Rust Belt Ramblings

​I guess I’m coming back here a bit more often. Hadn’t planned it, I’ll be real. But I don’t always need to shout every thought at a target, and this gives me a place to let them sit, so here we are. Anyway, I walked into a restaurant today to pick up a delivery order, I returned after said order, and I walked out with a job an hour later.  This was not a planned event. It’s not a big deal kinda employment either. But it’s the first step out in a long time. I’ve been in a hole for years. It’s not a deep one, and it doesn’t look so dire from the outside. But I cannot escape it, despite having a pretty nice view of the world from its rim. I have felt like I’m playing pretend at being an adult, stuck in some sort of extended adolescence while I myself try to guide children through the world, all the while trying to convince others that I am just as “real” as they are. And it’s not a fair assessment, if I’m realistic… but it persists. It’s seeped into my soul, and it has me feeling alo...

​It’s been quite awhile since I’ve been here. But it feels right. I’ve had a lot of things going on. I’ve put a lot of work into my music, I’ve been DMing Tales of the Valiant games for my friends, and I’ve just overall sorta been coming into myself more as a creative. It’s been great, and I’ve been really enjoying myself. But that’s not why I’m here tonight. With growth comes change, and for me, change is fucking terrifying. I’ve been more capable of processing my emotions, but the anxiety has also grown to keep pace. It’s a vulnerable place to be sometimes, growth. I’ve always tried to be a wallflower. It keeps me safe. But I have been accepting that I shouldn’t hang on the sidelines, and while it’s good and necessary, it’s left me quite exposed. Most of the confidence is still false, even though it is bolstered by the logical knowledge that the people who see my best self are telling me the absolute truth about the Greg they see. I still struggle with my insecurities daily. I win fa...

​Well, I’m at it again. Checking the leaderboards. I’ve always enjoyed playing video games. I am not great at most of them. But it never kills my joy. Until I start looking at the leaderboards. There’s a certain rush to being measured and found to be “good.” It’s validating, it’s an affirmation of value in that context. It’s also absolutely destructive. Once you get sucked into the hole of striving to be “good,” you tie your value only to the numbers. The experience doesn’t matter anymore, it’s become entirely about the pursuit of that threshold. And there is no “good enough.” You will say that there is. You’ll even believe it. But then you hit that plateau, and you think “maybe I can get a little better.” So you push for the next target, the next milestone, and you keep pushing. This isn’t the destructive part. Self-improvement is a beautiful thing. But it doesn’t stop there. You keep your eyes on those leaderboards. And you’re in a good place, but there’s still people better. They’re...

Where I’m at feels oddly familiar. I’ve been trying to compete again instead of coexist. I need my voice to be the loudest again, because I’m forever terrified it’s not worth hearing. Then, I feel like I’m being intrusive. But it doesn’t feel like where I’ve been. I see the proof that I’m not an afterthought or a background character. I am finding the excitement in the moments others share with me instead of feeling the need to “keep up.” I’m finding the joy in being the hype man again. I do truly believe that this is the best version of me. The hype man. I don’t really contain the pieces to steal the show, and I get more joy in being a part of a whole than I do in being a lone survivor. The struggle that I constantly balance is how to do so without losing myself. Life is a collaborative pursuit, but we can’t take every journey with help. We can’t rely on others to validate our joy. Jealousy is gross. It takes the awe we feel from others’ accomplishments, and it twists that. It makes u...

I haven’t wanted to burden anyone with the following thoughts, so instead I will indirectly throw them at a wide array of someones. It’s much like shotgunning my melancholy into the void, hoping to minimize its impact on the world around me. You see, these thoughts shouldn’t really carry any impact. It’s the same old feeling around my birthday. One of a lack of importance or visibility. This feeling isn’t one I like to feed. It’s a huge underlying part of my worst qualities, and it drives me to be everything I desire to not be. But around August 11, it gets harder to shoo away. We equate the anniversary of our birth with a sense of meaning, and it lends itself to selfish thoughts. And oh, my sweet Ora, I am a sucker for those. I struggle to accept my place in the stories I get to share in this journey. The truth is always that I am just happy to have a place in the tales others tell, but I desire more than I let on, almost always. It’s simple, but it’s deceptively tricky. I de...

