29 April 2026

So in the midst of all my mundane nattering in the previous post, we learned that someone messed about with my box of nails and shingle pieces with nails in them and basically filled it with bark and wood trash. I had thought C did it. But L has since mentioned in passing that she was the culprit. She’s decided the bark trash makes great kindling. This despite having two gigantic stacks of cedar shingles (the same ones I break down near-daily) at the front of the property that’ll last her til the heat death of the solar system AND despite the fact that when there’s been loose bark on her firewood in the past, half the time she doesn’t want to burn it.

I don’t know. I just reside here, dogsit now and again, and do a few chores. Nothing ever makes much sense.

I’m largely ignoring the bark-trash box, though. L will have it if I’m out of town visiting my brother or something — it’ll save her having to try to use an ax, what with all her joint problems and chronic pain. I’ll wait to set up the new nails-and-nail-scraps box until C’s done with whatever the fuck she’s doing lately. No more weird arguments over how I arrange my own damn workspace from someone who does not even live here and is, in fact, four years younger than I am. Fuck off, junior.

The other thing that made no sense to me is C actually fixed the situation with the washer/dryer (stacking units) fairly quickly… and then no one told me. That was Thursday. I think it was Sunday before I thought to ask C whether it was working or what. Oh yeah, she said, I fixed that days ago. Sooooo no one thought to tell me. I wasn’t exactly in the room when that came up. Maybe L announced it on her Facebook account, but I’m only friended there. I don’t follow (I don’t see her in my newsfeed ever, due to my settings). There are enough ways we irritate one another, and I’m suspicious she doesn’t follow me either, that I gave up on that more than a year ago. So it may be my fault I didn’t know. But it also takes ten fucking seconds to say something or send a text. Again… I dunno. I just exist in this house. Whatever. I have since done three loads of laundry and am quite happy with the current state of affairs.

When it comes to laundry, anyway. The false alarm on possibly getting a job in Cave Junction meant I had to face what it would take to uproot from here, and threw my current state of life-paralysis into sharp relief. I do this when I get too comfortable. I never seem to get comfortable in an actually healthy situation. Is this situation more healthy than when I was doing gig food delivery and living in a weekly-rate extended-stay suite? Maybe. Definitely more healthy in some ways. Is it healthy in all the ways that matter? No. So I need to watch out for that inertia because it’ll mean I can’t move on when I really need to.

At the same time, maybe I’m being too perfectionistic and I’m actually sabotaging myself by being bitter and wanting to escape. It’s really hard to tell what’s going on, and I don’t want to look too closely because surely the shit that pisses me off would not be a problem if I were actually a good or worthwhile person. People would like me. I would have friends instead of needy people looking for cheap or free help. I would actually have a present worth enjoying and a future to look forward to. I just don’t know.

Of course, maybe I’m being too hard on myself and the reason I’ve never gotten comfortable in an actually healthy situation is because I’ve never fucking been in an actually healthy situation. That’s a thing. It’s rough when you grow up thinking the adults in your life have a handle on things, even if they also have some less-than-stellar personal failings, and then you grow up and escape and look back and realize the house was metaphorically on fire. And it’s not just your parents you tend to have that realization about. That’s basically most people, because this culture is sick and it produces sick people.

Not that I’m a bastion of perfect mental health. But you can have Issues and still see at least some of what the fuck’s going on. That’s a thing, too. In fact I think it further complicates my life because if there’s one thing people hate when they’ve got their heads up their asses, it’s a smart-aleck coming along and pointing out they’ve got shit up their noses. WOW do they ever get pissed off. It’s wild.

But there’s also a danger that I spend too much time noticing other people’s cranio-rectal inversions as a distraction from my own nonsense. Oh hell, it’s probably a fact. I need to quit doing that. It is not like anyone ever takes the fucking time to fix MY shit when they notice I’ve got that going on. They just point and laugh. I’m good at noticing discrepancies. I should probably work harder to correct this one. I bet I would be a lot happier in the long run.

Meh… I’m not all that unhappy. Or, this is like my general health before the first time I went gluten-free and I really am horrifically unhappy but can’t tell? (I didn’t realize how much wheat made me feel like crap until I went without it for a while.) I dunno. But for instance, I think the last time I genuinely cried was December 2023. That was when I realized I had to leave Columbus again. (I would just like to go on record here that I completely did not want to do that and would return in a heartbeat if I became able to move back.) Even when my mother died a year later, I hit it mostly numb. A lot of shit has happened in half a decade. It got too much to respond to after a while. But mostly, I just deal. I will get through The Next Thing or I won’t. If I don’t, I won’t have anything left to worry about at that point. I can’t decide everything about what happens to me. That’s out of my hands. (You know how everyone keeps telling you life’s not fair? That’s actually true so no, I can’t magically make everything happen the right way just by making the right choices. That’s NOT a thing.) I can only decide how I respond, and that’s only going to take me just so far anyway.

So, mostly I vibe. And if something annoys me, I grouse, and then I go back to vibing.

Beats several alternatives.

But I have been worried that wanting to leave here is dumb or ill-advised. I was raised by people who were quite unforgiving of my mistakes. “If you’re gonna do something, do it right” was the general refrain. Looks good on the surface. Seems to make sense. Is incredibly damaging, especially to a kid. I don’t think I will ever be able to not have a warped view of how the world works thanks to that bullshit. I will be fighting with that idea all my life. I fucking hate it. The question shouldn’t be whether my wanting to leave is good. I am a fucking adult. I can want to leave if I fucking want to. The question should be, “What are the next steps I can take to make leaving here a reality?” I’m wasting time debating the wisdom or morality of any of it. Nobody cares. At best, they care whether my leaving would inconvenience them. Well, shit was fine before I got here. Shit will be fine when I’m gone. There really won’t be a difference. But what I do matters to ME.

