Scheduling a Nervous Breakdown

I've kind of slid sideways, jobs-wise, into a position in the same industry, more or less, that I was in before, specifically meaning the one mostly paid for by your tax dollars. No, I don't mean some bullshit Elon Musk billionaire-socialism public money laundering front specializing in pedestrian deaths, exploding rockets and eventually realizing the dream of asphyxiating human beings to death in exciting new ways on Mars, I mean more of the ones that are ostensibly using your tax money on purpose for things that are helpful. On paper at least. The line between public sector and private sector has eroded so extensively--between the outright corruption of already-rich-guys redirecting public funds or government-attached remoras self-dealing themselves into tres comas territory--that even those pockets that are left supposedly still doing The People's Work feel like a copy shop run by a drug gang.

After last week's momentous election results, hoping for stuff seems appropriate, but after the last 10+ years, it still feels a little naïve. We still have to make it two months until the inauguration of the new Congressional class, so until then it's business as usual. Hell, in the last line of the previous paragraph, you had to endure a middle-aged man making a reference to The Wire in a post about, I dunno, anything. Some things remain predictable as a sunrise.

Guard-up is not the worst way to be. Getting ready to accept, usher in and participate in change is a learned skill, it turns out. Most behavior is learned behavior, though. In the celebrated case Nature v Nurture, I'm on the record having filed my amicus briefs in favor of the latter. Sure, we come hard-wired with a will to survive and a reflexive distrust of snakes and leopards, but the latter part, like more or less everything else, seems kind of redundant with the "will to survive" bit. Most everything is a product of not only experience, but in contextualizing and metabolizing our own responses to those experiences. The ease and calm with which we take on shifts in normal or expected is how we get concepts like grace and panic, giant umbrella categories for how we respond when we're huffing straight cortisol like silver-faced Juggalos with fresh cans of spray paint.

I think I'm ready for some kind of tectonic shift in politics and our culture, with a blue Texas and people generally having Thanksgivings we can spoil with childhood resentments and passive-aggression instead of just arguing about politics. You know, the old fashioned way.

But I'm as hard to bend as anyone. Yesterday I had the whole day off, but still I somehow chose to try to write this after 8 pm on a Thursday night in a sliver of time between being home from running around post-work and going to early bed, again because of work. I've been writing on Thursdays so long, I can't seem to break myself into Wednesday writing, when I typically have way more time and space to work things out and just, I dunno, breathe a little. But again, we're humans, we only know the realities we build, these tiny prisons of inputs we insist are the most, best truth and then commit our whole lives to living as though they are. It's in the petty smallness of these stubborn vanities we forge meaning from the ephemeral nothingness of time, carving courses of intent between the spinning indifference of sunrises and sunsets. Adaptation is the hardest thing because it, by definition, violates the rule-sets, even if the board you've set yourself up to play promises no prizes for winning. Like Omar said, it's all in the game.