19/52 - The Templight Zone

Dear Internauts,

Well, I could either post the blog late or have been late for work.

Now that's no longer a problem, because I am once again—you guessed it—unemployed!

Such is the adventurous life of a temp.

While others tread paths into the dirt, forming stable paradigms of socio-economic legitimacy, we exist in a parallel realm of systemic flux.

Who are we?

What are we?

Where?

When?

Why?

AND HOW!?!!

When the hours of a shift can shift and a new skill is needed in a new place, we don the guise of competency and arrive like a fluid to a container or a set of mechanical parts all melted down then poured to fill up the outline of the default "employee" skin. We are numbers in a spreadsheet cell. We are the extra hands handed heavy crates marked by the busyness of the business—fill-in-the-blanks.

We are the capacity of expansion required by the seasonal sway in market projections under near ideal conditions given a margin of error + or - the fundamental realities of an ever-volatile capitalist conundrum.

We show up.

And when we show up and work the work, what do they say? Nothing or maybe something good, nice, affirming. Easy enough to allude to crude suggestion of a perfect world wherein they could hire us for longer. What a help we've been when they really needed it, but things are slowing now. After all, everything floats down. The oil and water are casually segregated. Maybe they'll see us when things heat up again. No promises, but they kinda hope we stay desperate and unattached enough to march back smiling and grateful.

We were needed once, but now we're not.

We were the only way, but now we're in the way.

Put us in our crates, and ship us back to the underground warehouse where we're cold-stored, kept fresh and primed for the picking.

Are we the Toy Story aliens in awe of the Claw?

Are we standing in the parking lot blowing on our hands, ready to do whatever needs doing?

Are we clutching our phones, twitching at phantom vibrations like frost-bitten amputees?

Are we what you need till it's not us it's you?

Are we flies that drop? (Good thing you got enough to compensate for expected losses.)

Are we "Yes, Sir" and "Yes, Ma'am" and loose parameters when there's no such thing as a job description 'cause you weren't sure exactly what you'd need that day?

Are we gonna stay up all night by your bedside or drop everything at a moment's notice or forgive any slight because the past is the past even though you hold the most minute infraction like murder 'round our necks?

Of course, we are.

Fair-weather? It's all fair game for us to face any storm in your wake. It's all the abuse we'll take so the pedestal won't break from under you.

Bad work for bad pay? But we'll come back anyway. Every time. Work-for-hire when you need a punching bag with a forgettable face.

We'll listen to your woes and sow seeds for fields you'll burn like bridges, and on our backs you'll hold the bootstraps we pulled up for you. Red, White, Black, and Blue.

Can you hear the practiced smile in our voice?

How may we be of service?

Thanks for reading,
Odist

18/52 - Season of Mist (Puttin' in the Work)

"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." -John Milton

Dear Internauts,

This week I surprised myself. Turns out I can handle a job far better than I thought. To go from a place where my job was killing me, and I literally would have killed myself had I stayed, to this place where I'm just as competent as anybody else (or near enough for the task), seems even now like an impossible journey. The way is winding, I've gotten turned around more than once, and the holes I can recall each looked darker than the last. Still, just as I came back to Massachusetts when I did because I knew there would never be a perfect time for a change, plunging right into this full time cycle after so long between day jobs is maybe the only way I could do it. There's no ladder. You're gon' hafta jump!

Okay, so the first two days doing back-breaking physical labor in the warehouse took all the strength I had both to lift hundreds of boxes and buckets but also not to snap at being called Big Guy the whole time by a superior who refused to learn our names. Thankfully, the manager noticed how much of an insurance risk it would be to continue allowing this weakling to keep carrying things and shifted me over to operations. (Being a temp is kinda like being a special worker, so I'm gonna say it's Special Ops.) Basically, filing orders for flowers and answering the phone.

Now, as you may know, my experience with customer service has historically been on the spectrum between bad times and end times level disastrous. Thankfully, most of the calls are from our delivery drivers just wanting to speak to someone in the office. Though I have gotten a few from disgruntled call center employees or customers who couldn't find their own front door.

