Vertigo, anyone?

I left my flat, I left my friends.
I left my job, it was bound to be this way.
And as I leave the ground, I start to think about
Everything you made me say.

Oh, things will never be the same again.

-R. Kellerman


Does anyone remember the final scene of The Neverending Story? It's actually the only part of the movie I've seen, to tell the truth. I must've been like 8, maybe younger. Yeah I know, I know. You're already ripping your hair out, screaming, "You've never seen that movie?!! What?! C'mon!" Go ahead, get it out of your system. At that age, I think was farming out a proper working class mullet, tearing up the neighborhood on a BMX with a card in the spokes and DIY cardboard vanity plate that said "BADASS", with my older cousin's metalhead boyfriend schooling me on the genius of Slayer. So, yeah. I didn't have time for typical kid shit. Deal with it.

Increasingly, I find that scene peeking out in the back of my mind; the sort of paradox of having nothing but this grain of sand left; this sole sacred remnant, upon which wishes are made toward -- not a resurrection -- but an entirely new totality. I'm quite aware of how dramatic that sounds, so keep it in your pants (I'm going somewhere with this).

Truth is, my place of residence is fairly stable; it's not going anywhere, and the rent isn't going up any time soon (nor is anything about living there prohibitive enough for me to keep an eye on the For Rent ads in Ward One). I'm more or less entirely in the driver's seat, vis a vis my economic mobility; I'm self-employed, in a line of work in which each incremental increase in actual work volume inheres an exponential increase in income. No one's really standing in my way, waving employee evals or updated (and invariably expanded) job descriptions. Mayor Williams has taken advantage of the lack of accountability that comes with a final term to structurally outfit the city on a fast track toward ethnic cleansing, and well... making the city uninhabitable for families; which (while appalling and catastrophic for anyone with a pulse) inevitably means a massive influx of high-income, childless residents... Many of whom have dogs, and jobs that will require them to hire the likes of yours truly to walk them.

So, when the question of "what next?" comes up, it's never really guided by any looming imperative to overcome this or that limitation or obstacle, or some externally-imposed frame of reference; it's almost entirely a question with few boundaries, of a wholly creative character. What can you dream up, guy?

Well, great, right?

To some extent, yes. Seager and I launching this worker-run dogwalking agency is one manifestation of that. There are a few legal and administrative hoops we have to jump through, and similar guardrails we have to loosely adhere to. But beyond that, the creative landscape is pretty broad. Writing bylaws for the agency actually means thinking structurally about how to make a collectively-owned and operated enterprise function as more than an abstraction or speculation. It's an extraordinary privilege to be in that position; making something ideal manifest. It's a process of routinely saying "Can we do that? Yeah, we can do that." Despite being bound up in largely mundane details, it's still a radical departure from virtually any decisionmaking scenario I've ever been a part of; where my mere desires are the determining factor of a given decision. It's difficult to even convey, in text.

Otherwise, it's fucking terrifying. Maybe not the business itself, but the parameters in which that takes place. Flawed as the structure of my past life might've been, it was familiar, and at least seemed intuitively reparable/salvagable much of the time. I've considered the possibility that I'm averse to taking more ownership of my own decisions, and I don't really think that quite describes it. In fact, I can say for a fact that my emotional health has improved considerably (in my work, activist projects, and spiritual life) due entirely to the increased independence and ownership I now enjoy.

Nearest I can tell, what I can't seem to adjust to is that I can utter the words "Things will never be the same again.", and feel the full weight of what's irrecoverable in all of this; feel the wholesale departure at work. Things I woke up to each day that were simply given, things that served some navigational function in my life... gone, never to return. Whatever is to emerge in their stead must be created from scratch. There seems even no real recourse to merely aspiring to prefabricated markers. It's a matter of wishing on the last remnant I seem to constitute, cultivating something altogether other and likely thus far unimagined.

And that prospect strikes me, some days, as nothing short of herculean.

Attempting to trick chaos into
Something beautiful. It's what I live for.
It's magic. Magic.
-Waxwing