screeching as the kid peeled away. My adrenaline wasn't pumping. I wasn't yelling. But, much as when I handed my ex the knife to shit or get off the pot with the threat of her slitting her wrists, I don't deal well with living under the sword of Damocles. This kid has been too hot and too unstable from the jump, and the gifts and rewards and placations have done nothing but provide an environment for him to feel emboldened to continue and draw pride from his self-destruction. My friend smokes a lot, speeds, and plays the same games. I don't see the capacity to lead by example along the metrics the kid needs to change. I see an uncle the kid might be allowed to visit in small doses after he's actually shown something worth rewarding.

One of the topics I've been talking about in Groups this last week is forgiveness/grace. How much room do you give? In my view, we never had to get to dropped on the side of the highway at 3 AM after gun waiving, but we did. I was certainly speaking to the issue well before it got that far. How much should we belabor the story of the kid's trauma? Certainly to a serious and far degree, but are we willing to also accept that you can be a fucking dickhead psychopath on top of that? Our job isn't to save anyone. It's to exercise your perspective and try. I tried right up until the point I couldn't stop repeating to myself, "I'm not dying for the fucking kid," and thinking about Ryan Dunn or all the shows unseen and projects not attempted.

I'm not forgiving the kid anymore than I'm forgiving my mom. Like her, he's not equipped to build on and exercise an accountable perspective. His upbringing or genetics broke his brain. The Hail Mary that is my friend attempting to contain this kid is causing me to contemplate in a measured way how I need to consciously uncouple from anything to do with either of them. This isn't a game, for all of my analogies suggesting otherwise. An excellent DMT trip might have released my buddy from a fear of death, but I'm not so ambivalent.

We can return to fundamentals. What can I control, what can't I? I can't make my friend adopt my perspective. I can never be in contact with the kid again. I can deny my truck to be loaned out and say, "You invited his impending meltdown into your home, not me." I can clear my booze and video games out of their house and go back to paying to do my laundry. I can press charges. I don't know if there's an underlying cry for help to release my friend from some sunk-cost fallacy that's rooted itself into this dynamic because I don't know what I can trust in the "I'm sorrys" that change nothing and persist in bad behavior, and tales of appeasement held up as growth. That's not good for my friend, for the kid, and certainly not for me.

[1042] Wrecked

How about this. I'll write my current hell as it's happening. I'm currently in the backseat of the Camaro with the kid driving. We're cruising between 90-100 miles per hour. He's already swerved through traffic, hit the gas hard through a residential/construction area to run a red light. He's blasting rap music. He's in look-over-at-my-friend conversation. I've texted my friend saying, "I want you to take over driving."

The kid is volatile. He gets aggressive and would certainly be the cause of any accident the Camaro is involved in. He's hairs away from cars, and a biker, he flashed his lights at and sped around on the way up. I don't feel safe in the real way where one surprise or issue crushes this sports car and because....? We don't want to set an appropriate boundary and expectation for this kid who needs to be constantly appeased or danced around?

I'm over it in a way I wish I had arrived at before I ever agreed to buy a ticket for him. I get all the work my friend has done to get the kid to whatever point you want to describe him as. There's been and continues to be a huge missing piece in this whole endeavor. If you want to build all of that into your household, whatever. But I'm here. I'm not unfairly asking to be appeased across unreasonable metrics. You can't make the kid less of a dick or emotionally stable. You can say, "Hey bro, I wanna drive."

Oh yeah, the various cartridges of weed and vape shit is fogging the air and and adding to the headache of being a good 6 inches too tall for the roof.

We'll regularly discuss the circumstance in which the kid might end up dead or in jail. It's a kind of forgone conclusion that this whole thing could fail quickly and miserably. If the kid has a prayer, I don't wish to be along for the ride.

I'm fucking up by playing along. I don't like the kid, trust the kid, or want any kind of dynamic with him That's what it is. I'm not obligated to this psuedo-theurapudic dance. I have to survive 2 more hours with this Camaro potential projectile and then I'm never even flirting with this kind of shit again.

[1041] Amen

It's no grand achievement to destabilize someone.

Something you're not going to encounter or understand unless you're in the "social work world" is how on-the-edge people are really living. They can present as "normal" or "friendly" or "smart enough" or have many "supports," and with what seems like the slightest bit of wind, conjure a tornado that throws their whole life into chaos. It's a world of anxiety that's so high that becomes the normal working condition. It's filled with so many medications, you start to feel "wrong" if you haven't built taking "something" into your day. It's a world where the futility and actual consequences of performing verses working mean relapse, jail, or death.

In the broader context of American society, with the decades long concerted effort to cripple school, health care, safety, infrastructure, individual freedoms, or even basic notions of public decency or good, it wasn't hard. Everybody who can't empathize with living on as dramatic an edge feels like they did something right or are special. Why on Earth would you attempt to embody the lived experience of people who struggle the most? You might fall into their black hole and find yourself as devoid of an identity or direction as them.

The illness manifests in how the victims go about "solving" their problems. How fucked in the head do you have to be to have your child's head blown off, and then you start your begging of leadership to "do something," with, "As a gun owner!..." bending the knee to your psychosis before you appeal to the power avatar. "Raise the buying age to 21!" Because that's the problem, just like "fighting for $15" means anyone took heed of inflation.

The problems are infinite, but the ones we pretend to discuss are literally crafted by those in control and with much grander greedy agendas than anything to do with helping you or preserving and protecting a life worth living. The fact that anyone has anything to say about trans issues beyond individual trans people and their doctors is the largest and latest. We still discuss the "opioid crisis" and not the corruption and complicity and greed of those who facilitated it. No matter what happens to the planet, profit will always take priority in how a response, if a response, is crafted.

Addiction is an apt analogy to so much of our broken psychological landscape. We're so deep down different holes, we're not entirely sure we've ever heard of the sun. When the entire framework for your existence is built on, not just a mythological framework, but with the mechanisms to make it self-reinforcing with each new traumatizing or inconceivable absurdity, all you can do is twist until something breaks. It's an abusive partner dynamic. The only kind of "love" you've known is them. You've come to look forward to the beatings and emotional withdrawal. You know what sets them off and are gratified in the knowledge and security. You take pride in understanding things on your terms where no one else can. It transcends "cycle" and forms a kind of orgasmic pressure cooker you cheer and pray for it to explode.

I watch it manifest across nearly everyone I know. I see the pivots to distance from doing the harder things to change. I see the dozens of details routinely skipped over. I see the safely self-scrutinizing posture of someone who knows exactly how to craft an argument for doing precisely as they've always done. This is why "things" and "we" will never get better. We can't conceive of it. We couldn't see it if it was in front of us. We couldn't sell it. We couldn't work to maintain it. "It" doesn't exist. It's a poll of what "a majority of Americans agree on" manifested in the exact same place of power an individual has to call the cops on their love-of-their-life-and-also-a-cop abuser.

