Capital B Bellingham

The robot party went well. I put on my ice drag king warpaint and hair [fig 1,2] and rode up in the back seat of a van with some underclassman’s mom. You know, to get the full high school experience. I brought ice bottles and juice boxes and pasta salad and doughnut holes – everything a growing boy needs. And of course some intoxicants, to help keep that growth properly stunted. The hair color was a medium hassle to put on but looked good and was excellent sun block. The face color was a little melty out in the sun but did pretty well I thought. But I got to poke in the sand and shoot the shit and mostly didn’t have to talk to parents. That last bit meant that I practiced being the lone old creeper hanging around with people half my age for a while but that identity is growing on me.

I got a cute little robots yearbook, which I really appreciate. Maybe I’ll share it when I figure out how I want to digitize it. Right now it’s cardboard and pencil and a collection of headshots. I reminds me a little of the oppression of school and manual document creation, but I’m trying to imagine it in the context of emotional investment in a symbolic object. A process I’ve been working on for a while, as part of the plan where I can like things and keep them instead of committing them to memory and learning to not care about their physical implementation. I’ve still got an orange letter on my fridge that makes me smile and I’m going to see if there’s a version of that for things like this book.

Afterward the party Ben picked me up and took me the rest of the way toward Canada. He had a couple people renting out his house but they disappeared so I mostly didn’t have to deal with anyone else that day. Which is good because I was exhausted ¹I actually wrote a good deal of this on Saturday night but I could not keep my eyes open to finish. It’s pretty rare for me to be so tired that I don’t want to write, but a day of travel and sun is hard for me to combat. And I suppose my busy Friday and insufficient sleep didn’t help. Still, I usually regulate my bedtime by my wake time … Continue reading. I helped him with some household shit on Saturday and then spent all day Sunday writing him a diagnostics tool for his forest Wi-Fi system.

He’s got a Wi-Fi dish pointed through the woods at a giant base station at his landlord’s place, to use the DSL over there. The phone company won’t sell Ben DSL at home and he’s not in cell range or in LoS to geostationary orbit (welcome to the 49th parallel) so there aren’t a lot of options. In any case “reset the router” is a complicated task that involves 5 pieces of electronics in 3 locations and a ground-level manually-aligned, non-LoS, cross-link through a rain forest. So I wrote a program that checks all the network things and tells you where it’s broken (and tries to fix things if it can). It will both make him feel safer and less isolated, and should help me when he needs my assistance again. Plus it avoids the need to log into a bunch of different shitty web interfaces to check their status.

It was good to do programming today. I don’t do it much in day job anymore – I’m still required to be expert at it, but it’s not something I do every day. When I do code it’s always urgent and for complicated systems and there is no SME to educate me, and no matter how well I do it I will be criticized, often in front of people who control my income. I can handle all that – I’m good at handling that, which is why I have this job – but I it makes coding difficult to enjoy. I want to imagine that I like coding, so I can do some for myself. Like getting the TV system fixed, or writing a new home automation controller.

I’m also happy to have some motivation for my BZ report. It’s been on my list for months and my boss is getting pretty worried about having it done this quarter (i.e. before July). It’s a project I actually could like but it’s always #4 or #5 on my priority list so I never get to work on it. I’m on the queue this week but I’m hoping it’s slow so I can finally work on this report. It’s a good week for it, if I get the chance, because Shanda is gone so I can just power through if I ever get the time and motivation. A good project would also help keep me from avoiding work all week while Shanda is gone. Otherwise by Wednesday or Thursday it’s pretty easy for me to not want to start work until 4 PM, and that’s not a good plan for my sleep schedule. Or for making my meetings.

Took the train home from Bellingham [fig 3]. It’s far and away the best public transit option for the trip. Even when I don’t have to drive the train is nicer because I can get up. I do wish the lights turned down like on planes, but I’m willing to make the trade for full sized bathrooms. I also wore leggings and socks for the first time during travel, and those were both good plans for my comfort. It’s still hard for me to leave home without clothes and tools sufficient for immediate and permanent evacuation, but I managed it all weekend and I’m sort of proud of myself. I was never more than a few hundred feet from my knife and credentials and additional cloth but I didn’t carry them at all. I did keep my main comms nearby but that seems to be a thing normal people do – sometimes even more obsessively than I want my knife – so I think that’s okay.

I tried to talk to Ben about EMDR and other ego state processing treatments for C-PTSD [fig 4]. There are a lot of things he’s not up to address right now, and he doesn’t have good access to care (and like me he has a lot of trouble being assigned bad care and other compliance demands) but he might be able to do something like EMDR. It’s effective for most people in just a few months and it’s not terribly invasive. It also doesn’t require a huge amount of talent on the part of the therapist, or a super close relationship with them, which should make it easier to get than many other things. I don’t know if he’ll do it but I at least tried.