Work is, of course, like the most boring, mind-numbing parts of school, but instead of getting graded, you're in constant threat of just getting kicked out. Whoever came up with, "if you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean" is a fascist, obviously, but let's be honest here: my manager hasn't yelled at me once and at the end of the day I help make people's days a little brighter. For those points alone, this job beats most if not all others I've had—at least the ones that pay money for my labor.

I'm trying to spend some time when I can to keep working on my novel and play guitar. I can put so much work into a drawing or a page or a song and it does feel like exertion, but it's fulfilling and almost satisfying when I know I'm doing well at it. In a weird sense of kaleidoscopic existentialism, I feel more real to myself when I'm creating. It can be a real challenge to find the mental and emotional energy after spending all day around other people in a stressful environment, but if I don't find it, I'll never make anything. And life is honestly not worth living without art. I know other people have their own ways of juggling through existence, but for me there is zero fulfillment in just laboring for money.

Grown up on lessons that "money isn't everything" or "money can't buy happiness," I only now begin to see what a place of privilege those well-intentioned themes sprang. See, I'm living so much off the generosity of family right now and have for so long, that it is a tumult of a thought to think that some day I won't be such a burden on others, despite their insistence they're happy to help. I've known some independence before, and that's what a more steady job and its wages mean, besides simply the aspects of survival such an independence would require.

I truly miss Nashville, and the person I was, and the people I knew. Like all the friends I used to have around Boston, though, it feels like a world and a life belonging to a complete stranger. I suppose we don't reinvent ourselves as often as we did when we were kids, but in other ways we never really stop, do we? The idea that people don't change is, to me, an utter sham. We must and do change all the time.

Of course, wherever you go, you gotta take yourself along. A change of scenery can't solve and hasn't solved my problems nor made me healthier or more "normal". However, it has forced me to just get up and deal with parts of life that would appear entirely foreign and impossible to the me who hid down in that basement several years ago. I don't think he was a coward, and I wouldn't call him weak.

Anyone who's face trauma and/or mental illness knows it can take a kind of miraculous strength simply to breathe steady or perform the most basic functions of living. It's not a matter of flipping a switch or taking a pill or picking up responsibilities to receive instant clarity. The demons in my head still roll and rumble, but I can at least say now that their snarling is not the only sound I hear.

I'm exhausted and about to start an even busier week with longer hours. However, as I tell myself every morning before I step out of my car—their stress does not have to be my own. All I have to do is what I choose to do. Just because someone else is freaking out, even if it's directed at me, doesn't mean that I have to freak out. It does no good to think I owe others some level of self-hate, whether they be long lost friends whom I miss so much or some a-hole with a power complex at work.

I don't know who I am. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know much of anything, but I know this–

People change all the time. It's okay to be fluid. 

Thanks for reading,
Odist

17/52 - Tomorrow's Flowers

Dear Internauts,

I should try to type this up nice and quick. Thankfully, I'm actually tired enough it shouldn't take too long to fall asleep. That's good because a) I usually have a very hard time falling asleep and b) I actually have work tomorrow.

Yup, starting tomorrow I'll be temping with a flower delivery service. Unlike last time, when I did some of the delivery, this time I'll be working on the flower arrangements. I have no idea what it's gonna be like besides standing for a long time and lots of pollen, but it seemed like an okay atmosphere when I was there before. Gonna try to keep my head up, 'cause being around people in a stressful environment for a long time will very likely give me a panic attack or five.

Earlier I was working on coloring and laying out page three of chapter one for the graphic novel project. It's actually coming along. I'm learning here and there better techniques for efficiency, clarity, and style, but it still takes a lot longer and a lot more work to do a page than I'd anticipated. Plus, I'm not used to making art in color, so that's a new challenge. But they're all new challenges for the most part, because it's not just drawing pictures or making a collage of sorts. Everything visual serves the story, from choice of angle to size of panel to focal points leading the reader's eye across the page. Really helps me appreciate the medium.

