Rant Collector

It's not like before all this started I wasn't concerned. But soon it became the lack of concern that was most concerning. If I wasn't trolling around thinking how exhausting it was, whirling around on 'high' in a blender of human emotion, I was exhausted by my own judgment of what I was seeing, and then judging myself for doing the judging or inability to stop going back to a place that I found so unfulfilling. I was beginning to feel detached from my own mental state.

This was a familiar feeling. This craving that I can't say no to, but can't truly find any one particular reason to deny myself - despite knowing intellectually, there are many reasons not to do it. There's a word for it, escapes me now, but an uneasy nostalgia of endless mornings in sweaty sheets and shame, nausea and deflection washes over me.

It'll come to me.

Eventually I got out. I had to pay a little money, to break the habit, but I did it. But you know what they say - you can lose a habit but something else will almost always take its place.

We know by now a good rant holds a delicate place in our hearts. But our hearts are not vessels strong enough to hold the many, many rants that must be broadcast so we feel seen and heard. The rants must be issued across the lands, so that we can be liberated from ourselves and share the anger and the angst.

And so I circle back to the place that can hold the rants, the finely planned rants, the off-the-cuffers, the wildly, grammatically flawed, the poor judgment soon to be deleted but you caught a glimpse you lucky soul, the ironic, the disturbed, the sad, the broken rants of we, the people.

Apart versus a part.

But this is hard. Has anyone complained about this yet?

'Apart' is a word that means two things are not close to each other. 'A part' is a phrase that is commonly used to describe a segment or component of a whole. For example, "I lost a part of my car when I drove the B&K logging road last night, seeking meaning in my existence." or maybe, "I think a part of my brain has died due to social media addiction."

But sometimes people use the phrase "a part of things" which is confusing because in using this phrase, despite meaning you want to be together with others, you still use the phrase where the words are apart. You could also say something like, "Apart from things being totally deranged, I am doing fine." That way, you are not together with the things that are seemingly falling apart. And if you say you are fine, folks will believe you are still functioning as a part of society. And mostly, in my vast experience of over-sharing in a casual exchange, that is what they want to hear.

I spent many a year trying to be the best at all the worst things.

It took ever so long to recognize that my desires were driven by the strangest, fundamental yearnings that led to nowhere. I was not one of the lucky ones, guided by wisdom and care. More mania and the underpinnings of personalities driven by the tenets of lack, one via the vehicle of colonialism: prove yourself, be better, achieve. The other, a slow unraveling in service to some unknown, unnamed master.

Watching my father die slowly of cancer did instill in me a deep understanding of the value of good health, but did not stop me from engaging in a perpetual and serious abuse of my body. And having a mother who was present in body but in some inexplicable way less so in spirit or mind skewed my view of, well, everything.

But in recent years, I've pieced together a much more functional existence, to use the giddy & passionate phrasing of the emotionally dysfunctional. And I've come to respect the resilience of my body in spite of the rigors of low level addictions I've put it through for several decades.

In the past, my goal setting was based on things I didn't bother to identify. But now that I'm older, goals in general seem silly to begin with, so I usually spend some time figuring out if I really want to set them and where it's coming from.

In this case we were 8 months into our pandemic, heading into winter and a month away from my birthday (which, due to said pandemic was already looking to be uneventful). Everyone seemed to have adopted a steely veneer of lassitude mixed with nonchalance about our future.

I remembered I usually make a "year in review" post around my birthday, but with so little to talk about, this started to loom over me. I was experiencing a very serious case of 'groundhog day syndrome' as the days got shorter, and work just kept getting busier, and extracurricular activities were non-existent, or heavily shamed.

I was a bit worried about my mental state, as I don't do well with either boredom or hard work. I decided to drug myself by taking on an intensified workout schedule, to see if I could get abs in the span of 30 days. Then I'd have something to talk about, be it a debilitating injury or a new element to my physique as a birthday gift to myself, something I've always wanted.

Mostly, because everything at the moment feels so unattainable and we have so little control over how everything is unfolding, it seemed to me something I could do, because I wanted to. And so I did, or at least tried. And as the saying goes there is no try...

But trying counts in my world especially with goals you know from the outset you can't attain without giving up French fries and gravy and cheese, but still attempt. That is a sphere of zeal I've rarely entered in this lifetime, so I'm proud of myself.

In the end, dopamine is but another addiction, perhaps with different results than other substances but still in my opinion, quite dangerous. Ask yourself, what other mania might compel me to show photographs of my middle-aged spread on a global, shareable platform?

