Deviant Rambling

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.

I have found myself neck deep in the morass of Wikipedia researching the concept of free will because I’m curious as to whether or not I believe in it. I am beginning to suspect that I have changed course on this front and no longer necessarily believe that it exists.

There is just a lot to be said for prior conditions dating back as old as the universe may in fact be. How many seemingly random and disparate factors came together to become the series of events that lead up to my birth? The number seems incalculable upon first glance because there isn’t even a firm grasp on the age of the universe. They came up with a figure that was something like 13.8 billion years and then discovered new information that may have pushed it past that time by a substantial amount. With better information, we make a more informed guess, but all of that information has been available for billions of years before our planet had even begun to form.

Fast forward to now. The decision to write this post is in large part due to my curiosity and penchant for writing, both of which were already firmly in place before I wrote the first letter. Going back, I am sure that these manifested as part of my character at a much younger age and have only now bore the fruit of this post. It required everything between the inception of these characteristics and all that I have learned and integrated as a person to bring me to this point in time. It also required all of the events leading up to the inception of these characteristics, but that is a chain that goes back as far as time.

The substance of the post was formed by elements now engrained into the very fabric of who I am, so although I may be choosing words as I see fit, it is from a preordained vocabulary. The aforementioned curiosity will allow me to expand this vocabulary so that later posts on the topic may be more legible, but that will be a byproduct of an existing condition, that of my curiosity, and by a factor of my biology retaining the information in the hippocampus. I never made the decision to be curious, it occurred at some point, and has remained central to who I consider myself to be.

I see our ability to make decisions somehow separate from the concept of free will, though. It is just that we only ever get to choose from a preselected list of options, akin to that of a person’s vocabulary. I can choose whatever word I like to describe the view outside my window right now, but only from the words I possess through prior knowledge. The words outside of this scope are all of the possible choices that could be made, but not by me. Everything is not a yes or no question like belief in free will, and with more options, the world becomes a veritable grayscale.

If, by a factor of my existing curiosity, I should discover a new word, I add it to the vocabulary and it becomes an unlocked possibility. It becomes another possible choice for that version of myself, but I didn’t choose to learn any given word, it just existed and I uncovered it like an archaeologist might uncover a fossil.

To me, it does nothing to rob the world of the wonder that I experience every day to some degree. There is always more to learn, and that is an incredible fact about our chance at existence. The person I am on this day will never exist again after midnight, the time we have arbitrarily agreed constitutes the end of this day on the calendar. We die a little every day and are reborn the very next minute, filled with the 13.8 billion plus years of cause and effect that preceded our birth. That person is no longer accessible but forever remains a part of the future, regardless of his actions and whether or not he was free to decide.

The Southwest crossed my mind today and I’ve been daydreaming about it ever since. It’s been over a year since we went out to visit our land in Arizona, and I want to get back out and enjoy that freedom again.

There is still nothing there, and so much going on here every day that it is hard to consider when might be a good time to escape. I still just want to go, and get away from winter while enjoying the tranquility of the desert.

I think I’ll spend some of the day today dreaming about it actively and imagining the possibilities it presents.

In my attempt to filter the news out of my every day life, I’ve had some success and a few times it has gotten through to me again. I can’t find my way to just parsing all of the topics and sources completely from my feed, because the fear of missing out on something relevant to me is real.

But this comes at the cost of opening myself to the endless barrage of political news that makes up a good portion of the overall news.

Just in the past week some insane things have happened leading me further down the road of conclusions that I had reached sometime halfway through 2023. The 2024 Republican Primary contest that was going to be this contentious, bloody battle will be settled within the first month because Trump is going to run away with the nomination. Days after Iowa resoundingly voted for Trump, DeSantis dropped out and endorsed him, leaving Nikki Haley as the only competition left.

Haley is all but guaranteed to lose New Hampshire tomorrow, and then there is a short break before the next states weigh in. But it won’t even matter because her campaign will hemorrhage money and supporters and she’ll drop out.

I try not to think about the inevitable but the writing on all of the walls is coming into clearer focus by the day.

2024 will be a rematch of Biden vs. Trump and I feel as though I can’t vote for either of them. This makes me question whether or not there is a moral implication for abstaining, and as a result, whether or not I am doing the right thing considering it.