Tomorrow night, I have plans to meet with some folks from whom I may be renting some living space soon. They're in the city and close to some subway stops, which is really exciting.

Really, there's just so much going on.

While I have been trying so hard for so long to be hired for some normal job hours so that I don't have to keep depending so much on some supremely hospitable and encouraging family... >deep breath< it can be useful to take stock sometimes.

Sure, my mental health isn't what I'd like and I've got plenty to complain about. Really, though, when it comes to some big things—like making art, watching and reading and writing cool stories, writing and performing original music, living in Massachusetts, rockin' a cool beard and cool glasses, and having a good relationship with my parents—I kinda have everything I wanted from life already. Maybe it's a matter of degrees and the specifics of how, but whether my mood is up or down, I can at least keep moving forward.

It's like a pile of boulders fell on my head, but I finally found the perfect one to chisel into what could be a fantastic sculpture. We'll see.

Thanks for reading,
Odist

16/52 - This Too Shall Pass (I say as I floor the gas pedal and swerve left)

"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.

It belongs to human nature to hate those you have injured.

To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace." - Tacitus

Dear Internauts,

There are so many thoughts my brain chars with neuro-electric bubble-sparks!

I got to see an incredibly brilliant, funky, passionate, smart, captivating, moving, joyful, solid as a state of matter master-class in rockin a crowd the other night with SINCLAIR. I mean, wow. Part of me wishes I had a better memory or had taken notes, but then not really because I got so lost in the show I can only give you dabs of the details except to say that it takes such a combination of practiced skill, brilliant charm, and explosive talent to even go anywhere in the same star cluster as this TRUE ARTIST.

Both The Promise and Colossal are very worthwhile films I would def recommend.

I maybe kinda sorta might possibly have a "job" thing. Obviously, updates will follow.

And I've been pushing ahead with making the art for chapter one of the graphic novel thing.

Heh, at an open mic on Tuesday, I played "What Really Matters" and two folks there at the bar started dancing. I think that's a first for any of my music. Sure, it helps that it's in 3/4, but I never thought anyone might actually waltz to my stuff. Or shuffle around at least.

Truly, I've got a lot of inspiration. Motivation, though, is ephemeral. Well, everything is, though, right? It's that kinda thinking that makes it heart to get out of bed. Strange how the fleeting nature of existence can in some moments and for some people be a source of exhilarating joy and for others a well of nauseating distraction.

Sometimes I wish I could be a liberal. Not very much a liberal, but just enough to feel included, y'know?

You may think that of course he's a liberal. He just can't stop blabbering on about poor people and the environment and animals and racist cops. Well, do I have you fooled? I do care about those things, or at least my blog and t-shirt collection seem to tell me that I do.

Now, you know I have no idea what I'm writing about, but I do think it's a bit of a problem to consider anything progressive when it says on one hand we should treat people better and on the other hand that we should only do so by getting the government to make us treat people better.


So, the government takes power (via money) from the people, and then the government allocates a portion of that power toward protecting and promoting the rights of the people. However, the majority of the power is used for protecting and promoting the rights of the government.

Taxation, and thus the government for which it exists, is a threat to human rights. The government takes from the people in order to give to the people in a way it deems best. So long as the giving remains desirable, the taking is permitted to rise proportionally. The most common solution is to take from one group more or less than from another. Not only does this serve to present a subtext of justice without doing anything besides taking, it places the government as some neutral party, more like a natural disaster than an institution made of and run by other people.

And sure, this makes sense if you truly believe that the only way to get people to behave in a way you think is right is if the law tells them they have to, that people won't do good or treat others how they'd want to be treated unless they're under threat of punishment from a highly-funded and well-armed super power. If that's what you think of people, then by all means, you should totally entrust the most power hungry and manipulative of those folks with the most power and resources in order to control everyone else. But of course, I'm not like that, and you're not like that. I mean, if only I didn't have to pay so much money in taxes, I'd spent it all on helping build a better community with my fellow human beings. You would too, right?

