Burned all my notebooks — What good are
notebooks? They won’t help me survive.
My chest is aching, burns like a furnace.
The burning keeps me alive.

– Talking Heads “Life During Wartime”

Feeling overwhelmed when the situation is bad is totally normal. When my life was a freefall of poorly placed faith, badly chosen partners, untenable, inconstant living situations, and marginal employment, I was forever swimming upstream at a feverish pace. Racing, leaping, grasping, waiting for the next big setback to smack into me and send me sprawling. When I remember my day to day struggle at the time, when I tell stories about it, it sounds (and _was_, in every sense) exhausting. But it was easy. It’s easy to come home so tired you don’t care where you live. It’s easy to shuffle from job you don’t care about to job you don’t care about. It’s easy to think of everyone as an enemy or an obstacle. It’s easy to dismiss all good things in your life as coincidence or happenstance, because then you aren’t surprised when they disappear again. After all, it’s not your fault, it’s just that life sucks forever and that situation NOT sucking was a part-time exemption. You had your vacation and now it’s back to the slog, sucker.

Well, my life isn’t a freefall any more. I’m no longer marginally employed. I choose the people I spend my time with and how much energy I expend on their needs with a more balanced and even hand. I’ve lived in my own house for two and a half years now. I own my car outright. I’m dating a wonderful person whose company brings me a lot of joy. I’m thinner than I’ve ever healthily been, I’m having sex regularly, I never really have to worry about money (day to day), and after weeks of PNR stretching, meditation, and plenty of swearing, I can almost touch my toes. I have friends and family who love and care about me, even my PETS are clean, healthy, and happy for god’s sake.

So that brings me to last night, when I was again sitting in my garage, endlessly fretting about whether or not my friends _actually_ like me. Whether or not my life has meaning. Whether or not any of what I have accomplished is “real”. Just a self-effacing pity cycle. Mope mope mope. I used to think this was OK, a defense mechanism for preempting disappointment. I encouraged it, even. I took snippets and misquoted Nietzsche and the Hakagure and pop culture. I cultivated a philosophy of pessimism. A grim hedge around my happiness — carefully trimmed to suit my mindset that I was fundamentally not worth attention or affection and that life is fundamentally unfair; a rigged game whose rules were either so unimportant I shouldn’t learn them or so ludicrously set against success that I should actively avoid engaging it.

This negatively weighted world is simple, and when things are bad, it seems to be a great philosophy. If all you know is self doubt and suffering, you are never surprised when you suffer. But I never knew what to do with joy, never learned how to trust my heart, and because of my overwhelming negativity, I never planned to live this long. It never even occurred to me that I might be 32, rested, well-laid, and gainfully employed some day. So, nonsensically, my biggest problem right now is learning how to be happy when I am _happy_. It’s harder than I ever thought it would be.

OK, this is just a huge dump of projects I’ve been tossing around in my head and I want someplace to organize it all.

1. Fix garage roof
2. Front/back deck
3. Get Yamahahaha going
4. Rewire Datsun w/LED lights/new alt/fancy fan
5. Sell Versa
6. Sell Kymco
7. Chicken tractor
8. Raised beds for front yard
9. Tear down shed/build tea house
10. Fence front yard
11. Fix edge of driveway/complete earth ramp in yard corner

I remember when I was very young, getting frequent ear infections. All the time. I’d wake up and feel vaguely sick, the side of my head would hurt, I’d have a fever and the sniffles, and we’d go to the doctor for some bubble gum pink amoxicillin and another admonition to jump up and down and clear my ears after swimming. They’d pass, I’d feel better, and everything was fine. One day, I woke up, and I could hear the air pump on my aquarium like it was a kettle drum. I looked over at the tank to see if something was wrong with it, and the light intensity from the lamp on top was so high that it felt like knives in my eyes, and made me instantly nauseous. I stayed home from school and about an hour later, I crawled on my hands and knees toward the bathroom, made it halfway there, then fell on the floor, vomited clear bile everywhere, and then slept in it for about an hour. That afternoon I felt completely fine. I think everyone assumed it was food poisoning.

Fast forward to Monday night. I was sitting down watching a movie, and I felt a headache starting. It had been about 36 hours since the last one. They come on quickly, and present with watering eyes, my nose either plugs or just one nostril plugs (the right one), and then the headache starts: an eye-socket-to-hairline swath of unrelenting ant-bites-inside-my-skull pain. Monday night I would have done anything to make it stop. I had my shoes on and my jacket on to go buy cigarettes on the off chance THAT would help. It was probably a 9 on my pain scale. I couldn’t sit down, I had to be moving, I was rubbing my head and neck and nothing was helping. I took a hot shower and laid down on the couch and finally all I could do was lay in bed until I fell into fitful sleep. Thursday morning, when I got to work, I had another one. Exactly the same, another 9. Eyes tearing, nose plugged. I’ve never had a headache as bad at work. And people were visibly concerned. It’s disconcerting when I can’t even concentrate on a sentence long enough to get from the start to the end of it. And I recognize the discomfort, the nausea, and the “like a storm clearing” speed at which the pain recedes from headaches of my youth.

