Deviant Rambling

I had to run a couple of errands and the second I walked into the garage I was blasted by the wave of hot, moist air that is currently smothering us in the Midwest. There is no doubt that summer is here and it’s early to feel this staggering.

We haven’t had any rain in over a week and everything is dying like it seems to do at least a few times throughout the season. Save for the buckhorn which will be 10 foot tall by the time there is enough grass to mow again. Apparently I have enough free time to watch the non-grass grow from the comfort of an air-conditioned space, completely free of the millions of biting flies just outside hoping to sip my blood after they stab me.

Earth seems to be actively revolting because of our continued abuses, pulling out all of the stops to make it uncomfortable. At some point I know this will shift to outright violence on her part, and she’ll make the place uninhabitable because we refused to take the many hints she’s thrown our way. We will deserve it.

Yesterday I managed to knock out the writing assignment I had with relative ease, and it felt good to get back to it. I should start scoping out additional opportunities to keep the sword sharp, so to speak.

I was mindlessly scrolling through Instagram as I often find myself doing and made the mistake of going to the comments section of a post. The content truly doesn’t matter because it turns out that most comment sections are exactly the same kind of shit.

Comments are sorted by “relevance” with particular weight given to those with a fair share of likes and interaction. People think of their best one-liner and toss it up as quick as they can after the content has been posted. Often, they are comments meant entirely to elicit a response from that person’s perceived adversaries. If the post is conservative in nature, the comment will be something about how “THOSE LIBERAL SNOW FLAKES CAN’T HANDLE THIS!”

Again, the content of the comment doesn’t matter, it’s about the response. And the response is often swift and equally forceful from the imaginary opposition. In our made up example, the liberal army heeds the call to arms and starts to question the motives of their would-be assailant. The assailant hits back with sophomoric insults knowing the argument itself is the reason they posted in the first place. The dance continues until someone has the good sense to forget about it and move on with their fucking day.

This is everywhere, for all kinds of content, even the most innocuous, completely harmless to all who view it. People see the comment section as a good place to vent their frustrations about the world. Normally the complaints and grievances are of a political nature, hence the example above. But it could be just general bitching about the world too. If you see a post about an adorable kitten and the first comment is something about how this kitten hasn’t made it’s stance clear about Palestine, you’ll know you’re in the same world I see.

Free speech is a gift we all receive when we are born in the United States. It is also the source of all of this unrestrained stupidity that now litters the landscape of the internet. In many ways, it is the same as it ever was, but with the addition of social media to give every single person a megaphone if they are determined enough. I am still a firm believer that the right to free speech is one of the pillars of our version of democracy and I will defend it to the grave. This includes agreeing that even those with opinions I vehemently oppose have the right to express those opinions. That is just a fact to me. They have the right to their opinion and have the full, unadulterated power of the internet to express it. Because no matter how terrible the opinion may seem to me, it is just that, opinion. Words have seldom hurt me and they have never to my knowledge done me any physical harm. Sticks and stones, as it is said.

But it doesn’t stop me from wanting to grab all of these people by the shoulders and shaking them to near death. None of this matters. The content doesn’t matter, your thoughts and opinions on it don’t matter, and this post to bitch about it doesn’t matter. The only thing that does matter is realizing how amazing it is to be able to post in the first place.

If you live in the United States and you post something off the wall or you make an untoward comment on someone else’s post, odds are good that you’re not going to get into any kind of hot water. There are places in the world that will execute you for voicing the wrong opinions in a public forum and that simply doesn’t happen here. That much of our freedom remains intact.

But what does this freedom cost the future of discourse in this country and the world? Because you can only sift through so many shortsighted, angry comments before you decide that maybe freedom of speech isn’t for everyone.

I started working on an assignment and after a few sections being in the zone I happened to come out of the trance and remember where I was and that there were, in fact, other people that existed. This happens fairly frequently when I find myself immersed in a creative task.