You don't get it. It's either break the whole paradigm, or play pretend. Every single societal trend in this country is astonishingly terrible. Every symbolic "win" an abject mockery. Prove me wrong. Show me we have a remote democracy. Show me greed isn't king. Show me we have a shared ideal or vision of the future that has all the fixin's of a decent and meaningful life. Show me how much better we're getting at educating, granting rights, protecting the environment, generating power, or living in a way that isn't desperate to fit in as many distractions and indulgences before the fall as possible. We are a society on the familiar edge of my clientele, but literally can't conceive of the inevitable consequences of continuing to play along. And when we can, the destruction feels both deserved and glorious.

I think my fight needs to shift. I need to be more selfish. I need to hunker down and insulate and try to protect me and mine long enough to ride out the era. The era may last another 50 years, or it might aggressively break and shift in the next 10, but either way, I'm in a war with one soldier against an infinitely diffuse, ignorant, and ambivalent set of forces. I should sit and read because there's only fires raging outside and the illiterates will only resent and attack. I should play games because clearly something something "god wills it." And you're god, and I'm god, and let us bask in our creation. 

[1040] Take Me Home

At a basic level, what I "really" want is incredibly simple. It's so simple, I find myself pushing astonishment at the amount of effort I exert in trying to get it. I'll spend thousands to spend time with a friend who I can trust actually likes me and isn't looking for a reason to get upset. I'll try to start companies to get paid, not even obscenely, but looking for the "comfort" of not always describing things in debt-ridden terms or that comes with comprehensive insurance and a decent car. I just, on a whim, started another one of my hasty wood-working projects because I didn't know what to do with my energy and wanted to test out my cleaned-up garage-esc space. Just having something to focus on that involved my tools and hands has brought me to 6:30 AM, only a tinge tired.

I don't actually understand why it has to be so hard. I don't know why I have to have a predictable amount of dread at the prospect of going to work for people who don't give a fuck about me. I don't know why I have to dream about the circumstances that will make sitting and reading a book feel justified. I don't know why most people most of the time can't be relied upon to grab regular drinks, movies, shows, or otherwise.

It occurred to me that I've been trying to convince myself to "go harder" in service to my business. I want to manage a business, people, and have a spattering of clients. Starting a business is none of that. Starting is pleading and fighting and taping together pieces that need glue and nails. Starting is putting a hundred things out of your head in an active way so you can focus on the next phone call, email, or form you can't define with no one to help you. I want people out there going door-to-door or to businesses to convince others to donate in service to care. I don't want to be the salesman, because I'm not selling anything. I'm a good counselor and manager. I just want to do the work.

I could be a good wood worker. In whatever I find to do part-time, I'll be good at that too. It takes a while, a sort of by default patience, that has to occur in order for me to discover how "simple" whatever it is I'm doing actually is. I used 20 different tools to cobble together this bed bench. I didn't even get a splinter, and I made the thing with my shirt off.

There was a reddit post about some person in an intentional community saying they have 4 or 5 families living together on the same land in a couple multi-family spaces. They were friends growing up, and through college, and then transitioned to the community they created. What was the secret? What are they hiding? It's hard not to feel perfectly objectionable and "crazy" in my constant advocacy to change or join up or experiment. I'm not jealous of those who can pull it off, I just get angry. Are my circumstances a particular kind of fucked? Are my "friends" somehow more pathological in their behavior than I might diagnose "the masses?" Am I setting such a terrible example that I've been allowed to persist within some kind of desperate and sick complex you've been salivating while watching this whole time?

I feel good just hanging out. I feel good using expensive appropriate tools to create fleetingly passable things. I feel good when I work with someone who takes themselves seriously enough to push through discomfort and skepticism. I don't actually want higher-order indulgence or a fuck ton more money. I want to be able to live approximately as I already do, not in debt, with a persistent presence of one or a dozen people I care about. I want help. I want to know I'm not insane, and that's impossible to do alone. What's the next example I need to set? Who am I not being enough like? Am I uncreative or uninspired?
I don't know where to turn, so I'm over here hyper-cleaning my house, binging shows and movies, and making ear-shattering noises with scrap wood.

[1039] Get A Grip

I don't know if I'm feeling more inspired or antagonized lately, but it looks like I'm attempting to write first thing in the morning before work. Weird.

I've been watching Soft White Underbelly videos over the last few weeks. This morning was a girl who has a pimp. The guy Mark who does the interviews, was giving her money which was going directly to her pimp. Mark sets back up the camera, interviews her and her pimp in a more interrogation/accusation style than he normally does, and says he can't funnel Patreon supporter money to her pimp. He explores "who to blame" in bringing up "the life," "hustling," "poverty," etc. The comment section is a predictable amount of, "She used you" and "She's being controlled and your demeanor is uncalled for."

Control. When do we actually have it? Can it be ascertained in any meaningfully distinct manner? It's a theme we return to every moment of our lives. Personally, I feel like I have an incredibly small if barely-there amount of control. I use my writing as evidence of that. I'm exploring and piecing together so many impressions I couldn't control what they made me think or feelings layered under so much prudent introspection, it's hard to express them sincerely. Is she being controlled by her pimp?
What does it even mean to have control if not predictably influence the outcome in the shared objective world? If she always, no matter what she feels inside, gives him the money, I'd say yes. That control starts most often when you're very young, and just continues. Did your parents control you growing up? I suspect most of you are familiar with acquiescing to the vast majority of rules or behaviors imposed on you or inferred. My "super power" to quickly read people was imposed by my mother. I didn't say to myself, "It'd be nice to learn how to better control and recognize when she's likely to hurt me or break my shit."

Control seems like something you earn. That's not the same thing as saying everyone who has some measure of control or who can be of major consequence has earned anything. I think it requires consistency. You might prevent yourself from eating unhealthily 1 day a week. That's better than 1 day a year, but it's not the kind of control I think most of us are looking to have or claiming to have.
I think we show a severe lack of control in how we judge others. I've read a few "anti-work" posts the last few days talking about how people's parents bought houses and became millionaires doing nothing special beyond working normal jobs or the exact same roles people my age are today. In discussions with these people, they simply can't imagine or believe that rent is 3 times the cost of their mortgage or that you need 2 jobs to barely keep your head above water. These older people often feel as though they were in control of their lives and that anyone younger than them just isn't working hard enough or is just being indulgent.

