Deviant Rambling

After a year and a half of fairly consistent writing work coming my way, I experienced something of a drought the past few weeks. It occurs to me at this time that I haven’t diversified enough in terms of clients and that is the risk you run. If the work slows down for your main client, you’re just kind of left to figure it out.

The freelance life is certainly not for everyone, and I’m only able to do it because of my living situation. It’s been a while since I had to consider what other lives I might think about leading and now that I have an assignment again I don’t have to consider such things.

Feeling the crunch makes everything feel like doom and gloom, and I could also do without those feelings. But I make money doing what I’m good at, and that is worth so much more than anything else I could be doing with my time.

The version of me from a week ago that stumbled upon the sports cards was so naive… After beginning to catalog and prepare a spreadsheet of all of these cards, I realize the truly massive scale of the task.

There are more than 10,000 cards here, with more than half being worth essentially nothing. The ones that do have value only possess the value if they are graded, which costs anywhere between fifteen to hundreds of dollars depending on the card.

The nostalgia I was feeling last week is gone and now I’m just left with the burdensome parts. I have help but I don’t want to spend months on this if I can help it. I know that if I took the time to do this card by card it could take years and I don’t want it to take anywhere near that long. I started this to clean up some space and until they are sold the space is still occupied, just moving to different spots around the house.

Seeing the ridiculous number of people out there who have done the exact same thing and are now trying to sell their collections for pennies on the dollar makes me want to find out the total possible value and list them all as one thing. Winner take all, and I know I’ll get taken advantage of but they cost me nothing except all of the time I’m gonna spend to make the spreadsheets.

I guess it’s something to do with my time, but this isn’t what I had in mind.

I’m not exactly sure when she got them, but my mom picked up a bunch of old baseball, basketball, and football cards from the 70s all the way to the early 2000s. They have just been sitting in the basement collecting dust and I figured what the hell, might as well see if anything of worth is in there.

So I start looking through sheet after sheet of these cards and I felt childhood memories flooding my brain. Then I began to remember familiar smells, and the way they were visually appealing or in some instances, hideous. All of it was positive and as I flipped through more and more memories, I couldn’t help but chuckle to recall how obsessed I was with the cards as a kid.

Since that time, I have had other all-consuming hobbies that were an equal obsession, and just like the sports cards, eventually became boring or no longer interested me. I have since grown to hate sports entirely, having seen people devote their entire lives to following a team. I see it all as a complete waste of time and money, but the memories remain intact and pleasant. It is a rare thing indeed to happen upon a childhood memory that captivates you in the way that seeing these cards did, and I appreciate that I can still access all the joy they gave me.

Now that I am an adult, I see that there may be market value to some of them, and I’ve set about the task of finding the cards I know will be worth something. There is a whole world of collectors that I have no interest in joining and learning all of the tricks of the trade with, so I’m sure I’ll get taken advantage of. But I don’t care, it will be 100% profit and it will help clean up more of the clutter around here.

Today I decided to purge some of the projects that I intended to complete but never got around to. That old saying about being willing to kill your darlings applied all the way through on one of these projects, but after spending zero time on it in months, I committed it to the beyond with fire. I started it over two years ago when my father passed away but I am now a completely different person than I was then, and it no longer spoke to me.

I incorrectly assumed that torching this project would cause me some kind of psychological torment but nothing of the sort happened. That is how I know it was time to let it go, the act of burning it felt like nothing at all. Just more garbage that I didn’t need to be in my way and now it is gone.

As it burned, any and all potential feelings I may have had, good or bad, vanished into the thick, hot air around it. I played some tunes that dad would have enjoyed in his honor and as the ashes piled up, I came to the realization that this was the intended completion of this project anyway. From the start of this, I had every intention of burning the project as an effigy. I was waiting for some grand sign from the universe that it was time and when no sign came, I took that as the sign.

I have mourned completely, and left a part of myself in the flammable eulogy I set ablaze today. Some words are never meant for the light of day and those that wrapped this project have been returned from the source that I pulled them from. I hope that someone else stumbles upon them through a chance encounter and finds them meaningful in their time of need.

Yesterday, Donald J. Trump, former president of the United States, was convicted of 34 different charges. It was the first time a former president has ever been convicted of any crimes, and it doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of his criminality.

Despite my best efforts to avoid the news, there was no way I was getting through that day without finding out about this unprecedented story. I am still forming my opinion on how I feel about this, but so far it is a positive. Equal justice for all is not just a trite saying any more. If justice applies to the president of the United States, then it truly applies to every person. I still do not believe that it is in any way equal, and we will soon see if the punishment is similar to that any other convict might receive. My gut tells me that he will spend zero time behind bars and he will throw an unreasonable sum of money at appeals and trying to make it all go away before the election is here.

If he wins the election, he will exercise his power over the judiciary to have his record wiped clean. Then he will continue to mold policy so that the executive branch has unilateral control of the government. This is all an attempt to stay in power until the day he dies, and so that he can ensure a political dynasty will follow in his name.

If he loses the election, he will call on his most rabid followers to attack again, and this time I don’t think there will be any question as to his motives.