“The only thing that’s ever stopping me is me” -Fall Out Boy, Stay Frosty Royal Milk Tea Well, proved that yesterday with the one-shot. It felt natural… but I gave myself a day to process it before searching for conclusions to draw. I have not lost any of the joy I felt at the immediate conclusion. It felt like something I could flow and roll with, and I felt like i could do it “my way,” but still effectively. Its the joy of the “what do you think?” and the pleasure of the “yes, and?” I was in control of the moment but I was not in charge. I am less a dungeon master, and more a self-aware narrator. And I think it suits me to pursue my “style” as such. I’m lucky. I know about the “Mercer Effect” and how a lot of DMs get down on themselves for not being that guy. Listen, he’s wonderful, and I love what he does. But I’m more trying to be Sam Elliott in “The Big Lebowski,” so I get to dodge that pressure. The DM Abides, man.

It’s been a really really long year, and it’s only January. There’s a ton of reasons for this, but right now I’m focusing on one. This is America. It’s got me so fucked up lately. And I’m not your standard, garden variety panicked yankee over here. I’m not making preparations to leave, I fucking can’t. Ain’t just that easy, I’m not marketable and my wife’s got Multiple Sclerosis, we’re not providing value, we’d be refugees not emigrants. But I’m already digressing. I think the best way to put this is that I’m not afraid. I’m concerned. Fear implies a feeling of danger. I’m a straight-passing cis white man with some beautiful baby blues, my bleeding heart is the only thing that makes me distinguishable from the alpha male misogynist and gigachad MAGA maniac. I don’t fear for myself. But i have strong concerns for people I hold dear to me. I’m also pissed off. Pissed off that my Canadians won’t be coming here because of the bullshit of our leader here and the legitimate danger he puts f...

So, I’ve begun reading one of my gifts from a friend. The book “Daring Greatly” by Brene Brown. It may or may not have been suggested to me that I record my observations and reflections on it, and I take it to heart when these things are suggested. This will be me trying my best, chapter by chapter, to reflect, and ponder, and maybe be able to draw some useful conclusions. Tonight, I read the foreword and the introduction. I don’t know much about the author, or rather I didn’t, beside what I have been told by my friends who have read her work and listened to her TED talks and such. I knew she was very knowledgeable on things that are very relevant to my personal journey, shame, emotion, vulnerability. This was enough, but upon reading the introduction and learning a bit about Brown, I find myself feeling quite seen and understood. She’s not just a researcher of these things, she’s a sufferer of them, in many ways that feel very close to my own experiences. Let me explain… Im reading ...

I’m a new person. Well, it feels like it at the moment. This year has been me blowing up a lot of things in my mind and my being, and the spaces keep getting filled with revelations and realizations. It’s been awful and awe-inspiring, the worst year of many but so much better than the past. It hurts my brain to process it but I’m nothing if not a masochist so I’m living on the high of self-discovery right now. It’s not going to last forever. I think that’s why I was encouraged to write about it. It was a good suggestion, recording for posterity, and I’ve learned to steal those good suggestions and outside observations. One of the things that has really kicked in for me is a desire to hear the outside view, it’s taught me to listen to myself more as I apply the principles of giving others my ear and taking their words to heart. Yesterday, a friend bought tickets to a concert for himself, and also me and Chelsea. It was impulsive and I sorta advised against including me but he would not ...

Lately, I’ve been contemplating time. Not so much the whole concept, my mind would implode and I’d be fetal sitting in the shower muttering about futility and all that jazz. No, I've been thinking about time as it relates to me and the way I’ve conducted myself. Let me explain. I was the kid that at five years old would sit in the bathtub and contemplate my own mortality. Bear with me, this isn’t all so depressing, I promise it takes a turn. The point I’m establishing is that I’ve always worried about the limited amount of time I’ve had. Maybe I was burdened with glorious purpose or something, I didn’t know why, but it always felt so fleeting, even when it was supposed to feel infinite. As I got older, I was always preparing for the future, and I did all the things I was expected to societally to do so. Kept up my studies and all that fun shit. Then I failed out of university in my first year. I didn’t want to be an engineer, I didn’t know what I wanted but it wasn’t that. Honestly...

