Yesterday and Tomorrow

Last night I received a call from my Aunt. She referenced me to an entrepreneur in the IT business. Sales, web technology, database management, application development, and copy-writing. My resume stinks. For what works in it, it has an equal value of detrimental nonsense that only conveys I have no clear direction. What else is new?
He was kind enough to explain the why and how and at least I have a lead to start some work. Will it get it me out of the ferris-wheel purgatory? I've got to start training anew, reset my goals and challenge my resolve. Not necessarily new activities but the focus wasn't there because the goals weren't clear. Ventures of time and money in the last month of unemployment were not what I had hoped for but it's better than nothing. Still, I'm unnerved by the question "Can you sell yourself?"
It's not a small thing to bluff when your integrity is on the line. You have to look at your short falls before plans can be put in place to fix them. But you're not allowed to acknowledge them at the moment of appraisal. It's bad business to choke when the light lands on you. And yet it's the most honest representation for someone who has so little to represent in terms of actual experience and tested savvy. You'd wanna say you think outside the box but you don't even know what the box is. You're not aware when you're considered creative or preemptive or capable because all you know are the problems you solved by the skin of your teeth. It makes me wonder if confidence is fabricated and installed from the outside in. If it's something that the ego creates, part of its function like a magic trick falsifies validity. Confidence is not a part of the natural equation, only necessity. So if survival requires fabrication it shouldn't cause such confusion. Still I don't like channeling bullshit. If I can't back it up, how would it make me look later? The world's big enough but the circles are small. After a certain period perhaps confidence becomes inherit, the life challenges meld together and are overcome with enough frequency to paste resolve over things that used to make you crap your pants. Until then do I just fake it?
I'm being given a test in copy-writing. I've read the fluff out there. It's repetitive, boring, horrid nonsense that conveys little to nothing of the bottom line. Websites are saturated with superfluous conjecture. I'm not talking about the product, just the crap that's written to get people to buy. Does income justify taking advantage of ignorance? Is beating people over the head with appropriated positivity really the way to get a message across? Am I asking too many questions about the system that works? Misdirection is happening on every level of the economy and it seems to be the key to getting things done. Without even coming to terms as to whether or not I can sell myself, I would be expected to sell someone else. Valid information can make an analytical person like me comfy. It means I can beat down antagonists, I can unsettle exploitation, I can be a self-righteous prick. And for some reason, that feels so much better. Is it better than feeling guilty for leading people on? Can I sell myself over an awful product? Is this tomorrow's challenge. What else am I bargaining if I wind up being good at it? It's easy to respect the approach of the survivalist. I think most put the questions of conscience aside and label it weakness when bills have to be paid. I haven't experienced that yet and thought of crossing the threshold . . . it better pay well.

Domain

I'm a ping-pong ball. Not so much by choice but by indecision and lack of preparation. I am fortunate enough to have people in my life that care about me. At the very least they appreciate I'm a minimal burden with a very high standard of respect and consideration for privacy. I don't contribute more than a low-key element. I don't disrupt or lash out. My tolerance threshold is severe. Being so cool fits well with the perpetual role of the guest. I don't believe my loved ones are intrigued so much as they aren't bothered. The good can be appreciated easier that way. And somehow I've developed this resource as a survival trait while I figure myself out. I'm aware it's become a habit and pray that the awareness itself is a sign of the finite span of this time in my life. Regardless, I acknowledge it's something that others can offer. It's a great something and most people call it home. But it's theirs. I want mine.

I am not an honest man. I reserve my judgments and live by them behind a generally closed exterior. I believe what I believe about people and let my actions generally dictate a path of least resistance. I refrain often. I do not believe faith in the general sense is necessary. I won't go so far as to call myself a cynic. I respect the less favorable outcome of the moment, and of the actions people take. I've witnessed enough of them in myself to see it reflected in others. If I'm training myself, I wonder why I would do that. Regardless, the closed circuit of my emotions has some steam to vent, some blood to let and this activity isn't suitable as a guest.