Nevertheless, this was an important day for the very concept of justice as we know it in this country.

I feel prone to riff on an old movie quote “Just keep swimming.” from Finding Nemo today. I have an assignment to complete and I have to keep reminding myself to keep writing so I can get it done today.

“Just keep writing, just keep writing, just keep writing, writing, writing.” A little song I hum to myself and will continue to hum throughout the day. This little madness will keep the words flowing and worth reading. Or at least that is what I am telling myself to keep writing.

It isn’t a huge assignment so there is no reason it can’t be done today.

I’d just like to shout out Grammarly because it’s a useful bit of AI-driven technology to make me more mindful about my writing. It is fucking infuriating to see the little blue squiggly line under passages of text but it causes me to examine the patterns I tend to utilize in an effort to make my writing sound casual.

It’s fantastic because it helps me eliminate fluff but it’s hell on word counts when that is the goal. The end product will be better and I’ll be better for it so it’s a win.

If it’s ever super cheap I may even spring for the premium version, but the free one works to steer me in the right direction for now.

The ever-improving weather outside has been drawing me out to enjoy the sunshine and warmth and it has cost me time I might spend creating. Naturally, this occurs when I need to work on an assignment and I just keep looking outside and remembering that winter is never far away relatively speaking.

But being outside just for the hell of it pays nothing and I am thrown back into the reality of the kind of work I do for money. Sure I can do this anywhere, but it has to be anywhere with an adequate internet connection and isn’t the same temperature and humidity as it is outside in the sun.

The month of May has absolutely flown by and it makes me want to hit the brakes on the world so I can actually enjoy some of this. But time continues the ceaseless march that it is famous for, and I am left to look back and wonder how much of it I have wasted. Thankfully, I get to decide what waste looks like.

Back to the drawing board, where I attempt to paint with words.

If you can’t be talked out of being a writer, allow me to serve as a voice of reason. Just understand that you will want desperately to write about the things you are passionate about and get paid your dream salary right out of the gate. But the world doesn’t reward such randomness.

There seems to be a time-honored tradition of paying your dues writing content that is made to grab attention quickly and keep it long enough for advertisers to plant their insidious seeds. Much of what you will be tasked with is just to get eyes on the page and keep them there for that short, fleeting amount of time. It will not be your dream audience or the content you ache to get out. It will just be work for the sake of making a living.

What will make you different is if you can successfully compartmentalize that kind of work as a necessary evil while also maintaining that burning desire you have to write about your passion. I have a limited amount of success doing this, as I seem to find writing an all-or-nothing proposition. Either I exhaust all of my creative energy writing the paid work, or I can utilize the same store of energy to write about the things I care about. The writing I do off the cuff about things that interest me does nothing to take my energy away, acting as a kind of nourishment. But that nourishment doesn’t seem to help with the paid work, so it just results in the act of creation and the associated thrills without the money.

But if you’re anything like me, this impulse to create is impossible to deny and you seek all avenues to express yourself. So just be practical enough to know the difference between the content you want to write and the content that will pay your bills. If you happen to be one of the unicorns that found a niche that lights a fire in you and also pays for your living, you have my sincere congratulations as well as a large helping of my envy.

I recently had a somewhat depressive episode for several days and it was a reminder of how important it is to be proactive about mental health. I have gone a long time without any issues but then suddenly I spent days crushed by the weight of the world.

It was everything all the time and nothing to be done. I felt disconnected from the world around me and as though I was just drifting through space. In some very real sense, I understand that I am doing that as we all are just random collections of molecules that happen to have some form of complex consciousness. But this was a reduction of this complexity into only the worst possible thoughts and feelings as my standard mode of operating. It was all-consuming and seemed to be endless.

Only there was a limit, and I’ve found my way out of the dark again. My attempts to look back and learn from it are fruitless, as there is nothing to see any more. In this normal state, it seems the depression is in my blind spot, forever there but out of the reach that understanding might give me.

I believe the culprit was money and that makes me sick to consider. But when I completed an assignment and got paid, I felt some immediate and noticeable relief. The depression did not go away, but it seemed to loosen the grip it had on me and allowed me the chance to breathe. The evil that we’ve deemed necessary as a society got the best of me again and this time it cost me days of feeling true despair.

Our self worth gets so tied up in our bank account balance that we lose sight of what is truly valuable in our lives. But if we focus entirely on the things that we derive value from, we are forced to reckon with a world that has zero fucks to give and never stops asking more of us.

I hate the world as we’ve made it and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do to alleviate myself of this hatred. My attempts to extricate myself from this set of societal shackles have helped immensely, but there is still so much work to be done and only so much time in a day. No matter how much progress I feel I’ve made removing myself from the world, it continues to test my patience in the way that it always has.

Just as there are only so many hours in a day, there is only so much patience. When the well runs dry, I retreat into myself to replenish my stores. These retreats may appear as a silent brooding to outside observers, but if I truly move into rumination, it is experienced as a deafening silence. The kind of silence only experienced by astronauts in the void of space. And I’ve yet to leave the planet in body, mind, or spirit, and I have no intention of doing so any time soon.