Winding down the brain

It’s after midnight as I write these words. This weekend was Memorial Day weekend, and I spent all but Friday working. It’s a lot different from how things have been in the past with this life that I have chosen. I do the work when there is work. When there isn’t work, I do other things to move forward. This weekend, the work came and I was on it. I had planned on taking today off. On Saturday, I wrote 2000 words, Sunday it was 6000, and today another 2000. That’s a 10k weekend of paid posts. Five of them. I’m hoping they sell. The client can be a little particular when it comes to content, so I’m expecting to get some notifications when they review them that I need to do some edits and rewrites. It’s good to have the work coming in, but I do need to take time to work on the book, the websites, and some other things.

I had an old friend coming through town who wanted me to meet her boyfriend. It’s great to see her with a good guy and she is happy. She paid her dues over the years with her sad choices (jeez, we’ve all had our share of them, haven’t we?). Penny got to make two new friends, which was great because she gets sick of me. Just because I won’t spend all day throwing that slobbery squirrel for her.

Their story seems to be what happens when things work out well. Two people who had given up finding someone else and were just living their lives. They met over a shared interest and in spite of trying to convince themselves otherwise, they found each other. Stories like that remind me that I am still a Romantic. I remember the last time that happened to me, and it puts a smile on my face.

I see people flailing, finding themselves unlucky in love. Myself included. Most of them are on dating apps or going out with people they meet at the bar or get set up by a mutual friend who can’t sleep with them just then, so they throw them their way. These two met doing something they enjoyed doing on their own. That’s how it happens, people. Finding someone who shares a common interest that isn’t swiping right and left. Someone who doesn’t just thrive on the bar scene and the drama and head games people play. Nope. It was just two people doing something they enjoyed independently and seeing each other from across the room.

Sometimes it’s just that easy. Sometimes it means meeting someone in spite of your desire to meet ANYONE.

Right now, I’m focusing on the work. It feels good to do what I love doing, even if I don’t always love what I’m writing about. A bad day of writing beats any day sitting behind a desk, watching my life tick away for someone else. I did that for twenty years. They cut me loose without a second thought. If what I wrote sells, it will be a good weekend take. And being on my own means I don’t have to worry about how my work will interfere with how much attention they are getting or making sure the toil of the house is done to their specs.

I still have the problem of being unable to sleep if I don’t feel like I accomplished enough. I need to feel fulfilled every day. I need to be creative for myself and get the thoughts down. So, doing that here will help me sleep.

Everyone tells me the way that I’m going to meet my person is going to be on one of my trips. I don’t know. I’m open to the idea sometimes, but right now I’m not going anywhere. I’m working. I’m getting better at what I do and feeling less panicked that I’m going to starve to death doing it. Someone taught us all a long time ago that enjoying what you do is somehow cheating. We have to force ourselves into these little boxes of being miserable or else we don’t feel like we’ve earned an accomplishment. Today, I got to use my skills to maybe make some money. I have a roof over my head. Food in my cabinets. Sure I feel that solitude creeping up on me sometimes, but I am grateful for the life I have.

I do the work when it comes and I have to retrain myself to let go of the idea of weekends and holidays. I get to set those from now on, without guilt. If there is work and I don’t wanna, then that’s on me. If there isn’t work, then I have other things to do. If I’m feeling burned out, then I can take a breather and come back stronger. It’s a crazy way to live, which when I put it that way, makes a lot better sense that showing up for some bullshit five days a week, even if there’s nothing to do. And feeling guilty for wanting something better.

This weekend has felt like a weekend of new beginnings.

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Stranger Shit

A few days ago, three shows dropped just before Memorial Day weekend. We were all so excited for them too. Shoresy (on HULU), Obi-Wan Kenobi (Disney+), and Stranger Things season 4 (on Netflix). One of these was actually worth waiting for, and that was Shoresy, the Letterkenny spinoff. I might go into it later, but it’s basically like a feel good sports movie (think Goon, Remember the Titans, Friday Night Lights) that has been infused in a Tim’s Double-Double for like five weeks. It’s good. It has an awesome soundtrack. I laughed outloud throughout the whole thing and I liked nearly all of the characters. It left behind the silly Letterkennyisms for the most part which I think have hurt that show. It was just a good watch.

Kenobi is more of just polishing that same turd the Prequels left us with. Ewan MacGregor carries the show on his back like a bantha. Mary Sue Organa is too precocious and once again they bent the rules of what we know about Star Wars…you know what? Fuck it. I don’t care anymore. Between the fans of the franchise who think it’s all real and the movies, there isn’t much else left to like about the series other than whatever the hell Mando is up to with Baby Yoda. Go nuts, b’ys.

So, my rant comes to Stranger Things, which as far as I can tell is just a fan fiction of the 80s through the lens of millennials who watched too many 80s movies growing up. They have once again applied their own sensibilities and romanticism to an era they hardly understand. They researched the time through painstakingly scouring old Speilberg VHS tapes and episodes of the Goldbergs. This season they threw in some Dazed and Confused to appeal to the stoners. Season one was great, then it fell off. By Season 4 we have a steaming pile of dogshit that has gone over budget with special effects, and hired the Woke Squad as the writers room. As Shoresey would say “Ho-leee…”

This is what I mean by Woke. I get inclusion, I get agency, all of that. But when you choke your sensibilities down everyone’s throat you get the same sorts of stereotypes you were trying to avoid. There isn’t one single likable character in this show right now. I finished episode two last night and I don’t even like Dustin or Steve very much. There is no chemistry. Nothing.