Building a home is a chance to make a statement about your life. It will reflect your strengths and weaknesses. It will become your sanctuary from the world's demands. It can fortify you and give you the peace needed to focus on whatever is most relevant. At its best, a home can be a haven for those you choose to protect and nurture. This purpose is a sign of some serious power, an indication of the stability of your existence. There is no place like home, because there is no place capable of accepting you as its master otherwise. A host's patience wears thin no matter where you go. You become integrated in their process, affected by their approach to life, unable to draw your lines less you seem ungrateful. Many people don't realize the value of independence until the bonds of dependence have made their restrictions clear. Even then they are hard to anticipate. The lack of a personal fortress, where within one can grow self-aware and cunning, means diminishing returns on the minds expanse and the maturation of its ego. A person without dire need to sustain himself will watch TV and let it take him somewhere since the guide-rails of entertainment are so much more convenient.

It's easier not to do. But not better. Being a guest for too long is an injustice upon itself, worse if the person fails to realize it. Shame will reap from his ignorance and harvest his soul.

I've found a writing contest I have enough time to prepare for. The deadline is in May an the fee is only $15 to submit. I'll be writing it as a guest, dreaming of being the host and mounting a counter-offense against all the absurd misconceptions of status that otherwise cause a foul contempt at my own promises. If I can't write a short story, I don't exist. This nature . . . It's the closest thing I have to a home, where my voice is the authority and the lines make sense.

Smug and Indignant

Approaching the one month marker to my much needed reality check (that's when the unemployment runs out), I'm finding that there is a thin line between frantic and indifferent behavior. The motivation has to be volatile to cause the excitement of urgency. If it implodes, the body is left in a void of reference. What am I talking about?

You can go over a year and have some distant appreciation of the fact that it's just easier not to do anything. Resources being available, you may criticize you're own dependence on the familiar world and it's friendlies, knowing it does little to represent the war that's coming. Surviving is not fun. It's just necessary; an unfair obligation. I might be revealing an engorged and possibly retarded dislike for the fundamentals, but authority being what it's become: an evolving reference mutated by people more inclined to exploit the obvious, the binding of "boss" and "bills", of "job" and "worth," getting out from under means a little psycho rebellion. I'm probably shooting myself in the foot somehow, but better now than never.

Opportunities can feel like burdens when you're not making your own life and used to it. Sharing controls with the controlling powers means limiting your ability to perceive a path through the frustration. What am I talking about?

I was a mean truant. I never grew out of my disinterests. I'm trying to find a way to happily partake in the labor circus but the people can and do suck. The whole "it's a part of life" deal doesn't fly with me. People shouldn't get to be assholes and the rest of the world deal. If they do, they definitely shouldn't be promoted. Maybe fairness is the harder gig. Regardless, service has been transformed. The taste is bitter. Work is hated, enterprise is forgotten, reward is alien.

The world can't run without people willing to contribute. I get that. I'm not offering up a rhetoric problem to whine about although some might see that. I'm 26 and I appreciate that new generations arrive everyday without any clue about the world they are going to inherit or if its even something they know they're allowed to be unhappy about. Happiness is the pursuit after all, lest we forget.

The days now are much faster than I ever recall them capable of being. Aggression would help but I have little. The enemy is invisible and even if I saw it I doubt I'd understand the threat emotionally. It's just an intellectual alarm going off at the moment. The survival mechanism kicks in abruptly when the wallet thins and it truly is a shame it comes to that. There's so much more to life than emergencies, at-will employment, and showing deference to idiots.

Discipline.