I set out to work on the task with the understanding that the world around me still exists and that time is a relevant and pressing concern. And then I am in the tunnel and all that matters is producing the best work I can from my store of creative energy. Very little can shift my focus in these times, and when it happens it is a jarring experience. It is like being shaken awake from near-REM sleep. You don’t feel groggy and upset, but you are nevertheless disoriented and it takes a minute for reality to come rushing back in.

It’s just good to know that I can still be entranced by the work that I do and that I can also come out of that tunnel with my sanity intact. Well, my version of sanity.

I had a doctor’s appointment today to schedule a couple of planned diagnostic procedures to keep an eye on my insides after what feels like a lifetime of gut-related issues. I’ll be getting my 5th colonoscopy and upper endoscopy within a month and if everything looks good, I can probably wait a little longer until my next set.

The surgeon who will be performing the procedures will have performed 3 of those 5, and our appointments are so much different than they used to be. When I first started seeing him, I had been admitted to the hospital he works for with a fairly major G.I. bleed that he pinpointed and corrected through open abdominal surgery. He saved my life and I am grateful to have the opportunity to have lived through the 13 years since that dreadful summer.

When we first met, I was just a dying man looking for someone to try and make sure I was gonna live. After that was solved, I continued to see him as time passed and life changed in all of the ways it does over such a period of time. I have lived a few different versions of life in that time and finally landed on something stable and worth identifying with.

Our appointments started as diagnostic and he took the standard role as a doctor, informing me of what the best course of action was, presenting me with options, and allowing me to decide how to proceed. He was professional and cordial, but I could tell there was a little sense of humor under it all, and on occasion we would share a laugh about the absurdity of our bodies.

Fast forward to the appointment today, and it was like seeing an old friend. He walked in to the appointment a good deal later than he usually is and it all started with a deep sigh of apology. He started to explain what kind of day he had been having, and before elaborating too much, looked over to realize the door was still open and he pushed it closed. Then he explained a little bit about the bureaucracy he had to take part in being the principal surgeon for the hospital, and his frustration with the processes he is beholden to. For just a few minutes, he was able to vent these frustrations and I gave him a sympathetic set of ears and learned a lot about what he deals with in the process. This was all before he even asked the first question about why I was visiting or my condition, and I encouraged it because I suppose he doesn’t have a lot of folks he can confide in. It was a really cool exchange and even if the man hadn’t already saved my life, I’m pretty sure I’d enjoy hanging out with him outside of this setting.

It occurred to me that it must be strange to be a doctor. People put you up on this sort of pedestal and hang on your words because as was the case for me, they could mean life or death. But when you want to let off steam in this kind of position, you have to be careful about where and when you do, lest you be seen as unprofessional. I saw a man who was worried about the same kind of trivial nonsense that makes up most of our lives, and it made him seem completely human. I cuss like a sailor but no one cares because I’m not diagnosing them. He let one “fucking” rip today and I could see the real-time panic he experienced because he said it out loud but I about burst into laughter because it’s exactly what I would have said were I in the same situation.

As always, the appointment was informative and achieved the intended ends. But today felt like seeing an old friend and I left energized and happy to have the ball rolling on these important tests. My first read on who the man is came in 2011 when I was actively bleeding to death, and with one comment I knew that I could trust him and I liked him immediately.

He walked into the room and introduced himself to my folks and outlined his plan to correct the ulcer and stop the bleeding for good. It would involve open surgery and although it was exploratory, he was certain he knew where it was and that it would work. Upon hearing the plan, my mom, being a person of faith said something to the effect that it was out of our hands now, to which this legend said “No it’s not. It’s in my hands.” I will never forget that because it was such a ballsy thing to say to the mother of a patient who was dying. But when he said it I laughed and I knew that I was going to be fine.

I am still here today because he was right and his training and decades of experience produced the desired results. The ulcer was fixed and I evaded death, experiencing a fundamental shift in my perspective about the value of our time here. I arrived mortally wounded and left forever convinced that death is nothing to be afraid of, it’s not living that is the real tragedy.

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.