One of the things that bothers me the most is the character of Robin, who is a gay highschool girl and is very open about this fact with her buddy Steve. Yes, there are gay people in the world, and I’ve known lesbians who are just as vocal at talking about women they are crushing on as any high school boy. Now. Not in 1986.

That was at the height of the AIDS epidemic. People were getting the shit beaten out of them for maybe being homosexuals. Usually they weren’t! Our nation’s leaders were saying they were getting what they deserved with a slow agonizing death too. It was a scary time for gays in America, especially in the midwest. Robin in real life wouldn’t have so much as breathed her sexual preference outloud much less trying to chat up the pretty girl in band. It wasn’t like it is now! Things have changed a LOT since 1986.

The bullies are stereotypical bullies too, with the LaCoste shirts and blonde hair and mean girl tropes. The rollerink scene was an orchestration of some bullying that introduced the requirement of empathy when Eleven just snaps and she’s supposed to feel bad about retaliation, when most people in the 80s would have wondered why it took her so long to break that girl’s nose.

With a package covered in Soviet postage, Joyce would have wound up on a watch list with a white van parked in front of her house until 1991.

Then they jumped all over that Satanic Panic bullshit too with the DnD kid being suspected of murder and everyone freaking out. Nobody really cared back then about Dungeons and Dragons. Only the churches said anything, and the pastors shouting about summoning demons were on their third extramarital affair anyway. The congregation who actually took them seriously were probably waiting in line to be next, or so painfully naive in their social structures that they were too busy selling Shackley to do anything about their kids. They did NAIL the types of people who would be found sitting around a table in HS like that. But I rarely…RARELY saw anyone who could be considered a drug dealer playing RPGs. Stoners hung out with stoners and anybody dealing was likely already dropped out by then because they were making some money. What I’m saying is they didn’t DM campaigns. And in the 80s, nobody was calling horse traquilizer “Special K.” In 1986, there was coke, crank, weed, and pills. I doubt Hunter Thompson was even experimenting with ketamine yet. Maybe Timothy Leary.

Plus, the show is goddamn slow. Vegna or Vecga or Lou Bega, whatever the monster is called this season is creepy as hell and the damage he does is on Kronenberg levels of body horror. To that, I say, you had my curiosity, but now you have my interest. But the rest of it, from Nancy’s “journalist” assistant, Freddy(?) who is just Waldo, copied and pasted out of Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” video to Eddie, who is the crazy stoner NOBODY would want to hang out with unless they were already so burned out…well, you see where I’m going with this. For being Woke and all, there is no GenX agency or representation here. Which is no fucking surprise. It’s sorta what makes us GenX.

It’s millennials playing dress up from their parent’s old clothes closet. This season isn’t even fun. The nostalgia is just sublimated tripe extracted in concentrated doses and injected into a corpse of a franchise that people enjoyed for a while until the kids got older and creepy looking, which is a factual representation of what happened to all of those 80s child stars.

As GenZ kids would say…Cringe.

So, watch Shoresy and give yer balls a tug, titfucker.

Connection

Something I’ve noticed about the last couple of years is how many people were thrust into the introvert lifestyle, kicking and screaming. People with typically shallow connections in that vast sea of humanity that is only a few inches deep found themselves stuck inside, unable to get out and socialize for at least a couple years. Though lockdowns are over, begrudgingly for some, the repercussions are still being felt several months after. I still see people wearing masks inside and outside. COVID has taken backstage once again to school shootings, war, and court cases involving multi-millionaires who really don’t have any empathy for you, but they are what we have been turning our attention towards.

I continue to post things here. For the most part, I’m pretty isolated. There are days I’m totally fine with that. And there are days it would be nice just to find that connection with one other person that hits on all cyllinders. I’ve had that kind of depth a few times and I have always appreciated it, though it can be short lived. I find myself scrolling through the apps, looking for something that isn’t there: that connection.

I’ve been told in therapy that my melancholy requires depth of connection. I’m happiest with a few deep relationships rather than a lot of surface types. I’ve also been told that sometimes that connection that I get comes from things I post here. It’s a relationship I have with my readers. I write stuff. People read it. Sometimes they comment. Most of the time the only metric I have to see if anyone has been reading is my analytics. I’m read all around the world, which is sorta cool. Sometimes people post comments, and I can’t tell you how cool that is. I enjoy hearing people’s thoughts on what I’ve written. Talk about a dopamine hit!

Sometimes it’s the only connection I get with someone else all day. That isn’t to say I am lonely. Of course I get lonely sometimes. It’s just more that I live in solitude. At times it can be meditative. At other times, it can be so boring you want to climb the walls. And other times, like the last couple of days, it’s that itch you can’t scratch. I’ve been locked up with work for a few days and I think that might have a little to do with it. There’s that need for connection in the back of my mind and I’m searching, searching, wandering, but I can’t seem to stay focused enough to do the work. I got a post done and I have a few more to work on, but I’ve needed time to do them right. Because I hate editing and I really don’t like having to work on the same thing more than I need to. So, I took my time with things today.

Anyway, I’m in a weird place, because sometimes I feel like I’m better off alone. People either wear me out, make me sad, or become like a drug that I crave that is always in short supply. And when you run out, you get twitchy and jittery.

I hope everyone is having a safe and eventful first weekend of Summer. Once I get these assignments out of the way, I can work on the books a little more and I think that will fill that gap and scratch that it. I connect with the characters in my stories too. That’s all for tonight. I’m headed to bed.