Neither of these men represent what I want our country to be, and there are no other choices worth considering, or that will be available to me in Indiana. A write-in is a throwaway vote, and I think I am done protest voting. Choosing the lesser evil isn’t a choice, it’s an illusion that a party wants me to buy into. They also frame it in a way that tries to make anyone like me feel guilty if we don’t vote. Because if we don’t vote, then the terrorists win.

I don’t think that’s true at all.

I live in a state that has voted for a Democrat once since 1964 and that was Obama’s first run in 2008. During the last two general elections, it was something close to 60/40 at the state level, and it was closer to 70/30 in my county. If I were to vote democrat, it’s a throwaway, because there is no way in hell my state is gonna break that way. Add to that my lukewarm at best reception of Biden, and it makes for sitting this one out.

This only matters in a system where the electoral college is the law of the land. If the power were truly in the hands of the citizens as it should be and they just tallied the popular vote to make the decision, I would protest vote every single time. But that isn’t how things work, so I have to make due consideration over the next 9 months as to whether or not I will even bother.

As it stands, I am leaning toward sitting this one out. I am all but certain that there won’t be a substantial enough change in either candidate or their platform to sway me from my seat, and I will accept whatever judgment I may have hurled at me for my choice. But at the end of the day, voting is a choice, not an obligation.

I am choosing not to play this game any more.

My lady love works in corporate America, having worked hard for her education and being able to work from home since 2020. When the company transitioned to remote work, they pivoted their entire corporate structure to support it permanently. This includes real estate dealings, shifting office space for outside leasing, blah blah blah, things that don’t really affect the job so I won’t go on too long about them.

The shift in company culture that took place in 2020 made online meetings a necessity (for some reason) and they occur at regular intervals. These meetings are almost always an agenda that could have been handled internally through email communication. But there is an underlying agenda to maintain tabs on employees and force a sense of company culture on everyone.

It is obvious from the jump of every meeting where people are pretending to give a shit about how the folks from other departments are doing. A polite conversation about nothing ensues before the meeting can get underway. It’s all such an unnecessary bit of theater that it defies reason.

Why can’t people just do their job and not be forced into participating in this garbage? Company culture is going to be one of the artifacts of the way the world used to work before we all realized how many jobs didn’t need the office in the first place. That section of the veil was lifted and everyone saw it for the misdirect it was. Now there is no unseeing it.

Some people enjoy the culture aspect of working for a company, and there are plenty of places for them to install themselves for their entire career. But everyone I know who ever has to deal with it feels as though it is a thing to be endured, not enjoyed.

I have spent entirely too much time doom-scrolling through the news lately, getting stuck hard on the political section in particular. I think that for my own peace of mind and to protect myself, I need to disconnect from this behavior as much as humanly possible.

Nothing gets solved by my worrying about how this year will pan out just because it’s an election year. I am off down rabbit holes just the second I begin to think about how much of a disaster it will be, and that doesn’t help a thing. I will be useless to the people that need me to be myself, and I don’t want to let the paid actors in Washington control any part of my existence like that.

I will continue to serve those closest to me in meaningful ways every day, and that will have to serve as my contribution to society as a whole. I do not wish to insert myself into the field of political discourse that is simply riddled with landmines. There is no right way to think and to expressing yourself now can be tantamount to a suicide of sorts.

I am so exhausted with the state of affairs in the country that I have to just do what I can here to keep everything headed the right direction and that direction is toward increased comfort and ease of living. 2024 can’t be another year I lose to doom because I am certain it is headed that way out “there”. That’s frankly none of my business and I intend to extend the distance between me and that outside world.

I hate that it has to be that way but I have nothing to give to conversations that die before they start.

Winter broadsided us this weekend and I have no intention of leaving the house for anything. It is currently -7, and just looking outside sends chills through your body. If there is a saving grace it is the fact that it is a bright, sunny day, and that little bit of solar power helps a person get through.

I have things that I can do around the house and a fresh writing assignment to work on, and of course, continue chipping away at the book.

Every day writing on that is a new record for any one project, and it is almost effortless. At some point I’ll be satisfied it is complete and I can begin the task of arranging and editing it for anyone else’s consumption.

That is possibly months away and I am in no hurry to get it done, just going to make it completely organic and see what comes of it. 500 words a day piles up in a hurry.