THE CHAOS CONTINUUM
It’s a state of mind, a state of being, a thing that flirts with madness and disaster and yet has its moments of glory along the way...
The chaotic flow of life has a way of wearing on you, or rather, many ways of wearing on you. There can be a constant grating chaos, a low grade thing, like a grinding of teeth through the nights that leaves you questioning why your jaw is sore, why your head aches, why you wake up feeling unrested. This is all of the minutia and bullshit that makes up so much of the average life in our modern society. Then there is the higher pitch chaos that comes in abrupt waves, forget the pitch and roll; it’s crash and hold and drown before being cascaded up through the surface into the air to repeat. Both of these things wear on you, though in different ways and at different speeds.
It all becomes the chaos continuum, the spiral cycle, and the vortex.
These days I am often gone out of town for work, be it driving to and from morning and evening or staying overnight in a decaying hotel here or there. I am on the road quite a bit, but not in a glorious way. I am eating crispy chicken sliders from Sheetz for breakfast. I am drinking two to three energy drinks a day. I am saying “No beer tonight” at 8am and then needing an ice cold beer from the bottom of my SOUL at 8pm. My body aches in the late evening and I can fall asleep in three minutes flat. The days are long, and by sheer volume of time, they leave little room for other endeavors — personal pursuits, fun, or rest.
Well then, when the time comes to be away from this grind, there are generally two speeds at which my mind and body may respond — plain exhaustion and so general lethargy, or a fight against it and so debauchery, excess, and mayhem. This is the spiral cycle, simply put. Just when the time is freed up to do one of those things that I want to, or that I feel like I should, all I want is to do the opposite — i.e. I should write! I should create! I should produce all of those ideas into something tangible, exciting, even outward-facing for the world! And yet, and yet… all I want is to eat a burrito, mindlessly watch Law & Order, and fall asleep within one hour. Or, to stave that off, I will drink heavy pour rum drinks, and either haunt a bar like the reanimated ghoul I am or scribble manic doodles in my journal with a seemingly self-refilling bowl nearby. The best of intentions as I move through the long days, AND YET, when the time comes to be free, I am drained. I am drained in all ways, and so the best intentions are nothing but a wisp dissipated by the faintest shift of the fickle breeze.
And the fickle breeze always shifts — it is in its nature of course — and then I am engaged in sloth or mania for the short time I have until the busy busy busy run comes again. That is the spiral cycle, with the busy busy busy run being the primary component of the chaos continuum. These things together with myriad other shapeshifters and unpredictable variables, on repeat, create the vortex.
I constantly argue with myself about the line between complaining like a little bitch, cc: excuses, and legitimate restraints on human capabilities such as energy, mental bandwidth, emotional capacity, etc, cc: reasons. Perhaps a concrete example of these things in practice is in order.
A few weeks ago I woke up with a crippling hangover on a sleeper sofa in New York City. Not the showing I intended for my final evening there. I’ll spare you the details at this juncture as they are beside the point, but many hours of travel back to VA followed, filled with a first acute then waning close brush with full on existential panic. I was saved from field work by rain on the Monday, and so I had one day at home to do my laundry and all of the work that I hadn’t been sure how I would get done that week. Tuesday to Friday saw long field days, additional work in the evenings, and nights spent out of town. On Friday night I worked until sundown to finish the job and then drove west and north. The northern stint of the drive was on I-95 and featured heavy traffic, followed by a necessary carwash for the rental vehicle upon return that was filled with mishaps too uninteresting to write but adding to the overall distaste, and then dropping the rental vehicle at Enterprise to pick up my car and return home. This would be sometime between 9:30 and 10:00pm.
So then the two options come into play - I am exhausted and in dire need of sleep, and yet, I am in need of waking hours spent not working, or transiting, or generally lost in an associated fervent stirring. So to obtain those needed hours of reprieve in the face of exhaustion, substances are necessary. Queue rum n’ weed, the classic combo of our times. Queue music, heavy doodling in the journal, videos, and late night snacks. Pleasant! And yet not how the busy Tuesday morning self would desire the free time to be spent, in the grander scheme of things.
I treated myself to a float tank session Saturday morning, for which I was of course not as well rested as I would wish to be. No matter; it’s relaxation embodied for one sweet hour. After that came a soft oblivion, sleepiness transforming into a nap on the couch with the window open, and varying degrees of nothingness after — television, food, more doodling amongst very low energy levels… the postponed state of exhaustion allowed to wash over at last. Detailed as such, it sounds fairly pleasant, yes? And I suppose it is. But when it’s your one full day outside of working hours, it becomes a valuable commodity, and so there’s a feeling of regret and imprudence that comes with what may otherwise be benevolent nothingness. This is to say, the opportunity cost of benevolent nothingness is the possibility of advancing your goals or life in a way that the cold lucid solo roadtrip mind would strongly desire.
Let’s continue. One instance hardly constitutes a continuum, cycle, or vortex.
Sunday - preparation and departure for a 7-hour roadtrip to West Virginia. Just after sundown my route finally took me off the Interstate and into the strange narrow winding mountain roads that work their way from Virginia to a hairpin meandering back and forth across the West Virginia / Kentucky border, all before dumping you out in the town of Williamson, WV. I arrived sometime in the neighborhood of 10:30pm and found a code in my text messages to enter the hotel. It’s a partially-revitalized 1920s affair, and I walked under a crystal chandelier to an abandoned front desk with a sign to use the rotary telephone to call for assistance. A young man arrived, handed me a key, and took me up the service elevator, after which I wandered the hallways looking for my room amongst a seemingly nonsensical layout and numbering system.
