April 7th, 2019

Life for me has improved.

I look back at the year and a half of misery, confusion, suicidal thoughts, etc and need to ask myself what changed to get me centered. I don’t even take any nootropics. No adderall. No drugs. Nothing.

Not even meditation.

What I do know about life is, there are “up’s and downs’…feast and famine. Normalcy and insanity. Times where life is good and when times are bad. Don’t get me wrong, these things are still happening.

The difference is the length of feast over famine …the amount of good days over bad … that I am controlling. Yup, it all circles back to ‘me’ and how I handle it all.

Let’s start with the first easy workable change: I’m working consistently. 

Not exactly an IT job — more like a whole lot of grunt work — but I’m paid weekly good money. Also have a second job opportunity with another company to work with the census soon. I’ll have to drop one for the other if I decide to take it. I’m going through the application process. Jumped through a few of the usual federal application hurdles already so it looks good.

Both jobs will have me traveling. Both jobs have ups and downs to them.

But this journal entry has nothing to do with the jobs as much as how I have been handling life with these jobs and the people I work with.

As you know, I can’t stand people and that still stands.

So, the job I’m working with now has the largest collections of jerks and assholes anyone could possibly work with.

How do I manage? That, my friend, is where I reveal the good stuff.

It’s a little bit of everything I learned over the year especially during my time at Walmart. Remember that time I expressed the best way to ignore the people around me is to use my height and look above and beyond them?

The idea was if I looked above the heads of people and not AT people, I can focus on what’s important and stop worrying about who’s looking at me. Of course, it worked and over the year I’ve removed needing to have eye contact with anyone unless I need to speak directly.

As a result, i carry myself as arrogant, I’m sure. But guess what? The expression of arrogance and unapproachable works for me and it works on the job place.

I work with grown-ass men and they like to pick on one another. Stupid jokes, etc, etc. Some people are worse targets than others.

In past jobs, I would get mad and say something and create enemies or quit if people tried to label me as a target to joke on.

Quitting jobs put me in this financial hole. Then I’m looking for work. The circle goes round and round.

In order to keep a job, I had to improve how I handle people.

The trick for me is the ‘above and beyond’ routine — expressing a singular focus to do the job I am working on. No socializing. No joking around. Anti-social 100%. 

It sounds terrible, but even my expression emits “If it isn’t about work, don’t fuck with me”

And it’s working.

People talk to me, immediately and on first contact, with cautious respect. Do you understand how much that means to me? To be left the fuck alone, but when they need to say something, it comes from a place of joke-free respect?

The problem up till now has been I left myself open to be non-confrontational, friendly black man. Not too unlike President Obama, who was disrespected every hour of his presidency by even high ranking leaders.

It’s a sad world — where you need to be considered a bitch/bastard to gain respect. And trust me, it’s never that people give respect that’s earned. You could be a Black president of the United States and still have another world leader NOT shake your hand in public.

Or you could be a new employee, greet people and do the job, and someone will find a need to say something smart-ass.

The focus on doing the job also provides consistent good results toward my financial needs so why the fuck would I care what anyone thinks of me if I’m just doing the job and keeping to myself?

The secret to my current success, believe it or not, has been a healthy amount of “Fuck everyone” and “leave me alone”. The results are showing in my freedom of thought and clear mind to get what’s important to me done.

Still haven’t been on Facebook in going on two years soon. I really have nothing to say to anyone — and I’m happy! Money is rolling in. I’m writing a little here and there and I have an animation project I’m eyeing at the end of the month to start.

People do suck — so let them burn. 

Which kind of brings me to my wife’s grand-kids.

As you know, they were staying with us and these ghetto trap kids are about to go home soon. Thank god.

I had a recent heart-to-heart with my wife about what led up to this and how it will never happen again.

She literally blames me for saying “Yes” to allowing these brats stay here. No lie. if we talk about it, the conversation flow is always “Well, you should have said something different.”

This goes back to being the ‘non-confrontational asshole I was a year ago.

Her daughter’s third child was sick. She needed help with the other two. Where else were the kids to go? Of course I said yes. I didn’t want it. But what else could I have done?

Now I know what I could do: fuck no. 

Especially if, being her husband, she’s telling me saying ‘no’ to help her family was on the table. That it even an option???

Then fine. Fuck it.

She has a son in New York. Age 22. I hear he’s fucking up. When we go to New York to drop the fuck-brats off, she will want to consider the idea of bringing her son back with us.

I was already over this and talked to her a few weeks ago and said: It can’t happen. Sorry about what your son is going through, but when we go to NY, it needs to only be us coming back home. I can’t live with another person under our roof no more.”

I said it politely. I know she’s troubled. Hell, it’s her son. I feel like a dick because it is her son.

But fuck it. No.

I hear her daughter is going though some shit, too.

Fuck it. No.

Not going to happen.

The price for being sane and happy is to be an asshole in the eyes of others.

What you are experiencing is the death of the “nice guy” and the birth of a person I never knew.

Someone happy.