Rust Belt Ramblings

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...