I’m still fascinated by traffic.
Traffic is a man made wave carrying, not just H20 molecules, but entire
individual stories and intentions all over the world. There’s traffic
everywhere I go. Driving to drug studies I’d be lost in the sea of cars
clogged in the bleak and concrete of Chicago suburbs. Driving through
Fort Wayne, I feel as though I’m right back in The Region with fatter
people and more to eat. Evansville rings the same. It’s probably an
Indiana thing.
I know the math that plucks “stars” from the sea. I know calling someone
a star to regard them as something special and different is an irony we
ignore pretty heavily. Without the media coverage, we find stars at
every level. People rocket to the tops of their industries. People have a
way of navigating social waters or difficult situations like no one
else around. A family man can be the star of his castle. A child can
always burn brightest in the eyes of their parent.
Driving from the hotel to the training facility, you learn very quickly
that Fort Wayne likes to speed. What doesn’t occur to them is there are
about 90 stoplights between them and wherever they’re going 5 miles up
the road. Speeding to slow down. Speed to cut off and then immediately
hit the breaks and halt. Speed to knock the shit out of one of a myriad
of potholes. Speed while they smoke, and put on makeup. This is a place
where people are trying to get somewhere, and the reality in between
doesn’t register.
This area also has an abundance of liquor stores and churches. I didn’t
make a count, but when a thought like that occurs to you, it suggests
it’s at least more liquor stores and churches than you’re generally used
to seeing.
Traffic grabs me because that’s what I’m becoming. I get up early, put
on uncomfortable clothes that flaunt sweat, grab my coffee and hotel
breakfast, and make my way to presentation after presentation about how
to treat LGBT kids like they’re people and not let it slide when a
parent who’s just had their kids taken away tries to talk me out of reporting something that could put me in jail. The “standard” of
interaction I’ll have to meet is 22 hours of facetime with clients, with
apparently a gigantic backlog that’s increasing if I want to be a
go-getter and shoot for 35-40.
The leadership, once I begin doing that, will start to tell me I’m
“changing lives.” They’ll say they had a feeling about me and were
waiting to see how it played out. I’ll get offered a company car. I’ll
interrupt hanging out or free time with phone calls or paperwork. I’ll
ask questions, in the way that I do, like
when I asked a VP of the parent corporation if there was a finder’s fee
for finding them a rich disturbed kid, who they cater to, to haul off to
The Dominican Republic for 10 months at $5,000 a month. It will make
people chuckle and uncomfortable, but they won’t be able to do anything,
because it will speak to a truth they like to polish and my numbers
will be undeniable.
If I get paid like I anticipate, it won’t be a daily struggle to squeeze
the tips out of frat boys, but a weekly reliable paid in full to the
professionals story of things that get done on my house. $300 here or
there? Yes, please do. I could pick up some small pricey-enough
indulgences like collecting cologne or springing for a nice watch. I’ll
be able to put a plan in place for my week that I politely berate (hold
accountable) my fledglings to where we work on goals and fill out
paperwork together. I’ll endear myself to some, alienate others, get
paid either way. I’ll think about getting on a healthy meal plan
delivered to my door and expanding my gym membership to include a
trainer.
I’ll even potentially have the time to have my weekends, or long
weekends, to travel and visit. Instead of all day wasting away in a
parking lot for a week, I’ll have hard and fast start and stop times to
my “free time.” I’ll have stories for days about people suffering a
circumstance I’m in no way approaching holistically or with the naivety
of my employers. It’ll be routine. I’ll have my snippets about how
Florida was rainier than I hoped, but at least there wasn’t snow!
I will meet very many pleasant people. They will have their families
form right before my very eyes. They’ll have their woes and story about
what brought them here. They’ll tell me what they believe and use that
tone for signaling discomfort for the topic or type of joke. “You see,
what it’s really about.” I’ll be asked a
dozen times if I have any questions, and I’ll watch them die a little
inside when their 5th dad joke in a row fails to land
By any normal measure, I’d be fine. I fit. My cultural conditioning
worked. I can sit still. I can play a semantic game as earnestly as any
convoluted Christian. I’ll have money. I’ll garner praise. I’ll be able
to merely mention my job and wear the gear to be regarded as a “good
person.” My hairline, gut, and humor will grow to match the rest of the
ensemble. All us jaded old-types will be in on the joke. I’ll disregard
the implication of the 40 I guzzle down every night.