I’ve been having these headaches basically daily (or multiple times daily) for a month now. I finally stopped just ignoring the “if you have a bunch of these they’re not migraines” paragraph at the end of every migraine description and clicked on a link to cluster headache. It’s… undeniably what I’m experiencing. There’s no cure, just prevention. So… I’m keeping a headache diary. Trying to track all the triggers which might be causing it (all of them, aside from cocaine, are basically in the running, since I don’t do that yak). I don’t really have much to say about this other than I hope it’s not a tumor (knocking on your mom).

Tags: brain health

“You don’t have to use money, you have plenty of checks.” – Me approximate age 8, to my mother, responding to her concerns about not being able to buy groceries that week.

“Deeper in Debt than Mexico” – The button which hung on the overflowing bill-basket at my childhood home.

“Aaron, you’re a pretty smart guy. You have gotta be able to figure out this ‘stock market’ thing.” – My Father’s advice to 16 year old me on ‘Finance’. The first time I remember him discussing money with me.

Money and me have never gotten along. I like spending it. I like when I have a big pile of it and the excitement of knowing I’m gonna spend it. Sometimes I even like the things I spend it on. But for the largest part of my life, money has been more enemy that friend. The lack of it, the mismanagement of it, the expectation that it’ll be there when it isn’t. I’ve scraped together my first meal in two days out of couch cushions and I’ve floated checks for cigarettes. I’ve been fucked over and over by money, largely because I wasn’t ever taught about it. Not in school, not by my parents. TV pretty much told me what I already knew: having money is rad and spending it lets everyone else know about your personal radness level. Friends let me know that it was really fun when I spent my money on them. My parents shared plenty of lessons about (borderline psychotic) work ethic, integrity, personal responsibility. But as far as somebody who cares about me teaching me what it _means_ to have money, what “savings” is,  how to manage income? Hah.

There were times as a kid, that my dad was earning _excellent_ money and we were still having to time our grocery store trips to coincide with paydays. My room was adrift with toys, my parents would clandestinely throw away baskets of toys which I’d never even notice were gone. I wanted for NOTHING, but at the same time, there were last second runs to pay a bill and keep the electricity on. But as long as the fridge was packed with Coca Cola, pork tenderloin, and condiments, the cable TV was going, and we could drive anywhere we wanted to in our (many) cars, it seemed like we were living a lavish, comfortable life style.

Basically, my family took money for granted when it was present and panicked when it was gone. And for years I had no idea there was any other way to live.

I’m going to tangentialize here for a minute – Bear with me, it’s related. When I moved away to college, I had some severe social and personal anxiety. The way I masked my inability to introduce myself to others was by taking up cigarette smoking. I had smoked a little in high school, some cigars, two or three cigarettes a week when I could sneak a pack into the back yard shed. But when I went to college, they became my lifeline, a habit that I could quite literally structure my day around. By the time my second term came around I was at a pack a day pretty steady. By the time I dropped out it was more like two. It took years for me to try to quit the first time, it took years for me to try again when that failed. Five years of smoking later, I decided to quit for good. Six years later (about a year and a half ago) I grabbed a cigarette from somebody while out drinking, and a pack-a-day sized monkey was howling at my brain before I even knew it. This is how I remembered what addiction feels like, how completely it affects you. Here’s a small example of what happens when I’m quitting cigarettes: I wake up at 2am wondering where all the half smoked butts in the yard are. And I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t ever walked out there and taken a few stale drags. It doesn’t even feel like physical need at the time, there’s nothing in your lungs telling you that it needs some smoke, it is simply the all-caps-flashing-neon NEED, a general sense of impending doom, and the desperation to have that need quenched.

It is only fitting that so many of my monetary problems dovetail with smoking problems, because I was raised utterly addicted to money. I spend money to counteract bad moods, to celebrate victories, to impress my friends. I spend money when I know I shouldn’t, I sometimes lie about spending money when asked. I have put off work, friends, and family, in order to spend money. And as I have slowly made my way out of the pitch blackness of monetary despair, I’ve learned a LOT about myself, my relationships, and the responsible management of money. As you may have noticed in the upper right of this blog, there’s a box that has all my financial details in it. It’s not 100% up to date at all times, but it’s a good general picture of what I have going on. There’s no value judgments up there about what my debt was incurred for, there’s no talk about the decisions I make about where my retirement savings goes. It’s not all inclusive and if you believe for a second four lines is enough space to get even a basic picture of financial health, well, heh, you may be as fucked as I was when I started. But it’s an OK start. It helped me get on the wagon. Just like with any addiction, the road to recovery usually starts with the admission that you have a problem.

“One symptom [is that] the moral valence of debt and spending is reversed, and the multiplication of wants becomes not a sign of dangerous corruption but part of the civilizing process. That is, part of the _disciplinary_process_.” [DUN DUN DUUUUUN uncomfortably dramatic emphasis mine]

Tags: books, effusive praise