When that happens, you don't get empathy and policy shifts. So what does either side of that misaligned discussion control? Before you accuse you can ask a question. You can form the discussion around numbers. You can consider ways to organize, support, and share. Or, and this is what we do, you can figure, "I've got mine," and say confidently you don't control wages, the job market, or an infinite series of confounding variables related to the economy and personal work ethic.

I certainly don't control how much I get paid. I can't even capitalize on the "coverage" that's "always needed" as they have a "float" to undermine paying me any more than my baseline salary. They go so far as to take things off my schedule so I'm not automatically qualifying for money by having more clients than their ideal threshold. I'm literally making less money the longer I stay at this company, leaving aside the wasted gas and repairs for my vehicles to get me to the office for no reason.

I do control my narrative about my shitty circumstances, my attempts to mitigate them, create around them, or contextualize them. I allow my judgement to be fluid and informed by more than the most forsaken sentiment about how it plays out, accurate and hateful-feeling-laden as it may be. I can't control insurance companies or clients or the amount of available or worthwhile jobs to try and apply for. I can, wide-eyed, engage each deliberately convoluted and malicious barrier from a place of sincerity and desire that doesn't need to eat me alive.

You have to know and be confident in your "why." Why keep fighting? Why get sober? Why lean into as much pain as you can bare, and then a little more? Why is it worth sacrifice and discomfort and weird challenging nuanced understanding? For me, each time I answer the question, I'm able to move on. Why write? So I can focus on my trivial work tasks without it ruining more of my day. Why build a fort, go to every show, or try to start a business? I'm so deeply acquainted with hatred and exhaustion, I'm curious and desperate to feel consistently any other way. I don't feel like I have a choice in lieu of my desire. This in contrast to not feeling like I have a choice because I haven't figured out what I truly desire.

I want to be of consequence not because I recognize and can emulate the behavior of a pimp. I want to create so I can feel like I belong. I want to demonstrate what I'm positive people can't even conceive of for themselves. It's why I don't need a god or lengthy debates regarding my entitlement or disposition. On my laziest day I'm doing some kind of work in service to my highest ideals. I happen to exist in a context which gives no fucks about that. How quickly does your average person then take and weaponize that intuition into compulsive self-destruction? You're tempted to think they don't know what they want or their "why." But it's worse than that, because they do. And in knowing, they open themselves up to all of the pain and errant judgment and depravity of a world dragged along by the narratives of others. How are you supposed to compete with that?

[1038] Vel Non

I'm back. I hate it. I like being home, my stuff, knowing the cats are okay in spite of being out of water and not having the cat box cleaned, but the contrast is jarring. I spent 6 days in Florida hanging out with one of my coolest friends. We talked music and books instead of client drama. We worked hard to walk miles back and forth between stages at Rockville. We had a ton of delicious meals and drinks. It's over. I'm back. I'm trying not to start clenching my jaw, tightening my shoulders and back, or thinking too hard about the pains of crappy vehicle ownership, insurance, or a job that is psychologically antagonistic.

Before Florida, I was in Chicago with my other great friend who's living her own version of the same things I am. Incredibly short-sided and idiot "leadership." Clients/students who are stressed out and ill-equipped. She's wearing 4 different leadership hats and considering her options for transitioning roles. Whether you're welding in Chicago, or in academia in Florida, it's politics, systems that move too slow, if at all, and among many other metrics, monetary and time exploitation presented as a gift you should be grateful for.

As thinkers, doers, and otherwise intelligent types, we all do some version of the same thing. We look at the broader picture, instinctively feel responsible for it, and ask what can be done. The personal saga of perhaps attempting to consume less or grow more or demonstrate through canvas bags and donations where your consciousness lies might flourish. My friend in Chicago wanted to engage in a kind of exploration conversation about how to broadly shift the paradigm or see if I've discovered something she hasn't yet to "fix things."

No matter how idealistic we might be about living sustainably or breaking up or competing with instantiated power, there are dozens of considerations we can immediately swap in to arrest more radical action. Who doesn't like driving 5 to 10 minutes up the road to Target? Who doesn't worry about having job options in densely populated areas?

I'm a dreaming idealist who suffers as such routinely. I make a concerted effort to couch my suffering in an appreciation and honest relaying of my moment or days as they strike me. I, after many, many years of singing the same tune regarding my hopeless hatred for everything I'm made to engage with or waste time on, have not found anything "better" or, most importantly to me, more practical, than to start from this place, literally in a field, and try to have my idealized life on top of the shit sandwich. I was amongst the old and entitled "Owner's Club" getting golf cart rides to the entrance at Rockville. If they have a car payment or mortgage, they're in considerably more debt than me.

I've felt lighter the last week. The mission was clear. Get to the venue, walk to stages, drink water or otherwise, rock out, take videos, eat, get back, shower, chill, repeat. I wasn't even tempted to clench my jaw. My shoulders weren't in my ears. The pain and work it takes to festival right paid off what festivals pay. It was worth it. I contrast this with the amount of work I put in to "stay stable" in my conception of myself with regard to my day job or the feedback and level of conversation I engage in with my colleagues. There's no amount of massaging that really makes the pain go away.

On the broadest scale, I can see how I appear to be trending. I get more and more stuff. I get a little more access. I learn about a new, absurd, hurdle to trying to do anything good in the world, get paid adequately for it, and avoid getting punished by someone who feels threatened you exist and try. I live a cartoonishly privileged life when you compare it to the catastrophic circumstances of what might constitute "average." But it'd be foolish to get deceived by the perks and placations. The foundation is extremely fragile.

Part of that fragility is that I'm only one person. I'm not a society. I'm not even a collection of friends or partners truly working towards a singular goal. The other major catch to being a thinker or doer or feeler of responsibility is that you work alone. You have a vague notion you need to work out to either prove how brilliant you are, or at least hold true to yourself that you believed until the end. It's a recipe for self-destruction that I feel I caught in myself fairly early and build into my imploring that if/when you wanted to come play on my land, you'd be living almost free to experiment in a way I deeply appreciate is a component of your being. I wish to enable that propensity. Please see the effort into gardening I made for a year when I've little interest in doing so myself.

By the numbers, I've spent thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on things Allie wanted to do, Byron wanted to do, investing in the space and tools for what I thought "we," those born complaining about the things at 15, 25, and now 35 wanted to "fix." I'm still the only one standing out here. We're still intellectualizing and abstracting the struggle and mildly to not-so-mildly resenting the implication that we don't care or haven't worked hard enough in our own miserable little corners. I guarantee we will all fail until the conversation, well, happens at all, but with enough regularity, clarity, and direction to prompt the kind of action that I'm increasingly less inclined to take on my own.