How long have you been enthralled reading my familiar story? Are you
jealous? Do you wish you had that measure of security
to look forward to? Do you wish you had a job that burns out the
sincere do-gooder, but makes you laugh at the idea that there’s a single
stressful thing involved at all? Is someone going to scream my hearing
away? Am I going to be unable to leverage, “Um, hey, I’m the road to
getting your kid back, duh.” Will I have to drive even half as long? Is a
sick kid puking in the back of my car or filthy apartment my worst
nightmare? Will I have to work as many days? Don’t forget, I organized
my life where a McJob would pay my yearly bills in 1-3 months, and they
want to pay me to be a professional adult.
I appreciate what I have. I find the value in the things that piss me
off. I know there’s always work to be done, and when I want to improve,
upgrade, or change something, it’s not because I’m living in some
unbearable hell. I know that my skill or malleability is particular. I
know my perspective has been beaten out of hundreds of thousands of
words. I know that I’m the speeding Fort Wayner who dares potholes to
break my axle. While most of us might find change uncomfortable, I find
the idea of forgetting what really matters to me unbearable.
I didn’t/don’t read so much about the world so that I could put it on
the backburner and become personally snug and “mature.” I didn’t get my
ability to cut to the heart with a single question or tone by playing
along. What Christian organization charges $60,000 a year to send some
teenager looking at porn to another country because their rich parents
are equally deluded and naive? That’s the question they feel when I ask
if there’s a finder’s fee for luring another one into their trap. These
righteous lambs spent half this “training” literally trapping us into a
church sermon, pitch from Wells Fargo, and insistence we treat gay kids
like they’re normal, but also “respect” the “different views” of their
parents who act like you assume southern Indiana parents will. I chose
to withhold telling them like 90% of my friends are at least bi, and I’m
not trying to get fired for calling some old cunt a bigot.
I think my next tattoo, or set of them, are going to symbolize
resistance. No matter how good I get at this world, or have already
been, no matter how many rewards, no matter how relieved you feel that,
“He’s finally figured it out, shut up, grow up, and get paid,” it’s
wrong. I want self-sustaining creativity and new culture building. I
want the old guardians of my ideals. I want to create the constraints to
wiggle around in. And I want my focus to be primarily on the big
evidence and trends. I want to shape the world, not pretend to save my
region from opioids and several generations of child abuse. To be fair, I
don’t want to deliver food, didn’t want to sell alcohol, didn’t want my
spine tapped, didn’t want to finish college, or drive a cab, or do yard
work, or probably the vast majority of things that constitute my life,
so saying what I don’t want to do amounts to less than piss in the wind.
I’m still always going to be looking. I’m looking for the way out. The
funds will, at the very least, fuel my business speculation. I am
actually going to be “in the world,” so I’ll scrape together bits of
information that may prove useful. I’ve learned I can still 9-5 and
still get my TV shows in, likely the thing that will accompany my
paperwork, which I’m sure I’ll streamline. I won’t get lost in this
world. I won’t get comfortable. This cushy bed in the hotel they’ve
comped? It’s not mine, and it’s over tonight. The food allowance for
dinner? $15 and doesn’t include alcohol, the fuel of any proper social
worker, or human in general. I want the gig that hires those who know
how to responsibly drink while doing it and to sleep when I want for as
long as I want.
The main reason this path has concerned me is that I’m aware I’m not an
island. I can be shaped and persuaded like anyone. No one ever tries
because they don’t really care or are too stupid, but it’s possible. My
mind normalizes things pretty quickly as a what I take as a
self-protective adaptation. It’s one thing to write pissy blogs, another
to start creating new holes in my arm to pick at, or clenching my jaw
until teeth wear down. I spent a year at CT. I swear I started there
yesterday. Every happy memory of my past was yesterday too. Tomorrow
I’ll be 60, bitching about the nuclear fallout not-that-long ago that
these goddamn kids are already forgetting! I’ll regret I didn’t do more
or prepare or speak explicitly because I was a little too busy, a little
too selfish, and too old to fight about things I know I can’t change.
Then I’ll wheel my lonely wretched body out under the sun and burn to
death like that Furyan in The Chronicles of Riddick.
It hurts just enough. Like pants too tight in the waste. Like a neck
propped staring at the wall projection. Like the cut in the eyes and the
tongues of the pretenders lecturing you on their nobility and morality.
Like the indignity of turning your head and coughing. Like the
disrupted quiet as you crumple the remnants of your calorie mistakes. Or
the hum of traffic, beckoning.
