{And I hate living in Neverland, and I hate living in this flawed body, and I hate I hate I hate PETER PAN!!!}

yes, the social worker/client dynamic is much like the parent child dynamic, sometimes sick and disordered

“I want I want I want, me me me, mine mine mine, now, now now”

I had a bit of a day….. really it was the last hour and a half. The last thirty minutes…… I nearly quit. We can’t take more clients towards the end of the day, we aren’t allowed overtime. We don’t want it either. The whole damn building shuts down at five. So we stop taking clients somewhere around 4 ish. Of course they keep coming, we don’t LOCK THE FUCKING DOOR OR ANYTHING, that’d be rational…….

I had this one spanish speaking client, and I want to emphasize that I like spanish speaking clients more than average, I get to practice my spanish…….. but she wasn’t taking

“mañana”

for an answer. Tomorrow, it means tomorrow, it’s my favorite spanish word ever. PREGUNTA, question……… no. I kept telling her, which is the same in either fucking language………..

and inside I’m thinking it’s people like you lady. You’re ruining it. You’ve got Tamales, Tacos, Street corn and all kinds of wonderful stuff going for you, but it’s this kind of stuff, this kind of not working well with others that makes you not so popular around here…….

I’m just making an observation, maybe there’s some behavioral modification we could work on. I want to help you. I’m on your side, but you’ve come to me at the end of a VERY BAD DAY…..

and I’m a little suicidal right now, can’t decide if I’m going to call the hotline or not. I might just get high. I’m pissed off, I know that much, at existence, at this stupid job, this stupid state, these awful clients. I hate this heat.

Last client came in with a wrestling belt, not even joking…….. that’s how absurd my day got. If I had an appointment and they asked if I was seeing things I might wonder, because that’s so far out there, but everyone saw it…..

They wonder why it’s so hard to keep people. This is why.

and we’re not even talking about the screaming kid on the leash, I conquered that mess.,.. at some cost to my sanity but I at least took it on.

{ In this life, one thing counts, in the bank, large amounts, I’m afraid these don’t grow on trees, you’ve got to pick a pocket or two. }

Oliver! 1965 and Hook 1995 were the two movies of my childhood. Seriously, might have both memorized. I think I was doomed from the outset, Dickens and Peter Pan? NOT EVEN Peter Pan, who mocks the mocker? why Hook, who represents that which threatens even childhood itself!! HA! So the greatest denier of childhood and of capitalism, in a go……… then the greatest mockers of buerocracy Gilbert and Sullivan you’ve got to stack on?!

Anyway Oliver, sticking to Victorian England which was somehow an improvement on Edwardian England which is when Oliver actually takes place. See, it reflects Dickens own youth that he spent much of in a boot blacking factory, there’s not that much more to it. He had to do this because of his own father’s financial irresponsibility. I’ve always identified with young Dickens. Older Dickens perplexed me, probably why I couldn’t connect with his later novels the same. Or lack of effort, to be honest.

Oliver starts out at the bottom bottom of this world; A poor house, but worse than that without anyone to claim him. A ward of the state when the state is stingy with wards.. Then at the least inconvenience, literally the smallest behavioral deviation they could construct, they put him out into the street. The coldest most indifferent caregivers in history. Abandonment at scale. No redeeming virtue.

So Oliver finds himself lowest on the rung of this mortuary, 19th century mortuary, you can imagine the smell, or best not. Okay, this isn’t good. It’s also not so bad, Oliver realizes. The movie skirts this, but Oliver gets a solid meal, in the book it mention he’s like “Hey! Gravy AND beans? I must’ve been good!” or some such, he’s actually almost not sad, for a paragraph. He’s got this regal bearing about him the whole time. Like a lesser boy would take it out on others. Oliver just, he looks very sad sometimes. You catch him wandering off alone sometimes, he makes really interesting drawings or some other artistic outlet. IDK, that’d be my 21st century update to Oliver having the sort of charm he had in the book which was more of a social asset at the time. Maybe it still is somewhere way higher up than I got on the social order. Someday perhaps.