More importantly to me, I'm less inclined to entertain the conversation that doesn't include sacrifice, incredible amounts of discomfort, ticks, shitting in bags, thousands in shared debt investment, or dogged nearly irrational pursuits in leverage and experimentation to get somewhere different. I'm "Owner's Club" and 48 shows left on the year different after building this space over the last 6 years. Shit has flown by. Yet I suspect my effort so far will still prove unpersuasive the next 6 years, like the blogs weren't persuasive before I found the land; and the conversations never took place about what to do with the chunks of study money.

"We're all addicted to something." If 1 in 10 addicts are ever going to stay sober, I think it's almost exactly the same psychological forces that dictate the 1 in 10 smart, empathetic, motivated, do-types to break from their internal dialogue and attempt to pair or match it with someone else. Although, the odds are even lower, because the pool of people is a tenth of the addict pool. I personally know 6, and the efforts we've made so far are still routinely undermined by "life," be it mental health concerns, or undermining and resentments within our own families. I should be flipping my next house, or seeing dozens of clients for a more-than-merely-living wage, or franchising my coffee shop, or rubbing elbows with all the rich successful types who appreciated my insight and enthusiasm at the prospect of getting them to write their own book.

But I'm not doing any of that. I'm here, alone, with the cats, dreading my easiest remote work day tomorrow. I put in a ton of job applications, when I could not get too distracted by the amount of spam email sign-ups and dead deceptive listings. I'm mourning the ease with which I carried my shoulders. The contrast has been striking as I'm thrust back into everyone's drama and emptiness crying out for daddy to make them all feel better. I know why your god flooded everything and let his kid get tortured. He didn't understand the suffering is built in to whether or not it's your creation.

If you're not creating something that constantly rediscovers gratitude and power and connection, you die. You crave death, turn the craving into something noble and worthy of worship, and retool the whole of conscious existence into variations of your death-cult thinking under the instantiated delusion that you won't suffer or will one day achieve eternal bliss.

Your god is a lie, and always has been. The story you've been telling yourself is full of more lies than you know how to identify because you're unwilling to do the work. You're sacrificing your potential, but you can't really conceive of your potential. You're silent until you're selfishly claiming to want empathy or to vent more than excuse yourself. Your god, be it magic sky-daddy rushing in to eventually make it all better, or other self-serving narrative about your value, intelligence, or perspective, it isn't a fart in the vacuum if someone isn't there to sniff, remark, and return fire.

 
My idea for "fixing things" or "changing the world" is to create $15-$20K versions of pop-up sustainable spots where anyone part of the initiative learns how to build, grow, and share in ways they're not used to, but feel better than what they're giving now. It's sustained via regular jobs, menial or otherwise, that we work to transition out of, if we want to, through capital experiments, or self-sustaining practices. You need land, not unlike mine, tools, not unlike what I already have, time, which we have considerably more of than we wish to believe, and some hard conversations about where to set up, who is responsible for what, budgeting, time-delays, catastrophes, time-frames, points of discomfort and sacrifice, and measurable metrics of success. I don't think you have to be errant dreamy hippies fucking off and flirting with tetanus.

I think every worry you bring to the table is valid, or you wouldn't have been invited to it at all. I think I've had every faith in what you're capable of for as long as I've been bitching, talking, or inviting. I think in the next 6 years, if I'm out of debt, if I'm working some job that doesn't make me feel hollow and angry, and if I've accumulated every thing, hobby, or skill I've earnestly thought to acquire, I have an extremely small expectation I will get there alone, and whether it's me and one other person, or me and a dozen, I know how I'm trending amidst the dumpster fire. Do you? Is what you're really after the mild incremental indulgences that accompany playing safe and selfish?

If I had all the money in the world tomorrow, the work remains the same. Do we have a clear enough idea of what it is? It's not look for daddy. It's not merely bemoan circumstances. It's not to get to every show. It's not compound self-serving narratives. It's not to worship the word "but." It's not to bitch to each other about how irrational or unfair or unsympathetic everyone in charge or around us is. It's not to get stuck in guilt for the wasted time or energy. It's not to voraciously charge towards idealistic exit strategies. It's not to pretend we're more emotionally stable or capable than we've proven so far. Whatever country you try to escape to is on the same doomed planet. Whatever job you take has a built-in bureaucracy. Your body is super acquainted with injuries and energy levels by now. Check back with me in 6 years, I guess.

[1037] Shake It Three Times

I'm so thankful. I made it to Chicago, twice, in my truck, and saw Troy Bond, Waterparks, and The Killers sandwiched between in Gary. The weather was fine. The roads didn't pop my tires. My truck didn't scrape the walls of a cramped parking garage. I got to hang out with Smash. I got to spend time with my dad. I got caught up on my TV shows. I cleaned and organized my car. I got great food and good beer. My cats didn't freak out while I was gone. I'm back home at 12:28 AM, wide awake after immediately falling asleep once I got settled in around 6.

I'm living a veritable fantasy in many regards. I'm healthy enough to travel, by myself, to expensive shows I can't technically afford, but no one really bats an eye at the debt figures or downplays their jealousy. I was able to see two of the shows because I work 2 days remotely. In almost exactly 48 hours I should be on a plane to Florida where I'll be gone for 6 days in the "Owner's Club" of Rockville and condo Brandy's parents have up the road. This is arguably the hardest I've ever gone in the "pure indulgence" vein, and I'm counting the party house given I wasn't spending thousands to scale what we were doing.

Big picture, there's a version of what I'm doing that sounds purely selfish and hedonistic. Aren't I worried about pick-your-existential crisis anymore? Don't I think, creepily deeply, that the crowds I surround myself with at shows are statistically full of the dumbest, saddest, and most self-destructive children the world could produce? I mean, they can afford the tickets and get to the venue. I'm often engaged in conversation with people who can't imagine themselves driving for 25 minutes to the nearest comedy club.

I have competing values, but they are anchored by time. I've felt, for most of my life, that time is very short. I've been able to slow it down by hyper-attenuating my experience of any given drama or question. I'm, hopefully, a living embodiment of just how much time we really do have, what can be done with it, and whether or not I can be doctor/astronaut/war hero, I can put up impressive stats on started struggling business ventures, shows consumed, hours behind various instruments, words read and written, miles driven, performances attended, and projects play-grounded. Nothing on that list spot-lit other people.

I read a blog written almost 15 years old where I'm talking about my "robot" or "analyzing" nature. I'm trying to explain why it's impossible to be "friends" with someone I can so easily manipulate. I'm imploring the, college crowd at that point, to not understand me as someone maliciously trying to play with them, just isolated in the knowledge that, in any moment, I can tell the temperature, and I can't understand why they can't. I've never really wanted to have this persistent distance, but it's as real and compelling a fact about my existence as I've ever discovered. It's not me "closing off" or "shutting down." I'm considerably less inclined to entertain the idea I'm a "psychopath" the more I've learned about autism.