I ask myself what skills I need to ensure I’m not living in a refrigerator box when I’m finally forced to retire (I will never actually be able to retire). I think the most important skill will be pivoting. “Okay, this has happened. Now what do I do?”, and then doing whatever it is. “This wasn’t supposed to happen” is not a helpful response. Even if it really wasn’t supposed to.

Nobody cares.

Speaking of that. Lately I’ve been ruminating a lot on this thing, and it’s hard to explain what it is, but here are the edges of it. I have been thinking about activism and activists who are nominally “on the left” and about their relationship to class issues. Yeah, I always stick to the light and easy subject matter. Anyway…

For those of you unfamiliar with this shit — you just tick a box on a ballot every four years, but “don’t really do politics” otherwise — I’m not gonna argue a whole lot this time about what leftism is. I do want to explore that, but not now. This post will be too long already. But when I speak of leftists, you can substitute Labour or the Democrats or who the fuck ever. Let’s think more “Democrats” in this instance since I’m American. Anyway. SUPPOSEDLY, the Democrats are for human rights and the working class. Supposedly. Actually what they’re for these days is everybody getting tangled up in identity politics, which is not the same thing as class politics. Identity is what you feel you are; class is what you actually are. That so few American (or indeed developed-world) voters even know the difference is rather troubling. And the end result is that the American electorate is at constant war with itself over which people’s feelings are more important than which other people’s. Meanwhile, the people who own and run everything are happily buying up our resources and running our institutions into the ground. And this didn’t start with Trump. This has been going on for quite a while. Clinton (Bill) and Obama (Barack) even helped it happen, I’m sorry to say.

An interesting casualty in the Feelings War has been the middle class — especially the intellectual class, including artists and writers. Yes, I know that a lot of times artists and writers are broke. But it’s called a socio-economic class for a reason. Even when a person in the middle class isn’t making middle-class money, they still feel socially as if, and are treated socially as if, they are still in the middle class. I have seen this in action. One of the few people I associate with regularly anymore earns about two grand a month in regular pay, and I’m pretty sure they have a college degree. Another sees maybe three grand a YEAR from their book royalties, and they’ve got more than two dozen of those in print, and they definitely have a college degree. But their friends are middle-class. Their professional connections are middle-class. They’re middle-class.

And a thing I’ve noticed with them and their friends, the ones who have been displaced from society due to falling on the reality-based side of gender identity politics? There’s a definite sense that they expected their lives to work out a certain way and now they feel cheated. This is completely understandable. It’s a very human experience. There is, however, also a certain amount of what I’d call a sense of entitlement going along with the feeling cheated. Like, “damn it, my career was supposed to leave my life better than it started.” I mean, that’s the primary reason any American goes to college, whether they want to admit it or not. They want to keep their social status or they want to improve their social status. They certainly do not expect their social status to decline. That’s not the sales pitch they got in the beginning, damn it.

And as with any middle-class person who hasn’t tried to unlearn privilege, it’s obvious they believe there are people who are beneath them socially and that these people “owe” them material support, usually in the form of cheap or free labor. It doesn’t sound nice, and I don’t mean to convey that these people are unilaterally mean. The best of them have something meaningful to offer in return for that cheap or free labor. But almost none of them are saints, and even the best of them fail to understand — or don’t care in the first place — that barely paying or not paying a person for work is wasting that person’s time, and that poor people stay poor because everyone else wastes our time.

I’ve been watching this going on for a while — this predates my current living situation, in fact, so don’t go believing this is a recent revelation on my part. I just hadn’t appreciated how deep it went until from two years ago to now. (I will have been here two years next month.) And while this has gone on, the middle class have nevertheless congratulated themselves on how enlightened they are that they want to Save The Poor. If I speak of this in Marxist terms, it’s the bourgeoisie crowing that they are going to liberate the proletariat. I have not read enough Marx to know his opinion on the matter, but it would not surprise me to find he did not believe the bougies would ever liberate the proles. That is certainly now my own conclusion, based on the evidence.

The only reason this even matters is because another thing I’ve been arguing with myself about is whether I ever want to join a political organization (I am not, nor have ever been, a formal member of L’s and Neighbor’s organization, nor L’s radical feminist organization, for that matter). And right now I have to conclude that my answer is “fuck that shit.” I don’t care who it is. Every single one of those fucking groups is run by bougies, and NONE of them give a shit about us proles. No matter what we do, no matter what education we get, no matter how hard we struggle, they are never going to see us as anything but their fucking servant class. Uh-uh. Nope. I’m done.

I don’t know what politics looks like for “the working class” if we refuse to join bougie groups on principle. (This assumes, of course, that any of us even have time for that bullshit, what with having to work to stay alive.) The landscape has certainly changed — political parties and NGOs are not our only route into political activity anymore, and anyone can get on the internet these days, often for free. There are definite possibilities here.

I’m just not convinced any of that is for us. There are too many moving parts, too many bad actors to keep track of, too much nonsense to contend with. It may just be we should let the bougies fight it out and then run whoever wins out of town on a rail.

I dunno. I just live here.

Okay. I have shit to do. Back to work tomorrow. Yay.