Somewhere Between Love and Shoggoth

This Friday a man I don't really know, don't trust, and who only seems to be interested in the pleasure he gets from slicing on a living person is going to reach up my nose and (hopefully) cut all the sick out of my fucking head. Fortunately, I will probably be unconscious for that whole nasty endeavor, but it still brings a lot of Deep Hate out in me.

I watched doctors apathy my mother to death for most of a decade. Watched people who openly mocked her for her weight ignore the cancer that was creeping through her entire body until all the MRIs and x-rays and examinations didn't matter anymore. People whose only job was to watch for the things that ended up killing her, who would rather make a fat joke than discern between mysterious nerve pain and the pain caused by cancer ravaging bones and organs. I Hate doctors. Spending fifteen minutes in an office, listening to a bored man try to justify yet another course of the antibiotics that have to this point pretty much only served to destroy my digestive tract fills me with the kind of rage that characters in stories dedicate their lives to and ruins peoples lives in real life. The idea of spending three hours helpless while that same man digs around millimeters from my fucking brain is loathsome beyond description. The only thing that keeps me from being reduced to a Lovecraftian puddle of cosmic fury, much less actually going along with this, is my wife.

A person in pain for long enough tends to turn into a dick, especially a person known for being a grumpy fuck in the first place, and I won't put her through that. Not if I can help it. So for this week I'm going to do my best to be a man and not a Shoggoth, because she shouldn't have to pay for my anger. I honestly hope that this whole event can vent some of the poison from my heart, maybe even go some way towards convincing me that there are actually doctors out there who aren't worthless, self-righteous, shit-souled, fuckpuppets. I hope.

Fuck You, You'll Read It

When I was a kid the only thing I ever really wanted was to have real, true love. I know its kinda weird to have a guy admit that but its true, and that goal has played a massive role in my life. I've always prioritized meaningful, intimate personal relationships over everything else; friends should be absolute confidants and partners should be nurtured and embraced as though they are part of the self. This makes me a support character in my own life, and I like it that way. I met the woman who was to be my wife when I was nineteen years old and once it became clear that that was how things were going down I wanted nothing more than to give my life supporting her in her pursuits. I love being a husband, being the support network for my wife, who I met when I was nineteen.

Complete and unconditional love is the only thing I've ever wanted and I got it before I was old enough to drink. How the fuck do you find a new ambition after that? What would be the point? I can (and have) make more friends, but the pressure to socialize is diminished in the face of the ongoing intergalactic genital high-five that is my wife. I could get really into a career if I really wanted to alienate my wife and betray every principle to which I've given myself. I know I sound like I'm bitching but I'm really not, its just struck me lately how awkward it is in our society to not really respect self-sufficiency or independence, which made me think about how I came to that place.

I don't value being independent because none of us really are, and the insidious lie that we are is the source of some very deep-seated issues. Self-sufficiency is just laughable as soon as you aren't completely alone, why work hard just to keep yourself going when a group cooperating provides for more people with less individual effort. The problem here arises from the fact that since I don't value those things I also don't understand a lot of the barriers people put up around themselves.

If there is a bullet point to take away from this its that I'm socially retarded and I don't fucking understand why you aren't, but I don't know. Fuck you, you read it.

Fuck You, Don't Pay Me

So here's a weird thing; I don't like getting paid. Not for my labor, not for goods, not at fucking all. Handling money in general bothers the fuck out of me. I've thought a great deal about why this is and how it happened that the absolute basis of our society came to repulse me. I'm not entirely sure how this state of affairs came about but I do have some reasons.

The main reason, I think, is that being paid to do a thing manipulates the nature of that thing. I'm no longer doing a thing because I want to or because I enjoy it, I'm doing it because I've been bought. At least rented. Now, this is probably some deep-seated fuckery from the circumstances of my rearing or whatever, but that doesn't make it less of a problem. Its to the point that if someone offers to pay me for say, my fucking delicious homemade molasses bacon, I not only don't want to give them any more, but I don't even want to make it anymore. Because clearly this person doesn't appreciate the act of love and attempt at comradery represented by my bacon, and if they don't then what's the fucking point. By offering to pay me it takes a fun, tasty offering of friendship and reduces it, and thus me and my friendship, to a commodity.

That's kind of the rub here, getting paid makes me feel cheap. I don't really value my own survival for its own sake. The things I do are done for earnest companionship, shared and personal joy and, fuck forbid, because I genuinely believe in what's being done. Getting monetarily remunerated just takes all of those great, ephemeral joys and tries to reduce them to a grubby, coke-stained stack of bills. Or worse, a digital means of survival that can only exist theoretically for me. It's saying that yeah, what I do is great and all, but you'd rather wave me away with money than allow a connection to form.

I fully recognize my unacceptable luck at having my needs accounted for, I don't deny for a second that this is a problem evoked only from a position of plenty. Unfortunately, my marketable skills consist of small batch baconry and the ability to swear on the internet, so my prospects are slim on my own. And considering my little neurosis gets worse the more abject my poverty and completely predates my current relative comfort I have, I would be fucked without my goddamn amazing wifemonster. At the same time, I think it says something absolutely disgusting about our culture when the knee jerk response to an attempt at brotherhood or an exercise in delight that results in a physical object, is "Here's some money so you'll keep doing that for me."

The Path to Agoraphobia is Paved with Good Intentions, Poorly Executed.

Over the course of the last several years I've pretty much completely lost the ability to functionally interact with people. I'm not completely sure when it started but it probably had something to do with the fact that I stopped leaving the house. There was a period in which I could only afford to leave the house if I was looking for or going to work and even then bus fare was a prohibitive expense. Preexisting antisocial traits started to assert themselves more aggressively as my whole interaction with society was relegated to news-bites and poorly contextualized academia (thanks higher education!). Over time habits were established in such a way that I could no longer come up with reasons to go out. After I was told outright not to get a fucking job the idea of leaving the house fell even farther from a necessary evil to make ends meet to the least interesting or meaningful way to waste my wife's money, so I just stopped.

I've come to understand, with some work, what a bad idea this was. Justification became rule, rule became habit and habit became neurosis. Now the thought of doing anything at all, much less anything out of the house is accompanied by a combination of panic, apathy, and rationalizing my inaction. Now I can't even trust myself to be able to break the habit without outsourcing my motivation to someone else. I will get better, I have to.

Thanks for playing therapist, beloved internet. Now I'm going to go psyche myself up so I might be able to do something today.