I don't just "want" to do all the things I'm doing. I need it. I can't physically function when I come up against feeling too "stuck," be it in a relationship dynamic or a working environment. I need novelty. I need to render some notion of forward movement or progress into existence. I've been thinking about quitting my job. I've been thinking about seeing what I can unlock in myself when I give up the "freedom" to be half-remote 4 days a week to do more in service to my business or breach an entirely new field. I didn't go to school for social work. I didn't want to stay in school until I found a way to make most of my classes related to philosophy, history, and psychology. My innate ability to pick things up or play on familiar human patterns has been plaguing me my entire life. My nearly pathological ability to focus or obsess will manifest in literally any direction I point it, and invariably I will unlock new parts of my story I can't conceive of yet. Why am I not something like a sports-better after building psychological profiles on players and coaches and analyzing stories about their habits and relationships?

It's very weird to psychologically position yourself to fight comfort. I don't want to get set in my ways. I don't want to say, "You'll probably be too tired." There's no more a familiar and shared condition I observe across the people who annoy me the most. I went back and forth for days on whether I should get a ticket to Jeff Arcuri in Louisville the day before my flight. Wouldn't it be "responsible" to be closer to the airport, not spend the extra gas, not throw the logistics of doing your last group of the day into the mix etc.? I felt myself generating excuses to put distance between me and something I sincerely wanted to do. Fuck that, see you soon, Jeff. Let my truck break down on the way to the airport. That just means a touch more in credit card debt or annoying Byron or Hussain with a midnight phone call.

Time is running out, after all. The people who make me laugh or sing will all be memories eventually. I haven't regretted going to a single show. I haven't felt guilty about anything else I'm not spending my money on. I'm merely on the latest iteration of my mission to be what I wish to see. Will a super-fort, health insurance, or sense of community ever make it into the equation? I don't know, and I don't know if I really care or if it matters. Is the world burning down? It seems like it, but I don't really trust myself enough to catastrophize my thinking in how I wish to approach the premise.

I missed my house and worried about the cats. I feel like immediately falling asleep let me reclaim a sense of ownership and safety regarding the space I've built. I have so much to do the next few days. I have so much to spend, be awake for, read about, and drive to. I have so much.

[1036] I Hate You, You Hate Me

I've been listless. You wouldn't think to notice were I not saying it. I'm still "busy." I still work full time. I still see, or attempt to see, clients in service to my own business. I'm tending to my bills and house chores, though apparently not close enough to have enough replacement litter after meeting the scent of my house when I opened the door this evening.

Let's just start there. I came home after seeing Hussain and him showing me how my car needs an alignment after the work he's done. He's predictably frustrated with our therapist who can't be bothered to communicate with us why a 20 minute task is going on 3 weeks to complete. The car has needed $150 or so in parts, he doesn't charge me labor, but it also needs tires, which I just bought for $270. Add in the cat litter, air fresheners, toilet cleaner, and some other "house supplies" things, almost $400 of crap, not fun crap, not wholly-unnecessary crap, just crap to live, drive, and clean, is on the way. Also, all the bills email me at once. $106.50 for the internet, and finally a nice surprise a radically reduced $150 for my electricity as the weather has improved. $8 for my seedbox. and $800 to my home insurance company because I figured, why not keep the spending ball rolling and avoid installment fees? I've been home for approximately an hour, and it only took me 20 minutes to spend $1400, $1600 on the day if you add the IMAX movie, gas and food I bought earlier. I also discovered a leak in my roof, and the rubber tape I suspect I'll need to fix it, $50.

I didn't buy truck tires. I don't have kids. I didn't have to pay my insurance for the year all at once. I didn't have to spend an obscene $17 on a bacon, egg, and sausage sandwich and large vanilla latte. I didn't have to see a movie. I could cross my fingers and pray for a few more months regarding my tires or just replace the worst ones. Do I absolutely have to have $5 air freshener? Of course not. It's not that any one piece of my day can't be sacrificed, or excused for, or defended in the spirit of living once and simple pleasures. It's that the whole premise and project that I'm working within, in my view, is irreparably broken, so it all feels futile and arbitrary fundamentally.

I'm smart and did well in school, and it doesn't matter. I've worked myself near to death across various industries, and it doesn't matter. I've attempted to start my own business several times, and it doesn't matter. I've lived as broke and hermit-like as you could reasonably expect a person to live, and it hasn't mattered. I'm as honest as a person can get without it becoming pathological, and it doesn't matter. I can get all the praise and positive feedback in the world, and it doesn't matter. I can be as giving and forgiving as you'll ever find in life, and it doesn't matter. I can live without things like running water, working toilets, air conditioning, or a bed, and it doesn't matter. I can create as open and freely accessible environment to live easier, play, experiment, save, or create, and it doesn't matter.

Nothing I do fucking matters. I'm not going to get paid enough, I'm not going to get recognized. There is no reward at the top of the hill. I'm not maintaining my access to heaven. I'm not winning friends and influencing people. I'm just telling a story of a wretchedly ironic caricature of the hero's journey. Perhaps in an anime you'll see them training. Each session they level up, or after they nearly die fighting a bad guy, they unlock new powers and potential. In One Piece the truly destined get a conqueror's aura that can paralyze or incapacitate through sheer will. Everything they do matters. Everything contributes towards them building strength, a reputation, a team, and a story that will transcend any given life or death struggle.

When I say "it doesn't matter" I don't mean "there's no consequences." I'd rather be in my paradigm than my paradigm but a little dumber, a little poorer, a little sicker, a little less well-connected, or a little more psychologically at the behest of my mother. I mean for you to think that the answer to "Everything happens for a reason" is "Yeah, shitty, shitty reasons." My schooling was a joke designed to extract money. My job(s) over the years the same thing. The business environments I've attempted to work in keep the tradition going. I could blame a most-encapsulating notion of capitalism, but I prefer to not obscure the simple greed at bottom. It's the greed of "convenience fees" and "transfer fees" and "processing fees" and "installment fees" and creeping ever higher interest rates. It's the greed drawn from an infinite well of insecurity that what you've created and how isn't actually good for anyone, fulfilling, or a worthwhile expenditure of time.

We were watching Kitchen Nightmares. The failing kitchens were all filled with greedy people. Their lost loved one needed never be dealt with as "their heart was no longer in" keeping the business alive. Gordon Ramsay comes in, points out the obvious, but then also magically resolves years of trauma and resentments in neatly packaged 40 minute episodes. 21 out of 105 kitchens are still open. That is a 20% success rate. If you're on Suboxone, there's a 90% chance you will still relapse. 10% of 21 million addicts actually seek treatment. I can't tell you how 1-to-1 the parallels in the worst kitchens matched the language of many of my clients. You're only twice as likely to save your kitchen as you are to "beat" your addiction, which is resting comfortably at 10%.

