Deviant Rambling

Today is a quiet day, save for the welcome, rhythmic tapping of rain on the sill.
Steady showers put me in a mind of gratitude.
As I see the rain, I see the world spring to life in response.
The dry time has ended, if momentarily.
It reminds me how desperately the West needs this life-giving bounty we are experiencing.
Some of my favorite places in this country I call home are experiencing a drought of unprecedented magnitude.
We have the means and capable humans to alleviate this scenario, but the arrogance to say it isn’t really a problem. Or worse, it isn’t OUR problem, because we don’t live there.
But we do live there. It’s in the same big, beautiful country we call home.
I want the West to have some of what we do, so they can continue to be who they are. A collective insanity prevents it from happening, and sooner than later, millions will have to migrate east.
A problem that took generations to become undeniable was completely avoidable.
I’ll have my memories of those vast and vacant landscapes all of my days. I cherish them as the treasure they are.
I want to collect new memories and stories, and it is my sincere hope that we all collectively lend a hand and make the collection of such memories possible.

I have stumbled upon a phrase that took hold in my mind earlier this morning, the concept of “Gainful unemployment”. The known saying is to describe someone as being gainfully employed. This would describe someone who has taken a traditional 9-5 job and is, by some measure, a productive part of society.

I am gainfully unemployed. I do not work in the traditional, 9-5 sense, and I am a productive part of my corner of society. I value my time so much that the idea of trading the traditional amount of it for money puts me off fundamentally. I accept that my opting out of a traditional life paints me with a broad brush. I alone will bear the weight of this decision, and I expect nothing from anyone. I will make my way as I see fit, and my success or failure is entirely up to me. It’s simultaneously invigorating and daunting to live this out in practice, but I honestly couldn’t live any other way. Working for myself my entire adult life has broken any chance I had at having a traditional career. That is never going to happen.

So long as I have what I need, can help the ones I love, and spend my time doing what I want, when I want, then it will be a life well lived. Standards are made to be challenged, and I have nothing better to do than issue the challenge. I own the outcome, I own my life.

Being gainfully unemployed gives a person a blank slate nearly every day to work with. I find myself staring at this blank slate today and feel the need to do something. It seems that my ability to come to a complete stop doesn’t exist.

The beauty of my place in life is that whatever I choose to occupy the slate can be entirely for the joy of it. There will come a time where the practical need for money will present itself again but I won’t need much to stay content. I have abandoned several iterations of the American dream as pipe dreams. All of those dreams are centered upon ownership of things and are thus impossibly low on my priorities list.

Experiences still matter and all practical efforts are to afford me more in this category alone. Necessities first, experiences second, essentially to the exclusion of all other things.

I can feel myself being tugged in the direction of picking up some drum sticks again. My hands have been tapping rudiments without much conscious effort and I want there to be more noise when I do it.

As always, issues of logistics arise. Unlike most hobbies/passions, drums take up physical space and practice is incredibly noisy. So noisy, in fact, that just keeping them in the basement isn’t enough, you basically need to treat the entire area for soundproofing too, or the home will be a rattling mess. Can’t deny the pull I’m experiencing but also have to be realistic since I live in a city now. Even though it is in a home with a basement, I want to be courteous to everyone involved. This is a passion that goes to the backburner often for these reasons. Hard to justify all of the changes that would need to be made to play. Doesn’t stop me from wanting to drop everything and do it.

Something is wrong with me, I swear. This avenue keeps presenting itself and I go fully at it for a while then let life get in the way. I should just deny life when it tries and go for it, but it’s hard to do.

Cleared out some more of the debris from a past life yesterday and with it, a sense of relief for the bargain. I still feel shackled to that old life, but minimally so. It makes me wonder what complete freedom from it will look like, as I’ve yet to feel it.

Every progress forward includes a little windfall of creative energy that I wish to harness but it goes in all directions instead of retaining any sort of focus. Perhaps this is just the nature of my form of creativity. Where it is boundless and limitless, it is, at times, truly chaotic and out of order. All directions look promising, so decision becomes a matter of impulse. “What feels right today?” is the question that crops up daily. I have the freedom to answer it differently every day and the success or failure of that answer only truly affects me. That is liberating to know, and none-the-less daunting.