...or any of my personal life, for that matter?

Speaking of spreads,

I've given up on the idea of having money, but now think of it more like cream cheese. Spread thinly and

evenly, it's versatile and goes well with almost everything, but if it's coming through the holes you've got too much.

As to how one chooses to fill their holes...

if I admit I'm lonely, people try to hang out with me. This rarely goes well.

The next logical progression is to suggest I get a pet, not knowing that I did in fact get a new pet this year. My Bokashi composter is a never-ending source of joy, as I endlessly ferment our endless amounts of food waste before burying it in holes around the property. Something I'm told is not appropriate to do with human friends.

I wasn't informed it came with a family of raccoons (or possibly very determined rats) which I don't ever get to see because at the time of night they visit I am already in a thick stupor, insensate from blue light exposure, desperately seeking the next online purchase to bolster the remaining vestiges of my spirit, and unwilling to go outside to share emotions with my fuzzy friends who are purposefully annihilating my attempts at regenerative agriculture at home, driven by their own relentless drive to survive, procreate, invade our home and eat me alive while I'm immobilized on weed gummies.

So pets come with their own set of existential challenges, and I might have enough.

Don't sweat the small stuff, they say.

But the small stuff is where I thrive. My ability to let the small stuff flourish and fester is really a skill unfound in many average sized people. I still hold a grudge against men in general, for the countless times I was hit on in my twenties by stating the painfully obvious, "HEY YOU'RE SHORT".

By suggestion, if today you wanted to hit on me, I'd say state something only slightly less painfully obvious, that our conversation could expand on. Something like,

"Hey, you're a white-presenting, cis-gendered presenting person with some clear chips on their shoulder and a barely contained anger issue, a chronic identity crisis and some funny one liners to obscure your insecurities that you actually don't care that much about anymore, because now you're an adult and just think everything is annoying, but try not to show it because you still have forty more years on this planet to prove you're worth the skin you flake in and don't want to push everyone away because you need someone to bring you food when your brain still works but your body continues its slow and cruel abandonment!"

Or is it the other way around? Either way I'll need food.

It was the year everyone is laying their grievances on the table,

and while mine are small I do want you to know the following 2 things.

At age 47 it sucks to have to ask complete strangers to reach cookies off the top shelf for you at the grocery store. Last time, the woman kindly asked me, "Just the one?", either in order to save me the embarrassment of ever performing this demeaning cookie mission ever again OR because I look like I eat a lot of cookies. Either way, I suffered the usual, awkward discomfort of the deeply offended yet deeply grateful.

As a rule, I try to ask men who are only slightly taller than me and coolly watch them really struggle to reach, and assert their manhood in the quest for the 'set-back-cookie-bag', as I cling to my 25- year-old vendetta against all those horrible come-ons.

Sometimes though, it backfires when they hand me the cookies and say, "So you like cookies?" and I am forced to concede that perhaps it was never my height that brought on these brainless come-ons, but my dazzling beauty and a mesmerizing charm that is, or was in its naivety, quite irresistible. If only I'd known back then, maybe now I'd have more than a bin of composting food scraps as a support animal at home.

Secondly, when you're small, there is an intrinsic hypocrisy in how you are treated. For example, nobody notices that when walking with regular legged people we easefully keep up, despite having to skip-walk at a rate of 1.5: 1 cadence with the rest of you. We gracefully conceal a superior physical conditioning in a world built for bigger people. That is why I got abs so easily. ;)

Nor do they express awe that I have to scale the kitchen counters on the regular just to get a big-girl wine glass. In athletic circles, this is called bouldering, but in the kitchen, friends just laugh and point, indifferent that my rating of perceived exertion for everyday activities is hovering around an 8.

But when you work out with said regular-sized people and can do the horrible exercises that someone who's invested much more than 30 days in the quest for fitness has devised, they like to say it's because you're smaller and have less body weight to lift, or a lesser distance to travel to lift it.

That my friends, is rude, and what I call bad physics but have been too polite to point out until now. And, while I've never, ever hung in athletic circles and admittedly know nothing about physics, and in truth was asked to leave the class permanently in high-school, in summary, it's all bogus.

So whatever you are doing please put it down and go freak completely out about something that was previously not bothering you in the least. Make sure to tell all your friends and get them hysterical too.

Keep laughing at life & remember I am always here for you. I am your rock hard guardian of rants of any size.