It's the behavior. It's your behavior that's fucked up, that sets the conditions for indefinite failure. Whether you want on-the-nose examples like millions of votes for fascism, or the, somehow, "abstract" fallout of your perpetual silence about things that matter, no one can succeed under these conditions without heavily sacrificing things none of us should think are acceptable. Did I describe such an extravagant and wasteful existence above? It's the first time I've claimed to spend money on anything that wasn't concerts or comedy shows in a while. Would I, could I, should I have the money if I dialed back trips around the Midwest and $50-$200 ticket prices? Sure. I could also die tomorrow. I'm on the road a lot, and that's where a lot of people die.

Specifically, the bad, wrong, always-fucking-me behavior is the lies. It's the pleasantries, the pageantry, the omissions, the red tape, the "good luck," the "I've just," the positive feedback backed by no more money, access, freedom, or power. I'm lied to constantly. It's the thing I hear most often every week. It's every sentiment offered to pretend "things" are "better" than they are. It's hopes and wishes and dreams side-stepping even acknowledging there's a problem, let alone exchanging ways on how to fix it, let even more alone fix it in perpetuity. We don't know what we're aiming at, why, what it could feel like once we got there, or what we're to draw on as we project its impact into the future. We have children we don't want and then somehow don't viciously punish the ones who would rather they go neglected or hungry than aborted. We take jobs we don't want and buy shit we don't need because slavery has been rebranded and taken us out of the sun if we're not a beleaguered minority. We pretend your human rights should pair with your access to capital; yours, or what's been mostly subsidized by everyone else.

We just lie, all the time. We pretend to be mentally stable as we shower the internet in stupid fucking memes. We pretend to be financially stable provided we never get too sick or downplay our cortisol levels that pay for must-have insurance. I am the absolute last person who should ever be in debt for really any reason. I live alone, in a shed, in one of the most affordable states, with a job paying considerably more than you'll find nearly anywhere. Even before I made the decision to go to all of these shows, my year-to-year trending spending was showing getting ever-indebted. All I was doing was driving and eating and working and I was losing. Could I have made more meals for myself? Sure. Could I have invested in a more fuel-efficient vehicle or diligently searched for a job closer to home? Maybe. Should I be expected to, every waking minute of my fucking life contemplate what I could do without so I can tend to basic fucking necessities to feel like a normal fucking person?

We're addicted to these bullshit fucking stories, and the kitchen-owners among us, with some professional celebrity help, have a 1 in 5 shot of keeping the miserably misplaced dream alive. The addicts have a reliable and predictable A- shot of keeping us collectively spiraling down the bowl of our fragile ego. You're depressed. You're anxious. You're angry. You're alone. You've given up your creative and motivated vision of who you imagined you'd be right now. You're tired. You're fat. You're every word is to be taken as fluff. You don't answer the call. You don't listen to the voice that nags you. You don't own anything, especially not even the very fucking fact that you don't own anything! It's all gone as quickly as you, or the people after you, can click submit.

I've wondered if I should go back to school, or learn a trade, or double-down on my debt and approach my business and potential from some creative angles. I've wondered if I should commit to retightening the purse strings and see if I can actually get within a paycheck of being out of debt verses cling to the story of the "few months away" that isn't true-enough to adequately describe the ambivalence and forlorn frustration undergirding my behavior. I'm enjoying my shows, TV, comedy, and music. The drives can be a literal pain in the ass, but..."What else would I be doing?" I'm not a real person in the environments I'm forced to adapt to or die. Nothing about me or my idea or my potential means a goddamn thing. So I'm going to laugh as often as I can, disappear into as many fantasies about family or friendship that will have me, and shake my fucking hair hard enough that my neck is sore for a week. I'm going to eat the food I like, spend obscene amounts of money on band T-shirts, and tinker on professional-level instruments.

I'm just as selfish as the next person, but I don't have to lie about it. In fact, I'm more selfish. I won't just let you have the story of yourself or your behavior. I won't just let you keep the peace. I won't be like an episode of Frasier where I step into the room and immediately continue to run with the lie. An 11 season 264 episode show ran through the 90s into the early 2000s built on insufferable caricatures habitually lying to themselves and others, and yet they're rich! And love finds a way! And the memories serve to remind them. And it can all be diagnosed and addressed as neatly as Gordan can turn around a kitchen. This is the kind of thing our brains have trained on our entire lives. This is why you're looking for a Disney prince or princess instead of a partner to work with. This is why we can get so lost in our own assholes we can turn ideas about being accepting or "woke" into compelling parodies.

You're still confused after reading this. You think I'm under some illusion that I'm more "real" than you or have some special insight into the nature of your pain and reasoning that I don't. You think I'm performing and am looking for sympathy or attention. You don't understand what the work of attempting to cope with a suicidal environment looks like. You don't actually access the depths of how hopeless and lost and fucking angry I am pretty much all the time. You will literally discuss your own issues through a series of fucking pictures and emojis or ensure your mental health struggle PSA has the best pictures of your tits and meta-data-ready hashtags. You don't fucking get it because I'm not lying to you, so none of this translates. It never has. It never will. It doesn't matter to you or the environment we're plugged into. It's for me, so I don't kill you or myself. You would never! you exclaim as your murder porn drones in the background. You can't imagine? You have a "quirky" fascination? Drawn to glamorized depictions of death is as ironically Freudian as it gets. You don't have the time or inclination to learn what I mean by that, so let your brain insert a belabored caricature. Freud is as real to you as he is to Frasier.

You believe your version of events. I don't believe what I'm saying right now, it's just what I feel and think. Show me something more. I have this version of events combined with the 1030 I've written already and the ones still to come. What do you think? Sorry. Can you think? What do you feel? Considerably more hopeful and joyous and connected and appreciative of our environment than me? I'll never know, because you'll never say it. You'll perform it. You'll Snap-it and Insta-it. You won't have a so-so time. You won't recall how you regret not missing someone more you designated as "best." You won't weigh the evidence of your satisfaction or direction of your existence; you'll filter what you're even willing to count as evidence, and reiterate it over and over again for the internal judge already on the take.