Obviously, this isn't just a liberal problem. This is a people problem. Are we lazy? Do we crave subjugation? Are we doomed to lives so nasty, brutish, and short? Are we not unlike the owl from the tootsie-pop commercials who counts a-one, a-two-hoo, a-three, then crunches the pop and declares the counting complete?

It's easy for me to see the worst of humanity in myself, but then again I can just as easily point to all the bad stuff I'm not doing and hope somebody steps in and stops THOSE PEOPLE. I mean, while I'd like to think I'm the type of person who would help the underground railroad of LGBT Chechnya refugees flee to safety, I have to realize that what I actually am is someone who grew up in a subculture that actively promotes the kind of religious extremism leading to the concentration camps those folks have to flee.

I recognize that I'm me, sitting here and typing at night with no real plans for actively improving the world. I probably would speed dangerously down the road without the fear of being pulled over by a cop. I most definitely would use far more profanity on here if I didn't think it might affect my little corner of readership. Truth is, on a purely emotional level, I get more angry at smokers flicking butts out their windows then I did about Trump's hypocritical Earth-Day statement.

We don't have to believe that people are inherently good or that local communities can interact in civil and mutually beneficial ways. We don't have to do anything. It might be interesting if more of us started looking at the predatory role of government as less of a given at the same time as we took a more active role in being good to each other regardless of borders or by-laws. It might be interesting if instead of allowing ourselves to be automatically grouped in with ideas about mass murder, war-profiteering, and violent obedience to authority, we made sure to support our kids before they ever become troops.

I don't know. I'm just a blogger. Why are you reading this? Does anything exist?

What is time?

Thanks for yours tho,
Odist

15/52 - Progressive Digression in Session

Dear Internauts,

You ever have this feeling like you're flipping through stations on the car radio, stuck in traffic, and the only thing that's not commercials is a song you didn't realize how much you absolutely loathed until this exact moment?

I sincerely hope with all my heart that I don't grow into one of those condescending grumps always spouting on about kids these days.

I've read a lot of frantic whining lately about how certain social justice movements, in attempting to promote the welfare of marginalized groups, are pushing for their agenda at the expense of more traditionally influential groups. Being as my mindset on a lot of topics related to gender roles, sexuality, race, economics, religion in politics, and other fun stuff has changed so vastly in the past few years, I can relate to those who are on many levels of recognizing that what we've been presented as default or right is actually more often just the way things have been for a while. Trying to come to grips with say, your white or male privilege can be made all the more difficult when it seems like one side is telling you you're the enemy and the other side is telling you that the first side is the enemy. Seems like no one is much helped by the idea of labeling who the enemy is except for those who'd rather things stay the same. Any rethinking of old paradigms is gonna rattle some cages, but I've been trying to do my utmost to relate to anybody who seems to be in pain.

See, I think the loud, angry folks and the soft, bitter folks are both hurt pretty bad. I may not always understand the vast technicalities and histories and anecdotal inspirations behind every feud, but I do know what it's like to feel ignored, dismissed, and abused. I don't think it does much good for anyone's cause to try and invalidate someone else's sense of disillusionment. I genuinely believe that if someone says they're in a lot of pain, the most constructive response isn't immediate disbelief (and certainly not immediate mockery).

Not to be all doom and boom, but we've always lived in a world where those with the greatest power to kill most often have the biggest funds behind their muscle. As long as we're not the ones being beaten, shot, or blown to bits, we can hypothesize and wring our hands and play keep away with life-saving medicine.

At some point, though, we all have to decide what kind of world we'd like to live in. Not for vague notions of future generations but for the literal, tangible now.

Are you okay with being the bully on the playground?

Are you okay with being the evil empire?

Are you okay with your time and labor fueling an egregious overabundance of imprudently employed death machines?