Anyway so it takes someone actually being out to get him, which be honest is going to happen now and then to an innocent boy nobody has ever educated about anything. I remember. He misteps, steps on a rake, and now his nose is in it. He has to take a run for it.

Okay, maybe this is just the fable of MY life.

So now he’s on his own in the world. He falls in with a rough crowd, but with them he’s making it

and this is the phase I’m in. The phase I continue to be in. So the phase I struggle to describe as how it ends, what comes next. I watched the movie. I read the book. I know all the songs. But I still wince at a few points. and I still can’t seem to get through to that final bit

somehow he manages to get out. He’s where he wants to be, and where he’s wanted and not required to do anything that frightens him or harms him ever again. This is the third act promise.

I was thinking about how I connect with it, and in some sense I feel like this was the contract I signed, this was the social deal I wanted; if I chose virtue and hard work…….. surely someonee higher up would see virtue and hard work……. and intellect

but year after year, it never happened. and I’ve only got a few more years I can put up with this bullshit left. That’s optimistic. Today the needle hovered over minutes for a few seconds. It’s back out at months again now, I’m trying to get it pressed back to  year again….. you would not believe how heavy it is right now.

but the third act that virtuous reward life fights like hell to save him, and wins. The bad men come to bad ends (except in the musical Fagin dances into the sunset, I confess I liked that)

It’s a rather awful place to be almost anyone OTHER than Oliver…….. is something I’ve thought about more obsessively over the years.

That is until you get to utopia, the end area. Only in this little area, everyone in it, servant and master are safe. Everyone sings together. Seriously, is there any more perfect suburb than this? This HOA must be so strict. Not nearly the awful world Oliver was born into. So he doesn’t even have to feel guilt for living at the expense of those who live as he did. He gets removed guilt.

I hated this part when I was a kid…… and life has come full circle, now it looks like peace and plenty. Sign me up for Who will buy such a beautiful morning and pastoral beauty in a somewhat urban setting

but no to the HOA. NEVER! I’ll break houses with a crowbar before you make me do it! With me jimmy in me hand! I have like 12 jimmys now! LOL

so that got out of hand. I wanted a crow bar, a pocket sized one. But I couldn’t pick one, and I liked this small business, microcapitalistic guilt…. the guy’s in Florida. Life’s hard down there, they got sink holes, gators and Ron Desantis, I feel a duty to support anyone down there making ANYTHING cool.  So I bought one, two. That was going to be it for a while. I knew I wanted a third, that third remains unbought but will be somewhere after the 6th at least because of what happened next. So I was going to buy a 3rd larger still than the two previous. Comments about compensating are expected and teased back. But then they do…. a mystery box…. well you’re combining my love for hard goods, tools and surprises……. aw dang it. And they made three sizes. So of course I get the biggest one. I have at least 5 crowbars, and I qualify it because they sent me a few other bits that I’m not sure if they are technically crowbars or other implements…. it’s an interesting arrangement.

I wonder if that’s a symptom of anything, collecting various implements the purpose of which remains unclear.

I have the damn psych degree, but it’d be obscure anyway, definitely not in the DSM if it did exist. It’d be a curious side thing correlations in search of a physiological cause.

God if I know why I have so many implements of curious nature. I’m not constructing a monster…… I really suck at biology and robotics. I might construct a thought virus, I might confess to thinking about that. Not on purpose. Just like…… plague. Maybe I get it from some pathogen, something just errupting from a perfect storm. Like it was just going into the wrong cave….. oopsie doo, that’s it for you.

but it could exist, a mental virus, thought is structured, a thought structure exploit that could cascade with a simple trigger, set the trigger, wait, and when the trigger goes, la, de, da yoou’ve got whatever you wanted the code to do, at scale because it’s been replicating while it waits. You gotta get it through the whole heads of 80-90 % of the species, but as a species we have the time, it doesn’t have to happen all at once. Why though?

There are bits of human behavior we are just ready to stop. Ready to look for more long term solutions. So we need to change, we’ve been stuck in a rut too long.