Approximately five hours of sleep to begin the week of work on top of an isolated blown out mountain top just over the Virginia state line. The place was a coal mine, is a coal mine, half still active and half long abandoned. The first day was the most arduous, featuring the realization that we were to be traversing varying degrees of mountainside, down to what appeared to be mud or water-filled pits laden with chemicals, and along narrow raised berms between the two; that is, stagnant scary water on one side and a 200-foot near vertical drop on the other, approximately three feet raised in the middle. Right. But more charming features of the week included a small roaming brigade of black stallions on that mountaintop, the realization that we were in the midst of Hatfield and McCoy territory and an impromptu lesson from a local historian, and abnormally early evenings (6:00-7:00pm) at one of the few local restaurants in town, primarily the quickly-determined-to-be best of which featuring cheap drinks and friendly staff. A mixed bag, which tends to be the optimal possible scenario in the midst of the chaos continuum. Hard work through the day, generally pleasing meals in the evenings, and interrupted sleep in a hotel bed through the night — as good as it gets.
On our final day we finished early and upon return to town we found that Williamson’s biggest weekend of the year was gearing up for kickoff in the morning - Dirt Days. It’s just enough to take the sleepy, half-decrepit, one-fifth revitalized place into the realm of festive, of happening. So naturally we decided to imbibe. What level of detail is worth going into? A pleasant evening walking amongst the strange little town, abandoned houses and ravaged riverside inside of the flood wall, drinks carried through the streets, drinks one last time at the aforementioned favorite bar, and then special edition latter hour drinks at the spot described to us by the locals variously as “dirty, fun, sketchy, strange…” Cash only at the bar, and an ATM on the wall. I’ve got one more round in me, and I’m paying for all who stay.
A long drive back on the Friday. Before I could exit those hairpin mountain roads I became stuck behind a convoy of vehicles trailing a wide load flatbed truck, it laden with the oversized bed of a mining dump truck, and I remained there for many miles. A fitting end to a week spent on a mountaintop mine. It was a long haul back to Richmond during which I primarily let an audiobook roll, not wanting all too badly to engage with my thoughts in any meaningful way. Exhaustion came in sharp upon the return, and so it was a mellow evening of takeout and female company. Saturday then was primarily taken up with a mundane series of logistical items before an evening of drinks and levity amongst a reduced crew of friends — the Friday given in to the exhaustion, the Saturday night spent running from it. And to complete the cycle, Sunday was a much needed day of solo nothingness — the prime exemplar of the necessity of benign nothingness at the end of a heavy run combined with the malignancy of its opportunity cost… the weekend came and went into another week of heavy work with nothing to show for the broader scope of life progress. The following weekend would be on the road again, this time to Delaware, but there’s no need to detail that here. The point in going into detail on these few days and weeks was to provide a concrete example of the concepts that make up the topic of this writing — a real life example of how the continuum, the cycle, and the vortex form. These events are inglorious in their happening, and yet they add up into a mass that is much more than the sum of its parts.
So what can we say? I’m well aware that many of these negative perspectives and their associated emotions are the result of the inner workings of my own mind. This is to say, if I approach my life from an outward perspective, I would be forced to admit - You’re not doing too bad, bud! And yet the emotions that come with the thing in practice do not align with that sentiment. The deep feelings of longing for something more, for something profound and perhaps more adventurous, more invigorating, more… meaningful — well, they go unfulfilled and so leave me in a state of either turmoil or a downtrodden low. The feeling that I am not living in a way that will turn my life into all that I dream of it being — this is something that I cannot escape for any prolonged period of time.
The constant grind and its associated movements are often ceaseless, eating up the waking hours of the days and keeping the mind in a state of hyper-engagement or exhaustion, and so they become the chaos continuum. This way of living creates the need or at least insatiable desire for extremes in the short times allowed outside of it — that is, actions related to lethargy or mania, all or nothing, manic or depressive moves to attempt to escape the continuum. These actions then fill the small free time until it’s right back into the chaos, and so there’s no profound break from the whole thing, and thus we have the spiral cycle. The spiral cycle continues, repeating and cascading in on itself, and with all of the mental processes, emotions, and habits that it brings forth, it creates the vortex. The vortex is a behemoth, impenetrable from the inside and out, a monstrosity that swirls and roars low, a primal gurgling sound as it carves swaths of destruction across the land. This is the state of play these days, rarely broken, and certainly remaining unbroken for anything more than a short period of time — never more than a tiny glimpse of clarity in the eye of the storm before the other wall comes crashing in and scenes of blue sky and sunshine are no more than a half-remembered dream. I finish writing this now and glance up at that clear sky fondly, smiling, knowing well how soon the purple surging mass will envelop all again and send these moments and written strands of clarity plummeting to the murky depths, out of sight and out of mind amongst the renewed onslaught of the vortex, of the spiral cycle, of the chaos continuum.
Yeah, in closing, I can say truly that I know how to weather a storm. But I’m getting tired of it, and I think before too long I’d like to go some place where the breeze blows sweet, and where I may lay down for a while and then, refreshed, put myself into non-fervent personal work with a satisfactory sweat on my brow and an eye toward a newly clear horizon.
