Deviant Rambling

There is an idealized version of retirement that is held up as the gold standard of what we are all supposed to be working towards. This pipe dream was concocted decades ago by the corporate interests that control the country.

You work for 40 or more years and spend the entire time being wise with money so that you can spend your twilight in relative comfort and reap the rewards of abusing your body, mind, and soul for decades. But no one tells you how to be wise or how to handle adversity so you just figure it out as you go. This fly by the seat of your pants approach can work if you are incredibly lucky, but most people aren’t.

My parents are a perfect example of how this scenario plays out in real life.

They did their best and worked for more than 40 years to attempt to achieve this ideal. In the process of trying to eke out this living, they were terrible with money. They managed to dump all of their effort into a home big enough for four but neither one of them may live to see it paid off. There is no savings of any kind, save for the windfall inherited from a failing parent. That’s enough to pay for the mortgage for a couple years and that’s it.

Dad actually didn’t ever get to see a paid for home before he succumbed to this disease and the very real affliction of a stroke. Mom has resigned to believing she will always have this debt and that is just how life is. They both took the bait and proceeded to build their lives on this pervasive narrative that was and remains bullshit. Without any kind of guidance, they managed to make it for decades, living the lower middle class proletariat dream. But only just so. We never made it all the way into the middle class and never got close to the upper class. They did their best with received wisdom and predictably failed to gain any kind of traction. Because the wisdom was no longer sound in the world they occupied. I am not sure that it was ever sound, but I never believed in this old convention anyway.

Now dad is dead so the primary breadwinner is out of the picture, leaving mom with social security alone to pay for this dream. If she manages to live to her mid 80s and doesn’t miss a payment, she might even get to own the home. After 50 years. 50 fucking years of service to this dead ideal.

That is what retirement looks like in our family. If you’re lucky you’ll die before they come to take back their property that you couldn’t pay for doing things the right way.

P.S. – I omitted specifics out of respect for what my parents sacrificed in order to chase this American pipe dream. I think they did the best they could with the tools they were given. They couldn’t have known the tools were broken.

It is hard to explain and impossible to justify but I feel a strong sense of resentment welling up inside me. The target of this seems to be those that can’t defend themselves, and it feels irrational to even be feeling this in the first place.

I am resentful of my dad and my brother because they don’t have to be here to try and navigate any of the struggles of life. Their journey was cut short and it saved them potential years or even decades of having to continue to push boulders up mountains. But I’m still here at the base of the mountain with no desire to ever touch a boulder again.

The world has become increasingly hard for me to engage with, and I have all but stopped trying to understand it. People’s motivations seem chosen at random and based on whims, lacking any real depth or substance. They’ll spend their entire lives chasing after money to buy things they have been convinced will make them happy only to find out the pursuit and the desires are hollow.

There are too many dark corners in my mind right now, and I want to understand the source of this darkness so I can flush it out. It isn’t like me to feel so trampled for this long, but here I am, crushed by the reality of a world I don’t understand any more. I am not sure I ever understood it, though. I try to recall earlier times in my life where I did what other people did and it always felt forced, as though I was an actor of some out of control script.

I just want to be happy. I don’t want to live a normal life because it seems like normal people are sleepwalking through all of this. I am wide awake but paralyzed.

I am struggling to accomplish much of anything today. I feel as though I am wasting my potential but I have no idea which direction I should focus my energy. There is no one telling me what to do one way or the other and I feel cut loose by the universe once again to wander aimlessly.

I’m still no closer to pursuing my life’s work, whatever that may be, and it is endlessly frustrating. There are so many things I am capable of, but so few that I am truly great at.

There should be nothing holding me back but I feel no urge to move forward at all so I am standing in my own way again. I hate this feeling and I hope it doesn’t stick around for long.

We got a month worth of rain in a few days and now it’s winter again, with non-accumulating snow and 30s in the forecast for the next couple of days. I believe it is winter’s last stand before spring really cuts loose.

Thankfully, the furnace is working like a champ now after a few days worth of troubleshooting and having the installer come back out to help. We’re in the middle of nowhere and personally know the installer so none of the extra trips cost us anything, a fact that I’m incredibly grateful for.

I hate the feeling that comes up every year around this time when the seasons haven’t fully transitioned yet and we stumble back and forth between them. You enjoy the sunshine and warmth one day only to know it can be gone overnight, but it makes the nice days that much sweeter. I’m ready to be able to be outside all day and night without worrying that shit will turn on a dime and be awful.

It won’t be long now and I’ll be hiding from the blistering summer sun and bitching about a different set of problems, every last one of them first world in nature.

After 33 years of nearly flawless service, our furnace finally went on to that big scrap heap in the sky. Naturally, this occurred the day spring started but winter has briefly returned with daytime temps in the 30s and low 40s. This made for a fairly chilly overnight and it had dropped into the 50s in the house by the morning.

Now a new furnace is being installed and it is remarkable how different they look decades later. It is about 1/3 the physical size of the old furnace and substantially more efficient. It’s one of the home systems that I am astonished by because I don’t know very much about it at all. Everything about it is new and interesting to me, but that doesn’t mean I’d want to do it for a living. If it is something that can explode or electrocute you, I’m out.