Building anything from randomness can seem impossible when you’re just looking at a pile of creative material. Sure it’s creative, but it’s a pile.

I suppose that was the entire purpose of this space, though. Allow my stream of consciousness a place to roam free, unbound by the constraints of the practical. A useful exercise and effective outlet.

There are some people that take years to orchestrate their death in the most elaborate fashion imaginable. This happens to be the path someone very close to me is on. A nearly endless battle against addiction has run the body ragged and I suspect we will lose him sooner than later.

The clinical diagnosis handed down last year was that of congestive heart failure with the general advice to stop doing everything that is currently habitual or be dead imminently. This was in the 4th quarter of 2021. It is now into the 2nd half of 2022 and the aforementioned habits haven’t stopped. Somehow, neither has the life.

So we are all in some form of holding pattern. A cruel waiting game for those among us who aren’t detached from it all as I am. I am grateful to be unburdened by this situation, having dropped this baggage years prior out of self-preservation. It’s a shame but not at all a surprise.

For whatever reason, my brain is completely awake at 4:00 A.M. and compelling me to spill whatever comes to mind on here. There is no subject matter driving this deluge, just pure word soup.

Now a game of definitions, since my mind seems dead set on me reminding myself: sophists. What is a sophist? Off to dictionary.com to find out…

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/sophist

So it is near what I thought it was. I consider myself somewhat of a sophist, but the mere act of considering my place in the universe applies the label.

Since this will be entirely tangential, the dictionary.com Word of the Day feature has been noteworthy over the past week. I believe there may be some fellow deviants on staff… Since the Supreme Court has decided to set the clock back 50 years, the words of the day have been, in order: fortuitous, prerogative, opprobrious, choice, dissent, draconian, autonomy. I may be digging for clues but the list seems thematic… In any matter, it only bolsters my approval of them as my preferred purveyors of word porn.

The decision handed down by one of our most hallowed institutions is one that I am still trying to unpack, perhaps completely in vain. It would seem as though the vocal minority has, at long last, become loud enough to smother all reasonable conversation.

Look, I get it.

I’ve been so consumed by a concept that to be told it was false was akin to telling a Christian there is no god. It hasn’t happened often but when it did it felt like structural damage. When this kind of realization happens it is structural. Something underneath a cherished ideal has broken. In this instance, the ideal that life has sanctity. But unpack that one notion, logically speaking, within the context of modern conservatism. The same conservatism that avidly supports carrying firearms openly in public, unironically advocates for the death penalty, and finds social programs to be equivalent to communism.

Certainly those three points alone should be sufficient, plain sight evidence that it’s impossible to square a pro-life position with the other baggage it is almost sure to carry. Maybe you’re a stickler for details though, and you need more counterpoints for the argument. No problem, modern conservatism is chock full of hypocrisy.

The same folks who are rabidly pro-life are anti-immigration. The cries of foul don’t apply to the security of our borders, apparently. There is a xenophobia underpinning this in nearly every conceivable context. It’s never hard to spot either, just look for phrases such as “I’m not a racist, but:” and “They’re taking all of the jobs.” 1.) Yes you are, and: 2.) Open employment and unemployment figures say you’re full of shit. Own the position. If you’re going to be a gun-carrying, death is on the table as a punishment, not in my back yard conservative, be that loudly, or not at all. Helps point you out to the rest of us.
American exceptionalism is simply a fact that you have to accept at face value. Despite the preponderance of evidence that we are fairly far from the top on nearly every metric of liberty. A cage can feel free if it’s big enough to stretch out in. Entirely too many people are held prisoner by this false notion, but it can be nearly impossible to be shaken from this blissful ignorance.

It must be the nature of every United States citizen to be rebellious in some way, and I am no exception to this. I post this a few days before the most ‘MERICAN of holidays, a day dedicated to when we officially stole a tract of dirt and water from the British. But we own it as much as they do, which is to say not at all. We are living borrowed time on borrowed soil. In any meaningful scale of time, this experiment in democracy will seem like a cute little human nothing. Because it is nothing. It is a self-serving, self-congratulatory pat on the back. This place isn’t special, the founders weren’t special, and the British weren’t especially bothered when we told them to piss off. What made us different were ideas, but ideas can and must be questioned. Ideas must be held in the crucible of time ad infinitum. Our responsibility, a truly patriotic duty, is to question what the founders presented as fact in modern context. It has been the responsibility of every generation since we were founded as a nation and the generations of my lifetime should be no exception.