Not a lot of fun. It has very few attractive qualities and they are all quite indirect. I dare say that the positive form of discipline is obsession. To be driven by a need or hunger in such a way that preoccupation diminishes is really preferable. I can sit with my Xbox360 for hours. I used to be able to do the same with WoW. Both activities have taken up less an less time recently due to simple lack of interest. I find a vacuum however where I spin irrationally to different potentially distracting activities that don't yield much satisfaction. It's like repeatedly going to the fridge knowing there's nothing to eat.
Information being readily available, my new areas of focus are centering around the same story I've been selling myself since I was ten. I'm going to be an author and a film maker. I've got the books and the time and I'm actually finding myself with nothing better to do than to sit and read and study. The mind still wanders however and without deadlines of serious consequence, the only urgency I can generate stems from a vision of myself in ten years. Somewhere along the way I want to own property, a Bentley, a business. I've got all this time to plan and research and the days are zooming by . . . wow, I used to think time just flew when you were having fun. To think you can sense its rapidity from anxiety or speculation. It feels closer to waiting for a package to arrive that you've invested in, or crossing your fingers before they announce the lottery. The closer you get to committing yourself to a life goal, the more dreadful it seems. That fear might have been what's kept me diverted for so long. Courage being a virtue and defined in its spite of fear, would make the term "fearless" an inhuman quality. The lack of any emotion suggests a coldness that does not bend to the ego's wavering response to the dangers of the moment. Of course it's just one example I'm using to generalize the conditions, like doubt, that stamp out consistently progressive behavior. But I wonder if the distribution of monetary wealth isn't some indication of a play on the disconnect from our relative vulnerabilities. If you're sharp enough to make life a chess board, one you can see clearly and move with purpose, then what does that make you?
The important moments string together and make something as yet imperceivable. We can speculate and come no closer to realizing the balancing act of our potential weighing itself upon our decisions of courage and passion and fear. I've started to feel a guilt that grows around the hours that pass. Sometimes living starts to feel like being a part of a system you have no say in, when you get down to figuring out where the unhappiness comes from. And it's ludicrous that you'd have no say. But the alternative truth makes one pause. It's the pause that gets you, kills you if it can. I have to remember not to pause. It's OK to let the world know I got a clue and I'm using it. Maybe discipline comes down to not pausing. It comes down to faulting the argument for hesitation or moderation. I see people all around working so hard and digging themselves deeper into all forms of debt; to bad relationships, to jobs, to places they don't want to be in. It's hard to accept you can put that same effort into change, and it be OK with the world you've come to know. The paradox is it's not OK with your world and what you've accepted of yourself. Light can shine in from the outside and all it causes is trepidation at first and for a while after. If the only thing to put faith in is consequence, the despair can be strenuous if not fatal. But it's this pragmatic view that becomes evidence you're accepting control of what happens. If you can get rid of that buffer of pretext and misconception, the anxiety about the "what ifs," then the information they yield become relevant and strategically necessary to navigate your way out. Everyday yields opportunity to practice this control, no matter where you are.
"Discipline" has a bad connotation because to the average person it means forcibly doing something you don't want to do over and over again cause you have to. It doesn't portray favorable commitment, constitution, or desire because the word is beaten over the heads of individuals that can't relate: parents to children, bosses to subordinates, teachers to students. Discipline is demanded by the institution upon its dependents. There is no one word of equivalent describing when the dependent demands it upon the institution, or when the soul provides the imperative upon the body. No I'll strike discipline from my mind and see what I can do with desperation, obsession, rage and love and my own imagination to light the way. It sounds chaotic, but doing things for the sake of practicing a sterile behavior; being disciplined as an end in itself, is still submitting myself to a laborious use of my will as deemed beneficial by the standards of authority I forgot to recognize. Life should be an adventure, not a daunting practice. I can play video games religious. I escape everyday to the terms I prefer. Evidence exists that I can be dedicated to something. I just need to bring those terms home to me, and own them in the things that matter. Then discipline won't seem like a lash. It'll be a banner. And my faith in consequence will yield the spoil of production.
In the end, I as a young man with an open future, just want to declare myself something positive and forceful. Nothing is trivial.

I don't know what to write.

No. That's not true. It's not plain to me but it's there nonetheless. It's some thumping, clanking nonsense in the background. The only tangible material lies in the intent. It's most clear desperation is a stride toward legacy.

The ride is so important, so the ego frays before the dilemma of "how?" and "why?" relinquishing moments to translate the intent for the long view. It's easy to get caught up in wonder; the appreciation of life's mysticism. The quiet moments at 2am, when the pretenses fall and falling asleep feels like giving up, are the clues that the day and its distractions acted both as hiatus, and missed opportunity to fight for something closer, to the truth.