With any luck, we’ll be back up and running yet today and it’s a solid investment in the home for the long haul. I have layers in the meantime.

I’ve borrowed the title of this post from the old adage when it comes to medical diagnosis of all sorts, but it has more to do with the actual news.

It’s been months since I went cold turkey on the news cycle and it has been an incredible change to live life without this constant distraction. The only headlines I catch are in passing and the things that happen to catch my eye from the screens I am near. I think it’s physically impossible in this day in age to avoid all technology, but I have done well to make my position known so that I can also avoid conversations that veer off in the direction of the news. Thankfully, I am most commonly around other people who are not interested in the news, and I don’t have to stop all conversations dead in their tracks.

There has been no negative effects from this, and that honestly surprises me a little. I assumed I’d fall back into the vortex and doom scroll but it hasn’t happened and it has only improved my life.

I am sure that the world continues to spin outside the home I reside in, as evidenced by the sunrise and sunset every day. I’m also sure that I could care less what headlines are being force fed to the masses because so very little of it truly matters. No more worrying about the sad state of affairs, only more presence and overall happiness.

Last week was unseasonably warm and I spent a good deal of time working on doing interior work for a new shed that will double as an office space for my lady. That meant that I had a hard time prioritizing the writing assignments that needed done.

Now it is the start of another week and it’s snowing, so there is nothing holding me back from getting to work. This is the way of things for me. If there is work to be done that requires my time, I put it ahead of the things that will actually pay me. That work which doesn’t pay me in money seems to fulfill some deeper need of mine, and it feels effortless and joyous. I know it is because I am providing value to someone I love, but I do need to be able to provide for myself too, and that takes paid work.

On the days where I am engrossed in tasks that require the use of my hands, the time absolutely blows by and I have none of what it takes to create. It is a very all-or-nothing proposition and I continue to wrestle with how to best balance this.

The air all around has become easier to breathe and move through without reservation. On this side of the crashing of mental health and aging, we find ourselves rare opportunities to take stock.

Life seems truly limitless and boundless again, though the day to day still exists and intervenes. I find that the ability to ponder has returned, and I appreciate the relaxation as everything slows back to the pace I’m accustomed to.

The old ache of needing to create has returned as well, but it is a sign of a positive mental space. Typically when I feel this ache, a period of revelation follows, where the forces of the universe conspire to speaking through me. Once again I find myself looking upon a flashing cursor, the perfectly timed pulse reminding me I’m still alive and capable of doing more.

I stare out to the world through my windows, bathed in the almost overwhelming diffuse sunlight but otherwise serene. If there is divinity in anything it is in the sacred calm I experience as I gaze over this place I call home. I am at peace and I don’t know what to do with it.

Last week I made a list of all of the projects I’d like to get accomplished throughout the course of 2024. The first item on the list was a monster of an undertaking and it was an item I’d be happy to take the whole year to complete.

We have around 60 fully grown pine trees on the property that were planted here before the house was even built. They are over 30 years old and tower high above the surrounding landscape. They were planted in a line that marks the property and in a row, three deep. The trees in the middle have seen much less sunlight and were beginning to die off, so I decided to take them all down on purpose to give the outside rows a fighting chance.

There were 20 trees to fell and last week we had some incredible warmth for the time of year and I saw an opening to really go for it. I got started early in the week and worked straight through, learning as I went. I made sure to plan each tree individually and had my escape routes ready in case the tree in question decided to act unpredictable. The outside rows acted as a wonderful protection from the falling tree and all of the various debris that fires out when they are in the process of falling. There were definitely issues that needed addressed and both of the batteries on the truck died within the first couple of days so I had to stop everything and replace them before continuing.

But after a week and a half of incredible weather and the blind determination that gets me into more trouble than it’s worth, I have taken down all 20 of the trees. A project that could have taken all year took me a week and a half and I honestly have no clue where that kind of gumption came from. I got so into the work that I didn’t look up until the last tree was on the fire.

Now it’s snowing and we have a few days of chilly weather and I can relax some of the pains away from all of the work. Once it’s warm again next week I’ll go out and clean up the remainder of the debris down to the pine needles and we’ll have an incredibly beautiful feature on the property. A massive pine tunnel with the canopy open throughout the middle all the way to the sky above.

I feel a sense of pride for what I accomplished and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

I have started to utilize the limiting features of Google News to filter out the garbage I am sick of seeing pop up. Every time a headline comes up that I cringe at just seeing, I click on the “three dots” and hover down to Fewer stories like this.

This doesn’t completely remove the bullshit, but it has been very effective at changing the sorts of stories that I see on a daily basis. I can feel a noticeable difference in the way I interact with others and myself. I am more inclined to be kind and have started to feel a return to giving people the benefit of the doubt instead of treating everyone as an adversary for self-preservation.

Political news has insidious effects on me that I never signed up for when I started to really pay attention. I’ve lost nothing to filter out this garbage, and I seemed to have regained my ability to just see more good in the world. A simple little tweak and I am feeling better about the world because I am not being told everything is terrible.

2024 started as a year I was sure was going to be an abortion because of the political minefield, but that was before I had the good sense to just check out of the whole thing. Now it feels rife with possibility.

To the news media at large, it’s not us, it’s you.