Ben is still worried about our grandmother dying, and all the nonsense related to that. He says he’s not, but he talks about it several times a day and clearly feels bad about it. I suspect someone is reminding him to feel bad on a pretty regular basis, which is part of that abuse I was talking about. I think I convinced him that he doesn’t have to go even when she dies though. It’s not settled yet – he says it is but then walks it back – but I think it doesn’t sound impossible anymore. I’d sure like to not go, but I still would if he was going to, to help protect him.

I didn’t keep up on talking to people this weekend. In part because I was busy and in part because I was in low comms settings. I chatted at the party of course but that’s hardly a substitute for the way I interrogate people in other settings. M popped in a couple of times but I think you’re still in (or back in) a fairly high stress scenario. It sure seems like it based on the sort of attention I can get from you, and the few details you leak. I could have paid better attention myself. I hope you’re able to find ways to make life eaiser, or to believe someone could help, instead of just waiting in isolation for things to change. And I know V had an eventful Friday that we haven’t been able to discuss much yet. I’m looking forward to seeing your new stuffs, and hearing the story you imagine about it.

Shanda is still away in WI. We haven’t been able to talk much either. You’re past the most stressful part of the trip now, at least from my perspective. Done with the family bits, and you accomplished them in a less destructive way than you had planned originally. I’m sure there are still lots of feels the be had there, but good job getting though it and choosing a way to do that which allowed you to stay present and protect yourself and mostly feel okay. It also sounds like you did a good job taking care of your sister after she hit a dear. I know you think you can’t help in emergencies but I think you can. I think you did. And I hope once she was calmer you also took care of yourself.

I realized that I’m ashamed to want money for any reason (and to spend or posses it, but wanting it is sufficient for me to feel bad). To avoid dying I have categorized a bunch of things as essential for the process of me being in good enough shape to support other people. But even that is just a trick to keep my stress level slightly lower. And it doesn’t really work. There’s always a cheaper version I could have, always a comfort I could do without, always more work I could pick up to “earn” enough safety and comfort to stay sane. My brain tells me that I’m not allowed to feel stressed about money until and unless I have no savings and can’t make my rent. Or at least that’s the claim it makes now. Later if those conditions were true shame brain would just move the goal posts and tell me that I am wasteful and selfish and would never have been in this scenario if I had been a better person in the first place.

I have been lucky enough to be able to steal some money from capitalists, and while that’s a noble goal my brain knows that my motivation is not pure. Sure, I need some of that money to stay alive. Sure, I took out a lot of loans to buy my way into capitalism. But I also wanted some of that money for myself and that is unacceptable. If I would just learn to want less I could help more people. If I could just give up on the idea that I will not starve to death when my body gives out I wouldn’t be burdened with this invented need for savings. If I wasn’t so selfish I’d keep giving until the stress of poverty was high enough to keep me from working (and then 10% more).

It’s on my mind because I was at Ben’s this weekend, and I see him stuck in an abusive relationship with our parents (and to a lesser degree, his landlord) because of money. I look at the money I’ve got in retirement accounts – maybe $120k I could get out after penalties for not doing capitalism right – and think about how that could buy him maybe 3 years away from Mother. It would leave me in debt I can’t service and with no ability to help other people and unable to ever retire, but those goals all seem really selfish when I see him being hurt day after day.

And it’s been on my mind because I’ve been running cash negative since I last expanded my household. I’m working my way back down to sustainable but that requires me to think about this and I’m still finding it hard to have a perspective that doesn’t make my brain melt. Wanting things still feels super dangerous to me, and hoarding money is a brand of abuse I’m terrified I might commit. Plus the years when I was poor, and the decades of enormous loans I used to help claw my way into education and out of severe depression make the idea of having no savings hard to take.

I need to find a place to stand where I can feel okay with protecting myself in addition to helping other people. To find perspective that doesn’t translate my privileges into an excuse for the irrational and detrimental standard is set of needing $0. The former is a little easier to see when I talk to Ben, because he does the same thing in a different format and it doesn’t work any better. He gets the privilege of rich parents in a way that I don’t, and he has arranged for a life that’s cheap in many ways, but it still costs $40k/year to be a human. And he’s feels just as bad about hoarding money as I do. It’s part of the reason he puts up with the abuse – it’s penance for wanting money.

Clearly it’s part of my general shame about wanting or needing anything. And I’m sure my head is full of weird ideas about how money works because I was lied to about it. It’s still hard to reconcile my individual poverty when I was young to what I now know was a (at least eventually) fairly wealthy family, because it produced odd juxtapositions in my life. And there are all the parts where Mother directly punished me directly with money. So I’ve got some ideas where the feels come from but it’s still a challenge to get them to coalesce into a story I like.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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