Unwilling Hero

Perhaps it is a social construct that dictates most everyone wants to feel they either do something or are a part of something important. A chance to leave one's mark upon the world in an apparent happy way and a good-guy badge in the process. What could be better?

On occasion, I have been told despite my best efforts, I am of a decent sort. That I have been helpful. Often, my reaction to such accusations is to call bullshit, perhaps even upping the ante with some who shot john. I maintain I am the worst kind of bastard with the morals of an alley cat. Any good I may or may have not done is merely collateral damage, for I am neither a saint or superhero.

Besides, there is no good or evil, persey, just fun and boring, and I like to be entertained...

For money a few years back, I found myself being a professional messenger of death, by virtue of triaging potential organ and tissue donors. It was a love/hate relationship. The gig truly intrigued me, but there have been those who have said I'm a morbid fucker to begin with. I can own up to deriving a certain joy in interrogating trained medical professionals, even and especially when they were foolishly pompous enough to believe their title was Medical Greek for god. It was important. Back then, I had a friend who was trying to go for his third kidney transplant. It was tragic that he didn't make it, and for two years after, despite a sort of burnout, I kept on in his memory.

The burnout I felt with that came from the establishment. Coming from me, such a statement is hardly shocking, I realize, since anyone playing the home game knows I do not play well with others. The bureaucracy cheapened what it was we were doing. The propaganda party line was we were saving and enhancing human lives, and yet, we were expected to do it in an assembly line manner, as though we were making widgets. The powers that be had no inhibition of telling you how, if you fucked up, you could be potentially murdering someone who needed a life-saving transplant, but in the same breath jump your shit for not having x amount of contacts in an hour.

When I got away from there, it was a blessing. I suppose dealing with disease, desperation, death, dying, and Machiavellian politics can take its toll upon one's psyche. Even a morbid quirky fucker such as myself. There was also the fact I found myself no longer doing that shortly before my mother got sick, sick. I do not even want to contemplate having to do that gig around those seventeen terrible final days she was in the sickhouse or in the aftermath.

After that, I found that I wanted my means of income to tied to something...well, meaningful. Me, the misanthropic cunt who'd call you a filthy fucking liar if you said I did a good thing. Perhaps I had gotten bitten by some sort of metaphoric bug whose venom was altruism. Maybe it was because the auspice of doing something important helped to make whatever the thing was more interesting to me than just simple punch in, punch out.

My catch as catch can catering gigs with Saint Christopher over the summer were a hoot. I really did enjoy myself doing that. I suppose, were I to try to affix some importance to it in context to the line of thought, there were some individuals who didn't go hungry and I was partially to blame for that.

But maybe that didn't count. Intriguing as it was, it was pretty well playing foodie with a family friend, getting some paper under the table, and free cocktails at the cantina after the fact. That wasn't working, it was money for nearly nothing, in that ham-handed dysfunctional Dire Straights kind of way.

Lately, for money, I have found myself being involved in the production of wood stove pellets made from the very beetle-kill that has ravaged parts of these mountains. The founder, my benefactor, is a woman with aspirations of getting away from fossil fuels, a green, local, and sustainable enterprise that all but glows with a whole lot of mindful livin', bitches!

And since I do my bits to live as conscious, sustainable, and mindful as possible, I find I can get behind the concept. Even if my twisted skeleton says not-so-nice things about the memory of my mother after a day. Of course, a great deal of my sustainable and mindful livin', bitches! doings comes from that one almost all consuming goal of dropping out. Being completely self-sufficient and beholden to no one. Perhaps that is sociopathic of me. It is definitely misanthropic, and I don't feel bad about that.

So, for money, I find myself doing something important again. I could care less about a good-guy badge, because I am neither a saint or superhero. Besides, true charity and other forms of good works occur when no one is looking and does not stoop to asking for validation. Although do dig on the thought of doing something that could be considered altruistic and be able live because of it without being sangha or some other religious title, which I figure that probably is rather sociopathic of me.