But I fear for those among us who see the writing on the wall: Context has been abandoned entirely. The space once occupied by nuance and an ability to maintain positive discourse has had the air pushed from it. Our living documents are being laid to rest by people who want to kill conversation, because conversation inevitably raises questions, and questions demand an accounting. The rug we continue to sweep problems under is 1,776 feet tall, it’s colloquially called the Freedom Tower, and it looks a lot like a middle finger to the rest of the world. Because we stopped wanting to be a part of that world a long time ago.

The last post made was a lashing out that needed to be done. It was cathartic and it was easy because it comes from a position of relative safety. But it was a treatise for anyone and everyone who can’t speak from the safety I occupy.

Being a straight, white, man gives me incredible insulation. It also makes me feel the need to use this dumb luck to help others who didn’t draw a similar straw. It is hard to know where to even begin because I am often seen as enemy from the outset but the truth is, I’m much more of an enemy to the conservative folks of the world than the liberal ones. Where we stand in time forces us all to commit and I am very firmly planted left of center socially speaking.

That doesn’t make me a Democrat.

Since we are forced to betray ourselves about every opinion, I am fiscally conservative, believing that the government fucks up every chance to help people so it’s best left out of their hands. All the while I believe the social safety net is woefully underfunded and don’t honestly think I will ever see Social Security.

That doesn’t make me a Republican.

All of my beliefs combined place me as some form of left-leaning-Libertarian, which just doesn’t exist at all. At best, this makes my voice disruptive to the status quo. At worst, this makes me seem like an anarchist, which I am definitely not. If Anarchy were to actually occur in the U.S., we would be The Purge full time for a matter of years. That’s how far off balance we’ve been thrown.

But again, that’s the view from my pulpit of privilege, the one that I gladly give to anyone who needs the boost.

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned a decision that had been precedent for nearly 50 years. The moment it happened, I felt a complete shift in my basic beliefs about my country. I already had a low level of confidence but with one act, that confidence completely evaporated.

We have been heading the wrong direction for years but when Roe v. Wade was overturned, we found a new low. This is an insult to women. This is an insult to any rational human being. This is a giant step backwards for civil liberty. It begs the question: What’s next? Are we going to ban women from voting again? Are we going to make same sex marriage illegal again? Is contraception going to be criminalized in some way? Will we re-segregate? Before Jun 24, 2022, I’d have considered these ideas to be akin to conspiracy theory, but the moment that ink dried, I believe nothing is out of bounds now.

Seriously.

Who the hell are we as a nation now that we allowed this to happen? How have we allowed any part of our government to intervene in such a way? How is this issue any of their fucking business whatsoever? The questions are innumerable and unanswerable. We should all be in D.C. right now, refusing to be quiet. Refusing to fall for the dream we are all sold from early on in life, that this is the greatest country on earth and that we’re lucky to be a part of it. I’m calling bullshit.

It’s easy for someone like me, a white man, to be a part of it. But if you don’t happen to fall into that category, they’re coming for your rights and there is honestly no telling what will be next.

Taking the past few months off to evaluate my place in the world has given me ample opportunity to determine what money actually is to me. I have the traditional understanding of what it is meant to be used for hard wired and sufficiently tangled with my sense of self worth. This time has given me the chance to see this entanglement is unnecessary.

Like so many of us, I’ve given money entirely too much power over who I am and where perceived value lies. Now I am deliberately separating money the thing from value the concept and seeing that they have little to do with one another. Approaching 40 years of indoctrination as to what money is and it has become clear that I’ve spent my entire adult life being tricked into believing it matters when it doesn’t. This sets me up for an absolute truck load of worldly failure but I’ve done all of the thought experiments to see where the dust settles and it’s nothing that will kill me. In fact, down many of these roads, there is an overarching sense of peace. A tranquil stroll, free from the persistent drive to get more for the sake of it.

Balance has become a theme for what achievement looks like in my world. In order to find something approaching this balance, I first need to unload all of the traditional ways of thinking. This will take time but it is time I have and am willing to trade for the bargain.