Deviant Rambling

Today’s word of the day from dictionary.com:

It’s a word I aspire to on a daily basis. It is the basis of this entire space. It’s a good one.

I want to write for a living. I want to obsess over words and their proper usage. This has no particular direction, I’m happy to write about almost anything. What I am not sure of is how to make money at this without also selling something of who I am.

Ads make me scowl and I feel like any amount of them in this space betrays the purpose of the space. As such, this site will always remain ad free. I am referring to the in-line types that are only successful with traffic and click-through, and are catered to whatever the person already wants. I’d feel complicit if my site sent them to spend money they might not have on something the didn’t need. That is an absolute non-starter so it’s out. (This is the simplest way to monetize but is also the one that makes me the sickest.)

Paid sponsorships are another option but you need a large audience and something you feel strongly enough to advertise for. Due to the lack of consumer motivations I have, I’m not a good candidate for this. I’ve had hobbies that this would have served, but my motivations would have been completely selfish. (Free shit to work on projects.)

Affiliate marketing is an option if you have a product or service that you believe in and would be willing to send your users through your affiliate link to pick whatever it is up. This is similar to traditional click-through ads to me, fundamentally. It feels more personal because you share the link through your name, so it’s associated with you. But that puts pressure on you for the performance of the affiliate’s product the same way ads do.

Is there any money to be had to teach people to just be themselves and pull zero punches? I’m not sure, but that’s the dream. Light fires under asses to get people to their best life. A foul-mouthed coach who refuses to let people settle for less than they are worth. That would be me. Maybe it’s as simple as that? (As impossible as that actually sounds.)

When I was turning one year old, I was spending the time in the hospital with an infection in my left hip joint. This infection had become so serious that it required surgical intervention to remove from the affected areas.

Surgery in 1983 was not what it is today. Because of this fact, I received one of my first scars. For the rest of my life, I’d have a pocket sized incision across my left butt cheek. It’s part of the reason I have always been able to laugh at myself.

Throughout my lifetime up until my 30s, I did my best to work around my injury. As 2015 came along, it became clear to me that it was time to think about getting my hip fixed. At the age of 32, I made the decision to have total hip replacement. The pain in my hip joint had become a daily occurrence and was debilitating. I was losing sleep, and I was becoming irritable, borderline volatile at times. I’ve always believed that pain transforms a person into an unrecognizable monster and I had become such a monster.

In the months leading up to meeting with my surgeon and at last replacing the hip, I ramped up the over the counter pain meds to several every day. In the last month before my surgery, I was able to acquire more serious pain medication and dragged my limping ass to the finish line. I knew this was no way to live.

The x-ray image did my condition no justice but it went a long way to explain my pronounced limp:

The disparity in length between my two legs had grown (shrank?) to 2.5 inches. Since the ball of my left femur was essentially missing, it wasn’t hard to imagine this figure. It still seems insane to this day, though.

On August 10, 2015, I was on my way to surgery. I remember the day almost entirely, save for the several hours of blissful ignorance in the operating room. There really aren’t enough good things to say about modern anesthesia. 10/10 would recommend. I was and have never been afraid of going under. It’s always been hard for me to understand why people are so terrified of it. If I died while I was under, I’d have never known anyway.

As the world came rushing back into focus in the recovery area, the room was filled with a team. This is the surgical staff, attending to my various needs. Just as I notice these people, one of them notices me shaking. “Are you cold? You’re shaking.” I managed to muster enough energy to say “Ten.” She knew I was conveying my pain level and the next time I woke up, I was in my room. After the fact I understand that this was the pain of the surgery itself. All of the associated “digging around” and the removal of bone will push a person to their threshold.

I understood that the recovery would be a potentially long and winding road. The pain I had come to know as part of me was now gone, and I wasn’t afraid of any road. All of the pain I had grown accustomed to over 30 years was now the past.

If you’re a candidate for total hip replacement and have any second thoughts whatsoever please allow my story to serve as confirmation that you should do it. I have seldom known the joy I experienced when I knew I would never experience that pain again. I’m here to tell you that miracles are real and they are the product of modern science.

I have taken to using a clean room as an analogy for the mind. If you can make a room free from clutter, it can be used to best effect for it’s true purpose. Just as one might clean a physical room, one can clean the mind. In both cases, it allows the space to be utilized as intended.