 I HATE Neapolitan ice cream.  Whoever decided to put my chocolate between vanilla and of all things, STRAWBERRY, you suck. But it works better for culture.  I've often tried to figure out what part of America I'm in, with very mixed results.  I realized this while describing myself and my area to someone who is most decidedly not "from here," by pointing out that "us Midwesterners" are the Canadians of America, and I enjoyed that.  But I got to thinking about it.  Pittsburgh, sure it's got some Midwest in it, similar basis in industry and manufacturing, with a smattering of agriculture and such. We're in the "rust belt," running up through Ohio on its way toward Detroit, and that's a pretty midwestern situation right there, mentioning those two places alongside us here.  We share a certain begrudging camaraderie with our neighbors. There's always room at our table, even if we may grumble a bit about the extra "comp'ny....

But honestly, I cannot help it. I'm not gonna make this a political space, but I'm an American in an election year, and these days that's become so much more than it once was. I am a Lyft driver. I have just recently surpassed 1000 rides. That's a thousand strangers in my car. For anyone who doesn't know, my car is my sanctuary. It's one of the few places I'm alone. It's where I hear the most music, where I can be with my thoughts. The times I've spent with friends in my car probably get overlooked by the friends but it's what I remember the most. (There's a reason for this, the politics come, but bear with me.)  I have shared one of my intimate spaces with a thousand strangers. A lot of them are just like me. But the majority are not. Some don't even speak my language, but most do. They haven't lived my life. They don't know my experience. And I in return know little about them. But sometimes I get the chance to connect. Many peo...

It's been quiet lately in the chaos. I've hit the cooling down period, after I had a revelation and was lit up like a fuckin' rocket. The revelations that got me all excited and hopeful haven't gone anywhere, and I'm not trying to shoo them out the door, either. But I've started working on my consistency, getting back to actual work, and learning to even out these ups and downs I face so frequently. And I have made some major progress. But friend, I am TIRED. I don't know what I expected... Well, okay, I know exactly what I expected. I was going to hit the ground running and do nothing but accelerate until I literally rewrote the laws of physics... But I knew that was just a little bit lofty of an expectation. What I did not know, however, was how tiring it is to just... Abide. I like to be one of those people that looks to "The Big Lebowski" for some inspiration on riding out the chaos. The Dude is the epitome of rolling with the punches, and ...

... That led to my new door. I've been spending an exorbitant amount of time reflecting on my last, well... Probably four years or so specifically, lately. It broke me. Completely and utterly... the Greg Bodack that is here now is not the person that wore that name in the past. I haven't even begun to understand it all. So many things have changed, and I can't possibly unpack everything at once. But I gotta start somewhere, so let's start in West Tarentum, sometime in 2021. I was living large, sucking in pandemic funds and just being a mid-30s adolescent with zero worries about anything at all. I was becoming a Twitter darling, meeting new people, finding out so many things about myself... While I sat around in a roach-infested shit hole doing nothing to improve my actual reality. I was drowning and chose to ignore it. Drowning in the feeling that I had no direction, no goals. Depressed because there was no "outside." Broken because my disabled and immunocompr...

If you know me, you know I'm a dad. It's simultaneously the most pride and terror inducing name I've ever been called, and it's probably both the reason I'm still alive, and the reason I feel like that's constantly only a truth hanging on by a thread. My son and daughter are my life, and they're so widely different from one another. It's beautiful, but man, it can also cause some major headaches. The Boy-Child (10yo), he's so sensitive, and sweet. It's infuriating because everything upsets him, but it's also so goddamn endearing, because he legitimately cares about everyone and everything that much. I don't want to call him Boy-Child, but this is the public Internet and shit, so pseudonyms it is. We'll call him Jude, for reasons some people who know him and us will get. The Girl-Child (6yo) is a firestarter. She cannot be contained or controlled, has the defiant spirit of anyone who's ever risen up against their masters. She's...

 And it's a "here" that made sense eternally. Been reading blogs of a couple friends of mine, and it had me thinking. It's a nice way to keep up with people when we can't "keep up" with them, when we're unable to share our moments in private conversation and close contact. And it's nice, to have that little window to the people who matter to us. For me, it's some of that that brings me to this, but it's another bit. I'm coming out of a real bad stretch of life, and everything is a struggle. Existence is being re-learned, after having been in survival mode for years, and then a medication carousel that I'm still on. And I've been encouraged to write down my thoughts. Some are only for me, by necessity, but I also want to store these ramblings, somewhere, for posterity.  Maybe it'll help someone, sometime. But that's not really the point. It's a little window in, for when I can't quite explain it, and need to jus...