Hi, I am not sure how to even do this these days, but there is something naggingly nostalgiac about listening to Built to Spill records on vinyl...takes me back to some fuzzy warm place.
I saved a life yesterday...I literally prevented a paranoidly delusional and manicly depressed woman from killing herself...it felt good. Many of my friends have been curious as to why I have all but dropped from the face of the social earth (aka downtown) and I suppose this is why. I am not one of those people who will flout my occupation around to somehow belittle what everyone else is doing. In fact I would warn against my new "lifestyle" unless you want to work 50 hours and only bill 35, see horrible horrible things on a continual basis and make less money than a shift manager at McDonalds. You have to be somewhat mentally ill to work in my field. You have to be a somewhat bi-polar, narcissistic and OCD person to not lose yourself in the daily madness that you put yourself hip deep into every morning. While you might be stepping into a prep kitchen, cubicle or desk- I am usually walking into a homeless shelter or mentally ill persons' place of residence (if they have one). I have recently taken on a Case Manager position at a local homeless shelter and also do crisis interventions on a somewhat regular basis...I lovingly refer to these as 'grab bags' because you have no idea who you are going to go see and what is happening in their own world (usually it is safe to assume you are having a REAL bad day if I am being called to come down and assess the situation).
Paradigms...it feels like years since I used to throw that word around. Sometimes I miss the intellectual stimuli and relative safety of the 'ivory tower'...I miss the professors and the debates primarily. Most of all I guess I just miss being around like minded people. People that don't even waste their time arguing within useless archaic paradigms held down by oppressive media, religions, and other close-minded faculties. The ability to look at things unobjectively (as much as possible) and to realize that everyone's view of the world is for all intents and purposes is 'real' and subsequently tangible to them...you want to argue that point with me? Go down to corpus christi (homeless day center by the skate park) and just sit in the middle of the crowd for half an hour...I dare you...when you have done this; come back and tell me how poor people are milking the system and need to 'pull themselves up from their bootstraps' or whatever other horatio alger/neo-liberal rhetoric the hand puppets have indoctrinated you into spilling from your ann coulter/glenn beck regurgitating mouthes...
I am getting off topic. The point I am making here is that I have no intent to get back on my life trajectory that I was on two years ago. I will probably go back to school just to bang out an MSW and subsequently gain access to more of the 'machine' and cause more good from within the system than I ever could railing against it with a purple mohawk and a shitty guitar.
That and I want to start a folk and indie band...weird...but I feel it calling...anyways hopefully it won't be another six months before I post again. Last year was one of the strangest in my life and not all of it was negative (at least I was fully in love with someone for a chunk of it and even though it didn't work out; angst for the memories)...at least now I have a general direction to begin walking towards and for the first time in a decade I am not staring in my rear view mirror and aimlessly driving around the mindless doldrums of "shoulda, coulda, woulda"
Night pep-peps