Are you okay with the abuses of your club, friend group, neighborhood, church, party, business, or any other subset of people to which you choose to belong while maybe turning away from the icky underside so long as the perks stay comfy?

Are you okay with living as part of a society wherein one can be said to deserve to be killed or to starve or to suffer in illness simply due to their standing in relation to imaginary figures favoring the greedy, the callous, and the blood-thirsty?

Really?

Thanks for reading,
Odist

14/52 - Down These Mean Streets (Or The Existential Potential of Turning Around)

“Remember: It costs nothing to encourage an artist, and the potential benefits are staggering. A pat on the back to an artist now could one day result in your favorite film, or the cartoon you love to get stoned watching, or the song that saves your life. Discourage an artist, you get absolutely nothing in return, ever.” - Kevin Smith

Dear Internauts, 

Driving here tonight—to this strategically chosen corner of the chain cafe in which I sometimes write these things—I rolled toward the usual intersection and passed a copy of Piri Thomas' Down These Mean Streets flapping brokenheartedly along the double yellow line. In that moment, I had no idea it was Thomas' book. I'll admit, the part of me that lives more by dream logic than daylight sense thought of all miracles it was my lost notebook returned to me. There, in two sizeable slices of yellowed, vaguely moist paperback (though, technically backless...and frontless), this apparently famous work, which until tonight I don't remember ever having heard of, reached its fingers from the painted pavement like the last beckons of a drowning child. 

Sure, I was going to leave it. The light changed and there was no easy, immediate solution to rescue these pages. Again, at the time, I had no idea if this was anything more than scraps. Could've been a  signed Catcher in the Rye or cherished correspondence saved from the Civil War or more likely the torn pages of a phone book some poor soul received while waiting for a far more urgent parcel. I had a mere two hundred feet AT MOST before the thought of further investigation would be as banished from my mind as any sentence I type here the moment I'm distracted by the

How had it ended up on the road? And in such a state. With books, like hearts, such wear and tear can be a sign of great love and great pain. Likely both. Personally, I've never been mad enough at a book to actually toss it away, save the few books that were good enough for me to pick up again later. Cradling them like the talons of a dying bird, I feel for the old familiar pulse and sink into the weary down. Memories of that which kept me going before play out like the hints of a familiar tune within the cage of my mind, while I consider each new seed one by one. And sometimes, that rarest of literary phenomena would spark a life back into the hollow bones of plot. The sky opens wide and the poor creatures wings span wider than ever before. And the song flows on ever louder and truer. Often, if I stay long enough to study the flight, I can tell where the bird's course dips. Sometimes, though, the bird seems all the better for it. 

At least we can say this particular bird got to fly for a little while, I guess. 

Covers torn off. Missing about forty-ish pages near the middle. In two pieces. Or at least only the two that I found. And those bent and smashed in a way likely caused by being run over more than once. 

Would I have ever even considered this book? Maybe. A quick search online says it has some decent press and is at least known. If I'd taken the right classes it could have been on a syllabus or two. I'm interested in learning more about this author now. I might even read a bit of it. Who knows? Might catch my interest. Might not. My attention is habitually fleeting. 

If I hadn't stopped though... if I hadn't turned around at the first chance and pulled into the nearest parking lot... if I hadn't swallowed my fear, looked both ways, and stepped out... if I hadn't reached down and picked up these wrecked, incomplete, discarded chunks of idea-infused matter... 

well...

I'd probably have written something about how much I think nationalism is a flimsy foundation for a standard of ethics OR how my old web host is shutting down so I had to fly back and forth between a new web host and a new domain host because apparently those are two separate things and they don't always get along well but now I've got a sorta new website even though it's just a poorly designed host for linking to various social media OR how I have never in my life applied to so many jobs just to receive absolutely zero reply from anyone OR how I think I finally settled on an okay script for the first chapter of that graphic novel thing I'm doing instead of being a good little self-promoting singer/songwriter man-child OR how I wrote a new song today by taking another song I was working on and changing the lyrics to something more blatantly cheesy and political because bombing for peace is really about what you can expect from any president but especially one who could bankrupt casinos y'know OR...