With the instance of a clean physical room, it can then be used to create and foster memories, a valuable possession. Or if the room serves a function, such as the kitchen, or a bathroom, those functions will be highlighted and welcoming, without distraction. There is something truly satisfying with the effort to bring such places to a state of clean.

So too, with the mind. When you manage to clear the mind of the daily and existential clutters, it becomes a hospitable place to live. Since this is where you must truly live at all times, this becomes a worthwhile effort. As with cleaning in the real sense, I have found the best approach to be one of daily observation and concerted effort.

In my physical environment, I go out of my way to maintain order. Paradoxically, in my mental environment, chaos reigns supreme at times. This chaos seems to be how my mind assembles the problems within me, immediately surrounding me, and those of the world at large. Somehow, through this apparent chaos, I find a trail of meaning, breadcrumbs of truth while I search for something to truly sate my hunger. The payoff is worth the doubt, in theory, so I allow my mind to shift in and out of this position as it seems inclined to do.

On the outside, however, I appear stoic; unemotional. There is some truth to this, as I wish to free myself from desire, and that appears as a resignation. I can’t help but manifest this in my outward appearance. It isn’t up to me to judge this appearance, though. The eye of the beholder is the only one who can form such a judgment.

The chaos in my mind is not the same as the kind found in a messy living space. Whereas the space in a living room might seem indicative of a bomb going off, the space in my mind seems to be a special sort of bomb. When the debris of thought explosions lands, it lands in categorized piles. It is these piles that seem to be in nonsense order. But there is space between the piles, and the space doesn’t seem entirely random either. My mind makes active attempts to assign value to everything. My perception of relative value shifts, and items are removed as no longer having value. This does make me wonder how many items have been removed throughout my life based solely on this gut-check response, and how many of them might have had unseen facets to remain that way forever. Is this some out of control version of the fear of missing out? As I move along in time I seek wisdom so that I can allow the discarded items to be truly discarded.

Part of me will always wonder, and it’s the same part of me that embraces the chaos which is so frequent in my headspace. Order matters to me in my physical space, because it provides the most freedom for my mind to be whatever it will be at all times. My actions to correct this perceived, real-world chaos may appear autonomous because they truly are. My mind picks up on cues that I have established as disorder, and it pushes the body to act. It feels at once proactive and reactive. There seem to be two minds at play, but both push to achieve order. The chaos mind pushes the keys, the order mind makes sure they get put away when I’m done. Allowing them both to have a voice is as close as I believe I can get to a true say in any matter.

Yesterday was a full-on creative push and today I feel much less of that energy. I am aiming for a sustainable level of this but am more inclined to peaks and valleys. Getting to this space to say how today is going might be all of the creative energy I focus today. Practical projects were more on the list today.

A storm blew through last night and knocked a ton of loose shit out of trees that littered the yard today. I spent a couple hours cleaning it all up then noticed a part of a down tree in the alley so I chopped it up and binned it as well. It’s not necessarily creative but it is practically useful.

Going to sit with my thoughts for a while and see if I can drum up any particular direction to aim for the rest of my day.

Take away the teeth and claws.
Make the thing defenseless.
All the primal remnants discarded.
Now you’ll have an acceptable animal.
Docile, obedient, playing at social.
Baser instincts may be suppressed but are never gone.
The lizard brain only demands survival and will do so by any means.
No matter how much costumed posturing we do, we are all still just beasts, capable of depravity.
It is just a matter of when and what is in the way.
Honor your monstrous nature.
If anything gets in the way, kill it.

Scrolling through the news this morning I came across an article outlining a new package of legislation regarding climate change. As I began to wade through the morass of details about the potential bill I could feel my eyes glazing over and my attention being sapped by anything and everything else. The feeling that took over must be the most powerful tool in Washington: making the average person feel like they aren’t smart enough to understand the details of a bill.

This feeling is insidious. It immediately makes me want to check out and just assume that any action with the words “billions” and “climate change” that is generally affirmative in tone is a step in the right direction. But this could just be a trick of the language.

Will I read the entire text of this proposal? Hell no.
Should I? Probably.

I know that the puppets in Washington are banking on this complacency. Given the very clear and present dangers of a recession and inflation, the climate feels like a problem completely out of reach to me. How can I possibly spare figurative energy to contribute to a conversation about the literal energy problem?