What can I control in all of this? I can keep typing until I'm done. I can keep going to work, running up the credit card, limping through my next business goals, filling up the tank, eating what I want, and beating the shit out of the infinitely abstract "you" for all of your silence, indifference, lies, and pain you cause in ignoring any word, let alone line, that might speak as whispered echoes of what was your capacity for honesty. Dumb or smart, you can choose to lie. Rich or poor, the story of either is a magnificent tapestry of bigotry or prejudice, or a holistic accounting and presenting of opportunities to act in service to discrepancies. Tax the rich and pay for literally everything we could ever need, or don't. Differentiate "poor" from "entitled," or rage-watch talking heads debate either abstraction indefinitely. I'm not pointing my finger at anything or anyone, because nothing is there. You're not there. You don't exist. You don't matter. You just won't admit it like me.

[1035] Piggies Bank

As a thought experiment, I imagined having my debt paid off, and looking at $5000 in the bank. What then? Do I feel "safe" or "better" than if I'm in debt? Not even a little. A decent issue with my car, an illness, or a couple lump-sum insurance payments wipes that out immediately.

What do I want from any given moment? To feel like I'm doing approximately what I want, or have access to what I want if I'm not. I can work without all of the old issues of my old computer on this new one. When I want to practice the piano with weighted keys and build proper muscle memory, it's an arm's length away. If I'm curious why a graphic novel series is confidently 5 stars on Amazon, I glance to the books stacked on my speaker.

"Possibility," whatever we can make of the word, is the operative variable at the heart of my being. I fundamentally want to enable as many worthwhile and engaging possibilities as I can. I need that to be true. The job can't trap me. The "debt," if abstractly represented in the math, needs to be met with a conceptual framework to match equaling a result of "what's possible."

I'm going to Chicago tomorrow to celebrate the 20th anniversary of an album. It's Wednesday. It's possible to call off. It's possible to buy tickets, drive 4.5 hours, rock out, work remotely, and drive back for a comedy show the next afternoon. It's possible to get to Louisville and back the next day and Fort Wayne the day after that.

I talk to ~130 every week, some going on 11 months now. I hear constantly about restrictions and wishes and "it'd be nice" sentiments. Don't you understand? I'm busy. The kids. My job won't. My finances aren't where I want. Literally anything stands in for restricting possibility. When you close off your options, you don't learn new ways of coping or fixing the problems you encounter with a rigid mind. You don't know what's possible. You can't recognize what it sounds like. You don't have any real feel or sense that "possible" even exists.

I remember crying a lot as a kid in response to my mom. I did things I didn't understand, got responses that terrified me, stuck me in my shivering or pissing myself state. The "why" never materialized verbally, but the lack of an answer served to arrest anything I might access to change my perception of the situation. All I could do was cry. All I could do was stare and heave and hurt. This was my lot. This was my real. This underwrote my compulsive picking and tapping and inability to drop or stop anything from a videogame to some subject matter that might piss you off.

So many of us are locked into our terrified arrested childlike states. We know everything there is to know about what we can't do. We don't have the slightest concept of just how much is possible. We don't push ourselves past what we think we already know. We don't "independently learn" things that don't practically manifest as "do your own research." We're stuck, and when asked about how or whether we're free to move, get downright defensive you can't appreciate our rigorous squirm.

I don't know if a place exists where this accountable/unaccountable, excuses-ridden/reason building, yes we can/know your place favors the possibility-laden mindsets, but I know I need it more and more desperately each day. My practice is to relay my perspective as honestly as I feel it, build things I care about, travel to share in experiences, invite, encourage, and challenge to clarify and specify the infinitely abstract ways we trap ourselves. I'm not content to rest on "enjoy the ride" or "the work is the reward" ideas about this. I need more. I need a culture where I don't feel like I'm the only one doing the work of realizing what's possible.

Maybe it sounds incredibly selfish and judgmental. Maybe I'm just unable to hear how much genuine consequential hope may be manifest in the weekly accounts of how we're not quite ready to put more on our plates. Maybe I should borrow from the book of belaboring isolated positive examples to placate and downplay how I feel, never allowing the potential of my greedy sensibility for more to play out. Or maybe I'm right in a deeper way than I could ever speak to. Maybe more people should be like me in their own way and own lives, "but."

It's exhausting trying not to be as selfish and entitled as the environments I'm plugged into. My job and clients want to use me, not utilize who I am or what I know or how I might best work. My friends live their "functional" version of the addictive debilitating tendencies I'm trying to get my clients to interrupt and redirect. There's a, not dissimilar, sensibility in the pretentions of those in charge of "legitimizing" your ability to run a business or be deserving of enough money to live in terms removed from "sacrifice." Every hoop is justified "because." Every Ticketmaster fee "convenient" and perfectly reasonable.

I didn't expect to write this much. I just wanted to tell you I still don't care about my debt from a new angle. I'm not looking forward to trying to drive and park my truck in Chicago tomorrow, but I live in a paradigm where there's almost as many cars on the road as there are people, and you can't find one to last longer than 3 months before needing to be repaired if you don't want the kind of debt I can't psychologically write-off.

[1034] Sackboy

At some point, I just have to start this damn thing.

I mentioned to my supervisor that I analogize my work life to the amounts of proverbial shit I have to eat. Groups, while making me eat considerably less, still lets some shit rest on each bite. In an ideal situation, much as when I’m eating actual food, there’s no shit in it. I don’t mean trace amounts because we’re all covered in poo particles. I mean a noticeable, unnecessary smell, flavor, and consistency that poisons the fundamental nature of the meal. Driving 3 hours round trip in a truck, for 10 months now, to conduct a remote role, that’s shit. The shit consists of the sentiment, “Well, you’re technically a hybrid-role counselor. Yes, and you’re technically an out-patient clinic who happens to admit people you shouldn’t and betrays your pill-mill nature with some regularity.

I also recently spoke to my reoccurring dream of being, less “trapped” in a mall or big house, but sometimes I’ll find myself just looking for the exit, and I never find it. I have an idea of where it is, I speed walk my way to where I think I need to go, but then the hallway bends in a way I don’t recognize, or the stairs let me out to the wrong floor, or the final 50 feet extend and get bogged down with rows of obstruction.

My supervisor, in response to my shit-eating analogy said, “Well, nothing’s perfect, right?” I quickly retorted that I’m not after perfection, I just don’t want to eat shit. Whether I found the front door, or safely landed after jumping out of a window, I want to find the exit, and I’m irrationally trapped for what amounts to a lack of imagination or need to wake up.

A common sentiment from the people in Groups is about how they need the structure and accountability. I’m told fairly regularly that it’s appreciated when I, “call me on my shit.” The “shit” clients are referring to is the vague distance-building language they use to skirt past intentionally using a coping skill or engaging in self-care. It’s when they work themselves to death for people who don’t give a fuck about them and then they ask for a dose increase before trying to balance their day or setting a boundary. This is where I can never take credit for your sobriety, because a persistent boundary or a daily balanced practice are merely my suggestion after observation. You either do the work or not.

