NaBloPoMo

Shit Is Fucked Up And Bullshit

Protestor at Occupy Wall Street dressed in a black and white striped suit ala prison garb holding a hand lettered sign reading Shit is fucked up and bullshit. Photo by Scott Lynch — Photo by Scott Lynch, 04 Nov 2011

Occupy Wall Street had the best signs. As a protest slogan, “Shit is fucked up and bullshit” pretty much sums up the frustration and anger that has been bubbling in this country for a decade.

And it’s also really brilliant in the way it reflects a sort of inchoate understanding that we have reached a point in human history where despite the wins of the past, and despite the optimism of the young, all gains and all joy are local.

The media, like the machines in The Matrix, have figured out that to keep humans pliable, to keep them inline, we need a certain amount of anxiety and frustration. They feed us a steady diet of crime and potential crime, both real and fictional, raising the general level of anxiety such that we don’t know what to do with happiness. At this point in late-stage capitalism, happiness makes us uneasy in a way we don’t quite recognize.

Sure, we’ve got comfort. There’s the big screen TV, all the streaming entertainment you could possibly want, books galore, music on demand. We have access to our friends lives, or the version of their lives they want us to see, at the tap of a finger mediating our need for human interaction. You can even order frozen, prepared dinners and an appliance in which to cook them, out sourcing the most basic choice a human can make to some corporate entity.

But all of that doesn’t make us happy. I narcotizes us. It preps us to be more efficient workers, better cogs in the machine earning money more money faster for our corporate overlords. With efficiency as the prime driver in corporate America, is it any wonder we have so much more narcissism than we used to?

Empathy is inefficient. If someone I work with shows up in distress and I have empathy, I sit with them, letting them externally processes or helping them find an answer to whatever is causing that distress as they so desire, and that costs time away from getting the work I’m being paid to do completed.

The malignant narcissist, however, sees all relationships as transactional, interacting with people only to extract the value they can provide. It’s focused, efficient human interaction. And it’s why so much of tech culture centers on lone genius paving the way for a new world. Don’t believe me? Just see Elon Musk’s Twitter feed.

Shit is fucked up and bullshit pretty much sums it up.

And so the king is once again my guest

Let me spoil it for you at the start: I should be writing a novel starting today. I am not.

Instead, I find myself contemplating National Blog Posting Month as an alternate November. Again.

We are entering a third pandemic winter. Third. Not second. Third. And I am tired.

I am tired of this pandemic. I am tired of my life being small, of feeling like I can’t go anywhere or do anything.

I am tired of having a small risk tolerance. I’m tired of having to assess every single activity – from picking up lunch for carry-out to getting a haircut to going to the dentist – against the prospect of death not just for myself but also for those I love.

I am tired of the changes aging has wrought on my body. I’m tired of the extra weight, of my old clothes being slightly too small and the next size up being slightly too big. I’m tired of worrying about how everything I eat might affect my physique.

I am tired of not getting enough sleep, no matter what I do.

Exercise: Sleep poorly. Don’t exercise: Sleep poorly.

Hydrate: Get up multiple times to pee. Don’t hydrate: Wake up multiple times a night anyway.

I’m tired of not being able to eat dessert because sugar keeps me up at night now.

Since March 2020 the world has been simultaneously chaotic and static. Forces I can’t control, like SARS-CoV-2 variants and whether people in our local area are getting vaccinated, have been pushing my life out of shape. As a result, my life has gotten very small. So small, in fact, that if I leave the house more than twice it’s been a busy month.

My last two years have been insanely stressful. Let’s see there’s:

The whole living through a global pandemic thing

Getting laid off
Finding a new job in an industry that thinks I’m 15 years past obsolete
On-boarding to a fully remote job for a company headquartered in another time zone
With a team in transition from small and scrappy to almost double the size in 6 months without any proper process or scaffolding
Did I mention the living through a global pandemic?

The thing I am most tired of, that I am terrified is a consequence of getting older and not of the insanity of the last two years, is feeling almost nothing.

Vaccines have taken away the true terror of COVID. I no longer have a panic attack when TheGirlFriend goes to the grocery store for the weekly shop. Fear has become a low-level background hum.

I have this mass of sadness clustered in my chest, yet I am incapable of crying.

The inequities of the world are being laid bare, exposed by the receding flood waters of white supremacy and capitalism. Climate change, something 20 years ago we were already 25 years too late to stop, is becoming a daily reality genuinely risking human lives and the lives of the rest of the species with whom we share the planet.

And I feel…numb. I can’t get angry any more about injustice, not like I did even 10 years ago.

If this is a natural consequence of aging…fuck this.

But the thing of it is, society doesn’t want me any more, not even my own fucked up corner of society.

Lesbian has become a bad word because so many people who refuse to recognized the humanity of others claim that label.

Kids in GenZ don’t know the difference between sex and gender – and yes, children, they are different – and insist that Butch isn’t a gender identity but is merely cosplay.

And still the LGBTQ community revolves around gender-conforming white men. So what have we really done to change anything?

I am menopausal. The medical establishment has relegated me to the dustbin, every complaint receiving the response of “Â¯\_(ãƒ„)_/Â¯ because menopause!” with no thought given to how to actually make my life better.

I know control is an illusion but like every other absolute, that can’t be the whole story.

This month I’m going to rant and rave and possibly be politically incorrect. But I control the narrative here. And this is how I get back whatever shred of control the last two years have robbed from me.

Rules for survival

Rules for survival come in all shapes and sizes. Some rules only apply to certain situations.

Don’t bring up a problem without having a potential solution and never embarrass your boss in front of people higher up in the structure are two rules that primarily apply in the work place.

Some rules for survival are primarily defensive.