>deep breath< 

This socially anxious, depressed, traumatized, demisexual, socio-anarchistic, neurotic, lonely, hungry insomniac, wanna be artist/writer/martian may not be great at breaking up run-on sentences, but I do sincerely thank you—from the deepest, darkest depths of my speeding heart—for reading. 

-Odist

p.s. - if any of you have read Down These Mean Streets, let me know your thoughts, 'cause at this point I know absolutely nothing beyond the title, the author, and that it's maybe autobiographical...oh and of course that somebody either loved it or hated it a WHOLE lot.

13/52 - Last Night I Dreamt of Distant Space and Woke Up On the Floor

Dear Internauts,

There's a disconnect grown over the past several years between the way I'd like to imagine my brain working and the way it has proven to actually work. This heavy drive inside my mind would prefer that every emotional state and the corresponding level of energy be tied directly to obvious outward stimuli. I'm happy because something positive has occurred or I'm sad or angry because something negative has occurred. To recognize that this isn't the case is at first to see homeostasis thrown into flux via a storm of inevitable, unstoppable chaos. To face this storm, however, is to recognize that it is in fact far more predictable than even what I might consider normal. After all, it is completely subjective to say that some experience is good or bad, and our emotional responses arise through that lens or an even more subconscious one. At least we'd like to believe so. However, the practicality of real experience—the basic building blocks of self in response to the forces of impatient tide and time—are almost binary in their simplicity.

I mean to say that my mood is like an infants. Worse even, my moods are like a vending machine. Put the right pills, food, sleep, and percentage of time spent around other people into the brain slot like loose change and basic stability falls to the bottom.

Oh why am I so tense? When was the last time I ate or slept or remembered to take my medication?

It's astoundingly frustrating at every turn to feel that my existential experience is so limited to chemical inputs and outputs. And yet, to oversimplify can be just as if not more limiting.

While I'd like to believe I'm a complex organism with a wide range of perspectives, motivations, responses, and ideological influences, it's become just as easy to see myself as this emotional automaton. However, when I finally reach some strict, habitual mainframe balance of physical balancing out the emotional, the roaring madness of how utterly foolish I must be to think I could understand myself comes tumbling down to crush me.

I've eaten, showered, slept, medicated, accomplished several things on my to-do list, and am on the precipice of truly feeling some blip of happiness just in time for a wild card stimuli to pop in as cliffhanger like a "who's that Pokemon?" of mood swings. Just as I start to feel in control or predictable, as demoralizing as that can often feel in its own way, and suddenly I am complex and chaotic once more.

When I was a kid, I could simply blame my bad moods on my age, a phase, or some spiritual shortcoming. Now that I've somehow reached a kind of adulthood, it's like these decades of humanity have all been a front. Every clue as to how to respond, process, and interact with the world stands as a red-herring. Life is the perpetual moment of "all is lost" pre-climactic battle, in a script where the ending is formula but its previous chapter never comes.

I would have preferred to write about how legislation will always fail to achieve real societal change so long as hearts and minds remain unchanged. Maybe when I'm feeling less like the lego set smashed to pieces with a few 2x2 blocks lost under the couch, I'll share my improvised anarchical manifesto.

For now, I'll simply say that there are no updates. I continue to work very hard as a songwriter and performer and graphic novel artist and writer, while having yet to hear back from any of the hundreds of employers I've applied to and contacted for a "grown up job".  Ugh, because selling your labor is the keystone of our society. The paragons are the miserable and steadily employed. After all, finding a job isn't hard, in the same way that finding a rock isn't hard. It's skipping that rock all the way across an ocean that's a bit difficult. Perhaps especially when your hands are tied to sunken ships and your legs made of rice paper.

Ta-daaaaa! That's a blog.

Thanks for reading,
Odist