Entry 8 August 21, 2009

I want to write you something important. Something meaningful. Something that resounds and resonates. Which requires me to concentrate. Which I don't want to do at the moment.

I just took a walk around town. I do that. Common past time. Used to be something I did every night, or nearly every. But now I find that I am doing it once a week at best. A good hour of rounding a few neighborhoods. My route is little changed over the past seven years, which is odd considering how often my starting point changes. But I loop the local campus and I loop past a few strange apartment complexes.

I revisit each time I have made the trip before. I consider the memories and emotions. I see how the landscape and buildings change. I remember the times when and I don't associate with my past self and the past versions of my town. I mostly just stop on a square of sidewalk or in front of a building and get slammed with concise, clear, play by plays of the last significant event that happened to me there.

They call it baggage for unknown reasons. A case you take with you that has things you will need in it. But this isn't helpful stuff. This is simply what you remember from a time that you wanted something that perhaps did not happen. A time that you want to will forward to the present or yourself back to the past and act differently. Time travel does not exist.

And it isn't about preventing paradox or the problems with the world crashing or universe imploding. It is about the inability to get anything done. Every single day would be Groundhogs Day or 12:01 for every single person. A million billion redoes and extra lives until we got it right. Anyone with a lasse faire attitude would be treated as the definitive god of cool.

So we are not allowed to undo, our choices have to carry with them some form of meaning or they will cease to exist and then the world will stop turning and then the universe would implode.

So perhaps paradox is just mathematical regret. And perhaps we find ourselves needing to push on because dwelling creates issues.

But I want to walk across town and not feel like I am in the Baskin Robbins of emotion. I shouldn't be laughing until I start crying until I start singing until I want to crawl into a ditch until I sigh until I turn around until I decide that this was a bad idea into a good idea and then I get home.

Because the swings are as tedious as the worst of the locations. And more common. And I should just stay home and write anyway.

Entry 7 August 10, 2009

I would like to start off with something like "Oh what a night" or "I've been here before and I must say..." but all I really have is "ummm, yeah?"

I have been concerned over the last several days that I am no good when given to my own devices and time. I want to live in a spontaneous world in which I am always in demand and must be forced to solve problems on a split second notice and use years of discipline and planning in practical ways to combat an uncertain world.

But when it comes right down to it I am much better off actually doing the steady learning and rigorous schedule bits. I find that if I give myself time to relax and play I just end up feeling nauseous with a headache. I need to have something at least vaguely important to do or I just come apart at the seems.

And if you happen to have been privy to my life for the past 10 years you will find a lot of time spent wasted and crazily drifting trying to find a foothold of some sort to stabilize me. And the whole time I did work and school as best I could as tertiary things. My personal well being was my number one concern because I was flailing so wildly. But if you are ever in a situation where things are spiraling and difficult to deal with you will often find that standing still and scrutinizing the issue gets you run over, or eaten by raptors, or knifed by a psycho. I always tell people to act first and spend time thinking about situations either before or after not during.

And yet, there I was, in the midst of a shit-storm of my own creation and while there may have been occasional eyes that let me feel safe or at least, not threatened, there was never really a time that I was in a good place.

Now it seems that I have a chance to be in that place, but I have to keep pushing forward. Though I may feel tired or even overwhelmed I need a lot less time to gather myself and heal then I tend to think. If I try to baby myself then I become fragile and tender. You have to put weight on a bad foot to help it heal and I have to, likewise, but pressure on myself to get going.

I doubt that I am alone in this way. However, the pressures I chose to place on myself get abundantly and swiftly complicated. I have been known to make poor decisions and I have been known to rush down paths.

Is where I am and what I'm doing worth risking for what I could be doing tomorrow? I don't know.

Entry 6 August 2, 2009

"I resent the way that you make me like myself," says Mike Doughty in a song. I'm not sure who the exact "you" is in his statement but I can certainly align myself with the sentiment. There are days that I know my life is not my own, that I must spend every moment breaking free from my selfish inward gaze and place people before me.

High words, and hopefully true words, but rarely sane words.

I keep reaching for the term "gravitas" because it holds a powerful key to unlocking something essential in life that I feel has been missing lately. I want my actions to mean something, I want the thoughts I have to change the world and upset reality. But it is an enormous responsibility to have things you do matter, we are all better off having the things we do be unknown and unseen. Nobody has the shoulders to bear the weight of public scrutiny indefinitely. Perhaps we obsess over the banal minutia of celebrity and fame simply because we cannot fathom what it would be like to follow someone that was doing something worthy. It would likely break them, and then nothing would be done.

I test myself against the outside world and I compare myself to others, it is human to do so, it is vanity and it is ego and it is self-fulfilling and self-destructive and above all else, addicting. I cannot make my actions matter nor can I make my thoughts reality, but I also cannot stop trying for either one.

The ultimate challenge of a dreamer is to press onward with a course of action with no regard for the negative possibilities and potentiality of such but keep firmly in mind the downsides and hurdles. Too often dreamers are counted as disaffected and useless because they freeze up when their plans go awry and most of their plans are doomed for such set backs from the beginning.

Case in point, if you decide to do something crazy you have to be prepared for it not to work even while you chant the positive outcome like a mantra. To ignore either side of the coin is to invite ruin and futility to all of your actions. The self-help mentality has began to program us to think only in one direction, that being open and fair with our personal assessments is the road to failure. I demand that the opposite must be true. It is in our one-sided certainty of success or failure that we create the largest problems. The gulf between our projected actions and the potential end point of those actions will destroy us most profoundly.

I leave you tonight with a thought that is best considered when the lights are out and the sun is down and the clear sky creates a still black mirror that reflects your inner thoughts: If you lived in a social vacuum and there was nobody to compare your results with, would you be pleased with your decisions?

I know that I would, it is only in the light of scrutiny that I find an immense pool of doubt and recrimination, but perhaps you see it differently.

And in the end, my opinion on the subject should not matter.