Don’t go a a second location with someone you just met. Had a bunch of drinks? Double down on the first rule.

My mom, like a lot of moms, is a pragmatist. My mom is also a bit bloody-minded and a bit of a badass.

When she was 75 she repelled a push-in home invasion by slamming her full steel front entry door on the guy’s hand and then shutting it after he leapt back in pain.

Find two weapons in this room is a game we used to play at my house. Not to make it sound like my mother did this to a toddler, but I’m old enough to not be able to remember when we started this as a thought exercise.

And for the record, there are a lot more weapons in any given room then you might think.

We’ve been watching more TV that we might otherwise watch during these unprecedented times. This how we ended up watching the first three seasons of Wynonna Earp (Netflix; Syfy originally). Imagine Buffy the Vampire Slayer only with less heterosexual male gaze, a ton more sass, and gorgeous western Canadian landscapes.

CurrentMe has been wondering what PastMe was thinking ignoring this show for the first three seasons.

The short version: Wyatt Earp pissed off a demon and as a result the first-born heir in each generation since has been cursed with having to put down Wyatt’s kills, who rise from Hell as revenants upon the death of the previous generation’s heir.

Wynonna is the black sheep of her generation. The second born, never meant to be the heir, wild-child dealing with a lot of unresolved trauma stemming from the fact that she accidentally shot and killed her alcoholic, abusive father while revenants were kidnapping her older sister Willa, the rightful heir in her generation.

Upon her uncle’s death, Wynonna returns to Purgatory and to her sister Waverly, who maybe isn’t actually an Earp.

It doesn’t spoil anything to say that at the beginning of the second season Wynonna finds herself in trouble. It’s during this episode she remembers her mama’s rules for survival.

One: Don’t panic

As a first rule, don’t panic makes a lot of sense. Panic serves no purpose other than to draw energy. It also causes you to miss things.

Two: Assess the situation calmly

Evaluating your situation without emotion allows you to take a realistic look at your options.

Three: Take inventory

What do you have that you can use? What is around you that can help? What is your physical condition? Is the environment – your location, the weather, the time of day – working for your or against you?

All three of these rules make complete sense, especially if you’re trying to physically survive. Where they lack is in what I’m going to call…

Four: Figure out your goal

You can’t do the thing without knowing what the thing is you’re trying to do.

Focus on your goal and your goal alone. Others may be ignoring rules 1 and 2 and may try to take you down with them.

If you know what your goal is, these rules are flexible enough to apply to almost any life situation.

Presenting to your boss’ boss’ boss unexpectedly?

Don’t panic. That big boss is just a person, like you.
Assess the situation without emotion. That big boss is probably just bored or has heard good things about you. Maybe assume the best.
What tools do you have that will help you? Probably there’s a slide deck involved. Maybe you’re 20 minutes deep into a 45 minute presentation. You’ve practiced this, you can summarize.
What’s your goal? If it isn’t “Don’t embarrass your leadership” you might want to think again.

These rules also apply to the new reality of social interactions.

Yeah, some people aren’t going to wear masks, and some don’t fucking get that the reality of “keep back 6ft/2M” is that maybe you have to wait to get the thing off the shelf where I’m getting a thing off a shelf.

If you keep the goal – don’t get COVID – in mind, there are still ways you can deal with their behavior that don’t involve going all raging self-important asshole in a store.

My life is, objectively, pretty good. The curse of my imagination and the skill of that inner critic regularly torture me with “what if…” and it’s getting really boring.

For me, the struggle is how to move from surviving to thriving, and how these rules relate to that challenge.

By the numbers

Height: 5′ 9″/1.75 meters
Weight: 174 lbs/78.9 kilos
Trips around the sun: 18,728 days, 6 hours, 33 minutes and 0 seconds
Times I’ve been in physical therapy: 2
Degrees: 2
Professional certificates: 1
Full-time jobs held: 12 or 13 depending on how you count
Books written: 6
Books read: too many to count
Movies seen: ibid
Times I’ve doubted myself: ibid
Times I’ve gotten back up: ibid

Yes, today is one of those days. Those creepy, crawly nasty days when self-doubt kicks in and my incredibly talented inner critic sharpens its claws.

I’m trying a new technique this time. I call it the P.O. Technique.

When the inner critic pipes up about how I have set myself up perfectly to be distracted from the work I need to do on the last book, how I’m going to fail anyway because I don’t fit the profile publishers will look for any more, and how, ultimately, I’ve wasted my life I’m going to tell it to piss off.

In case your BritEng is a little rusty, piss off is a fairly rude way to tell someone to go away. And that’s what I want my inner critic to do: go away.

If I’m going to enjoy the rest of my life, I need to be a better friend to me, and I sure as hell wouldn’t say even half the shit to a friend I let my inner critic say to myself.

It’s not perfect, and it’s something I’m going to need to practice. But practice I will because I need to be a better friend to me.

You can never go wrong with lights

There’s something comforting about lights in the dark. It appeals to our most base instincts around self-soothing. Light, we think, gives as more control and more control equals a higher chance of survival.

Most winter festivals are about lights. You see it all over Europe where Christmas markets with their colorful lights, food stalls, and places to buy gifts start popping up in the middle of November. Hanukkah is literally “the festival of lights.”

We didn’t do lights last year at my house because we spent the holidays traveling. No lights. No tree. Nothing. Yeah, it was a lot less to clean up when we got home in January and wow was the bulk of December oppressive.

We decided to go all out this year. We are now those people – the ones who put up their lights Thanksgiving weekend.

And yes, the last errand we do before going back into quarantine for TGF‘s birthday and Christmas will be to buy a tree. No way I’m doing Christmas 2020 without a tree.