This makes me wonder how many times I have had to make this trade off in my adult life. The amount of cultural disturbances that have occurred in my lifetime is significant. There has been pain and suffering on a societal level. Every time it feels like we have reached an all-time low, the bottom drops out and we plummet further. Just making it through day to day life can feel like a struggle. Knowing that the climate will eventually kill all of us just looms as the unavoidable leviathan that we have created..

Could we all do more to help? Sure. The cost for doing so will be our lives and livelihoods. The agreement many of us in is one with print too fine to read. We were sold the idea that the people in charge had our interests in mind when we elected them.

Any amount of observation during an election year (Like this one…) proves this idea is sleight of hand. Get in power, stay in power, make your money, and repeat until you can’t win the popularity contest any more or you can retire comfortably. It is a world completely insulated from the real one the rest of us experience. This false sense of security occasionally gets disturbed and it feels like change is coming through traditionally violent channels, but then we all concede again.

As I left the article in question behind in favor of more interesting matters, I felt this concession keenly. It felt as though I was conceding a planet, because in some far flung sense, I was. The idea that we might accelerate to some inevitable cataclysm seems like a foregone conclusion. Our arrogance knows no bounds. But the planet is a living thing and will fight to survive. We will just be another casualty in a decorated history of trial and error.

We are making headlines through our dedication to setting the clock back 50 years. There’s a case of a 10 year old child from Ohio coming to Indiana to get an abortion because she was raped. Let’s just get this part out of the way now: If this isn’t an exception to the rule then stop pretending you have welfare in mind at all.

But they didn’t bother pretending. The state’s AG immediately called the record of the physician into question publicly. Joke’s on that asshole, though. The physician who had the unenviable task of providing an abortion for a 10 year old has a completely spotless record. Don’t think for one second that the AG will stop with this one instance, though. This was an opening salvo in a war against choice.

Can we just stop for a second and restate the facts real quick?

A 10 year old girl was raped by a 27 year old man. The 10 year old girl had the incredible misfortune of then becoming pregnant. At 10. It is a personal tragedy on a scale I’ve never witnessed. The suffering surrounding this is potentially insurmountable for everyone immediately involved. What happened after the discovery of the pregnancy was frankly none of our business but thanks to the national conversation, that very personal information is entirely public.

The fact that I am even harping on this information is a sign that something is terribly wrong. I shouldn’t have the information because no one should.

Now circle back to the political aspect of this shit show. As is tradition, the Bible-thumping super-conservatives are saying that the pregnancy should have been carried to term. Just what in the actual fuck is going through the minds of these people? IT’S A 10 YEAR OLD GIRL YOU FUCKING LUNATICS. Do you think this was just an accident among two consenting adults? It was a crime, perpetrated against a child. Her life is likely already ruined because of the fallout, but it 100% would have been ruined if she had been forced to carry to term. That’s if she didn’t just die outright.

Some of the same people who say the child should have carried to term are responsible for helping draft legislation to make abortion completely illegal in Indiana. There are proposed exceptions to the rule due to rape and incest cases but both of those should have a gigantic asterisk.

* – Only available to those who pursue an abortion within 8-12 weeks of conception. (I’m paraphrasing the wording here, the actual text is infuriating.)

That’s right. Even in cases of rape or incest, there will be a running clock on when a person can receive an abortion. In the proposed range, a person might have zero idea that they are pregnant. Nevermind the fact that they may still be processing a life shattering, traumatic event. I suppose the sanctity of life doesn’t apply to the person who has their life destroyed by the aforementioned rape or incest, though, does it? Come down off the cross, we need the wood for the fire that’s sure to follow.

There may be more than one nice day this week… More opportunities to get out and do some work around the house. I have officially become old because I look forward to it.

Won’t be long before I pick up some New Balance shoes, white tube socks, and jean shorts. I’m on my way to becoming a suburban dad without any kids to worry about. Going to have to start yelling at neighborhood kids and complaining about the volume of people’s music.

Better get to it. *dad stretch and groan*

Up at a reasonable hour today and got quite a few things done. For the first time in a minute, I feel as though I accomplished something today. It is all just stuff around the yard/home but it provides for a better environment so it’s a nice series of small victories.

Today was an unseasonably mild day with a nice breeze. This is ideal weather to get things done. Felt like fall this morning and it makes me wish it were here. But then we’ll be on our way to winter and hard pressed to find any daylight.

Take the good days when you have them.