Testing of Will Continues

There is not too much to say in the way of updating, but the same day I was all post-happy last Friday about the direction of projects, with laser owl focus, I was hit with the wonderful returning dividends of my health issues last year, namely the medical bills coming due (in that my inability to pay them has sufficiently gone long enough they will do legal bullshit at me). Oddly enough, this all comes on the heels of everybody being all “HOORAY!” about the health care act, which always confuses me because it’s actually a health insurance law, and has as much to do with health care as buying a condom has to do with raising a child. I had health insurance (thank god, or else I’d be in for $80000 instead of the $2500 I haven’t hustled away yet), but even that didn’t mean shit. Because I went in for what is allegedly a simple surgical procedure, got dirtied up with bacterias in that process, and then spent the next three or four months recovering, and still have a bullet wound gash in my abdomen that my 4-year-old jokes is a second belly button.
Well, because of that debt, which needed to be paid immediately (as in the 28th of this month before garnishment proceedings start), I had decided to skip into doing a Confederate Mack collection I’d been talking about.
The Confederate Mack collection is something that’s been kicking around for a while as an idea, but never happened yet. I started working on it genuinely early this year, but honestly, being a happily married dude with three daughters, the oldest of which is 13, it was kinda uncomfortable reading what a miserable misogynistic predator I used to be. But at the same time, that was me, and there was still the same underlying goodness of person. Plus, the whole Confederate Mack thing was camouflage to a certain extent, to scare away assholes who care about normal bullshit. Of course nowadays, post-internet re-wiring our brains, that sounds really pretentious and stupid. But back then, it didn’t feel that way. (We are entirely too self-conscious post-internet, and thus take nothing seriously for fear of being lololed for being serious about something stupid.) This time around (the past week) digging into the old Confederate Mack zine body of work, there was a ton of good stuff to see, even in the midst of the early shitpiles of self-destruction. So a collection will be forthcoming.
Problem is, I am married to this NFL idea, which needs to be done in the coming three weeks, or it is useless. And the Confederate Mack collection deserves a little more thoughtful curation than me typing it up in a frenzy of caffeine and truck stop alertness aids. But that will come.
As for my bills and situation, I don’t know man. I still want to stick with my plan of putting some shit out there for the world in the coming months, but the immense financial need on the immediate scale has me contemplating other moves. It has me contemplating collaborations, and honestly it has me contemplating nefarious shit. The problem with illegal activity is it never pays as well as you think. You risk your ass and do some dirty shit that could bring havoc into your life and all you end up with is like $350. I think the financial benefit of crime is often overly-glamorized.
And I also don’t mean to sound like I’m bitching. I’ve got a job (at least for the next five weeks), and there’s food at my house. We ain’t dying or nothing. There’s billions of people on this planet worse off than myself and my Bird Tribe. But goddamn man, this fucking series of events the past year with a simple fucking appendicitis turning into prolonged infections which bled into a really bad work situation because I was working for a nefarious ass dude who almost immediately was trying to manipulate my days into causing me to quit or get fired, but having to maintain gainful employment to provide for a family, which in turn just maxed me the fuck out on the stress scale, and then you think you clear a hurdle after a month of mandatory down time and start working on shit and BLAMM! the medical bills are like, “Fuck you, bro.” It is a trifle, but it’s also just testing the path. No one is ever allowed to be successful by the world, at least not from where the truly successful start. You have to chop through the thickets of resistance and make that shit happen. So I will still make it happen. But the struggling gets tiring. And it is easy to see why people flip out and kill themselves, either slowly or literally in one final act, or commit heinous acts against others. It is hard to continually process that frustration of struggle in a healthy manner, especially when usually the side symptom of such a struggle is you are under-rested and over-stretched, ready to rip if one simple thing pierces the barely held together shanty of comfort you’ve barely got clipped together with the last twenty dollars of last week’s paycheck.
Oh fucking well. So as much as I’d like to say, “Hey Internet, Here is a wonderfully wacky retrospective collection of Confederate Mack writings for you to purchase this very day” so that I could pay my fucking bullshit by the 28th, it ain’t meant to shake out that way. I’ll stick with the football project first (which I did get a solid 10% done on this past week, even while reading through every Confederate Mack zine ever printed), then probably shoot to have that Confederate Mack thing done late August/early September, and then we’ll move back to whatever shows up next on the horizon. Hard to plan too well when the horizon always shakes and shimmeys on me like it does.