How do you obligate someone to the work of being their own source of structure and accountability? I implement literal accounting in mindfulness exercises. I hold my people to rules for how the group will be structured. You hold the line and wait. The longer you hold the line and wait, you get “institutionalized” psychologically. We’re the products of a lot of line-holders, healthily or unhealthily. It’s why I have a degree and nightmares in my 30s that I haven’t done my homework. It’s why most of the world, regardless of their health, status, or intelligence, is on some level paying the bills, staying alive, and using language that suggests no genuine desire to be a “leech.”

They’re much more fragile lines than we wish to believe. It’s only a decision away to violate a norm or create something with its own lines that challenges via its very existence. The trap people get into is believing they are establishing new norms or that they’ve created anything in the wake of their reaction to the current standard. To react, destroy, or protest is categorically different than building, protecting, and incorporating. One leaves you at the mercy or folly of what you’re reacting to. The other is filled with work and opportunities if only it can be recognized, maintained, and celebrated.

Work, in my experience, speaks for itself. I, pretty habitually, do as good if not the best job at whatever, at least in a professional context. I clean deeper when I’m scrubbing bathrooms. I’m efficient in my driving and notes. I manage time, people, and policy with ease. This keeps my name out of genuine contention about my value, for all it also conjures regarding my personality. I celebrate myself. I reward myself. I refuse to play along with nonsense when I don’t have to and I don’t lie to you or myself. I work to find the truth of the vagaries in my feelings and ambiguous nature of my motives. The blog, for the infinite amount of things it might say, will speak for itself when I’m done. I’m working.

I had a mild panic moment thinking about my spending. I almost forgot, at least bodily, that I’ve already done the math. When I did it again, I discovered that even including my bills for the rest of the year, all of my spending, driving, food, parking, shows, airfare, etc. amounts to just over one paycheck a month if I stay till the end of the year. If I radically dial back my spending, I’m still out of debt in 3.5 months. 98% of my debt is shows still to come, and my new computer. I, still, just don’t really care, even when my body wants to forget here and there.

I do feel trapped, which is nothing new. I’m trapped by the absurdities of my business relationships, the insurance fuckery and capitalism, and even the weather. A tornado blew away houses kinda like mine about 30 minutes away, so now I spend another $1,000 a year in insurance. I can’t make our therapist answer the phone or troubleshoot a login issue preventing us from moving forward to get empanelled with Medicaid and Medicare. I’m born to a country that doesn’t believe you should pay for anything related to health and goes out of its way to corrupt the systems that tried. Where’s the exit?

I suffocate on just immensely oppressive irony as well. You know how I’ll find a girlfriend? Get verbally and physically abusive. I’ll find someone willing to bail me out after I go to jail after we fight. I’ll find someone who in private will defend me and speak highly of how good and honest I am in how I contribute to working things out together. If I start gaslighting, the desire to have kids will overwhelm her. If I develop a drug habit, we’ll get a prime opportunity to discuss all we’ve overcome together. If I just cheat instead of look for a way to be open, she’ll cry that I’m not fucking her enough!

You have a lot of money? Cool, why don’t you use your position in life to back yourself into a corner that needs someone like me to prompt you to be mindful about how often you’re screaming at your loved ones. I hope your newfound peace and clarity will allow you to thrive. God knows I’m not working to open my pool, fixing up my side-project house, or getting together with my extended family that doesn’t try to eat each other alive.

My most panicked and desperate friends will occasionally reach out to me, either looking for solidarity of the sort I’m often unable to provide, or because they know, in fact, how I will respond and then that can be used as the pretext for lashing out. It’s very weird. I can tell they can’t tell they’re doing it, but in magnificent feats of irony, the once (for “fun”) time I might ask for help (or hell, lunch), it’s crickets, excuses, distracted distance, or inevitably wholesale silence if not outright banishment. It’s pretty crazy-making actually, and I think it speaks to why I’m so enthralled with compelling messy family depictions on TV. Do I really wanna be one of the Shameless characters? Fuck no. Do I want to be on the verge of death wandering about the ‘verse? (if you know, you know.) Again, fuck no.

We don’t see what we have. You might profess to want structure and accountability, but it’s baked into what you’re doing, or not, already. You have to look for it. You have to know what it sounds like and speak the truth of it into the world. If I carried on, you might get the impression I’m envious or jealous of the people I see living with relative blindness to the nature of their different privileges. I’m lucky enough to know it’s not about me or them though. We’re all plugged into the inescapable. There is no exit, and the task is to make peace with wandering around. You can wander with an abusive partner, all the money in the world, or with a series of habits that serve to distract, but you can’t not wander unless you choose to stop, set up camp, and draw a line.

I have a lot of lines. Probably more than can be accounted for, but they come through when I write. I’m not going to get caught up in lies. I can’t think straight, feel good, plan, stay organized, be righteously indignant, or care about literally anything if I can’t find as true an understanding of something as I might. You get up and arms about the issue of the day? I’ll keep asking the annoying question until you remove yourself from the reactive space. I think J.K. Rowling is running that program at present. I pay attention when my body crosses lines and explore why. I’m willing and practicing the habit of asking if new ones need to be created and if I’ve crossed one.

I’m not going to be pushed at work into a space where every time my phone goes off I feel stressed or performatively sigh. I’m not going to let my finances get lost in a sea of favors or sentimentality. My cats aren’t guaranteed a spot in my lap. Everything I’ve achieved so far, and plan to get in the future, has been me building the kind of environment in which I hope to thrive. I get to make the drives to my shows, I don’t “have to.” I get to build on my land. I get to play, read, and watch what I want as I please. My conversations about my business are about what meetings I can get invited to, not “If I had my own, I could…” I have my own, and I do.

There’s $700 sitting in my account that wasn’t there a month and a half ago. I’ve spoken with most of the surrounding probation departments (those people are incredibly hard to get on the phone.) I’m showing up on provider lists and getting called. The larger context is still a series of larger mouthfuls of shit, but there’s my miraculous unsullied seed waiting to sprout. The watering can, soil, air, and gardener are all covered in shit, but the work and the ideas that allow the seed to grow form the protective lines worth holding.

It's incredibly lonely, but not lonelier than playing dress-up and pretend. I can make peace with my missing perspective regarding the relationships I thought I was forging. I’ll run on the fumes of my spite until it kills me. It’s movie-magic that puts the whole crew or family on the same page. It’s fake. It’s not something to aspire to what you see on screen, anymore than it is to aspire to the cartoonish mythologies that plague pathological families and religious ideologies. You’re working regardless. Either to normalize shit-eating, sound-making (a lot like saying words, but not quite), and distancing from even the memory of what it takes to be an accountable world builder.