Deviant Rambling

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.

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.