Today I quit my internship. I cut a loss of time ill spent. I'm 26. An internship without direct knowledge of the company or a strategy to win the hearts of its management is like donating life-times to the abyss of never-where. I try to find consolation in the lesson, that decision making should not be a passive consequence of external events. Were that lesson so easy . . . I've been wanting to sit still and write my business plans. My unemployment is running out, I have few games to claim my interest. I'm building the courage to jog again. My life has be a series of preparations and plateaus, but I won't stop believing that perspective can change the game. Not everyone ages well. Peel your lids back and find yourself racing a demon without regard for showmanship or declaration. In fact, the enemy of progression is silent; absence. The fight for legacy comes in simple moves, strategies, counterattacks, feints, presses and withdrawals. It's sort of wonderful when you take a step back. But I do wonder if that hand that articulates this tapestry isn't simply my willful own. Is idle deliberation a sign of the crazies? I wish someone had the authority to point that out. But I know I'd flip them the bird anyway. Being human is a trip. No wonder the signs don't come in plain English anymore.

Incomplete

If I said I felt lost, I'd feel pretty funny. It seems such a melodramatic statement, complete with generalized overtones of despair having no function other than to justify idleness.

But I do. Tsk Tsk to me. And I travel between homes of family and sentiments with not real sanctuary of my own. I see the roads and skies passing around me and I wait for some solid ground, all the while knowing that waiting is a joke and an excuse ultimately revealing nothing but a standstill. Time is pushing me forward like the momentum of the planets revolution and you'd think I'd get the hint. I do in fact. I dare say maybe . . . just maybe that missing gear, that crossed wire, maybe it's been OK this whole time. What if I'm not broken and it's all some backward decision I made somewhere along the way that I'm too scared or too comfortable to re-neigh on?

Yesterday I did this and tomorrow I'll do that and the whole mission will be pushed back another hour to another week and my sadness will linger upon months of regret. But I'm awake during all this. The shame is sharpened with time and it has its own grip on movement.

I got this whole back'n'forth thing going on if you haven't noticed. I have some work I put off for several levels of a video game. This was after a day of listening, which is easy to do, to someone who cares about me and uses the time with me to self-medicate with appropriated wisdom that isn't appreciated elsewhere. I'll call him Coach. He reaffirms his righteousness, gives me confidence and we do this all day. If it weren't for the evidence he provides I'd sign off completely but I think it's working cause I come away terrified. It doesn't quite stop me from living but it makes me aware of how far behind I am. He see's my potential tomorrow, I see bad habits repeating themselves. Hope is great and all but you need a sentiment inside you that sort of works like a point man and sharpshooter combined. Move forward, line it up, pull the trigger and see what happens. It just happens to be that my trigger might take 2 years to pull. I'm guestimating.

We're talking ambition here people. According to my data, thinking is of no use by itself. It's an impotent agent. There is a great benefit in the unknown. Within it lies our greatest moment. And while adventure may imply spontaneity, it takes the strictest discipline to properly explore the potential of the thinking process.

Babble. No spelling error there. It's just what I do. Speculation assassinates progress. This all makes me wonder about drugs.

I like the idea of being an entrepeneur. Along the way I stumble into all this self-psycho-analyzing and I wonder how self-made millionaires never talk about all this. I do this because I'm a common guy with that common dream of being supremely uncommon. I know the general populace is where a lot of people end up and thats it and I don't look down on anyone for choosing a simpler path. If it's good it's good. But I wanna leave something behind, I just don't feel that, as a minority and as a lower middle class citizen, I have the programming for it. I'm scared of the lack of living and ultimately I sabotage myself anyway. I don't know why but I got a clue the other day it might have something to do with the fundamental doubt instigated in me when I attempted to rationalize my father's absence from home as I grew into adolescence. The discomfort and worry and general vulnerability sill linger. I don't think about him that often, these emotions are just residue and yet it's a sticky tar that was never completely washed off.

I don't want to make my dad the point of any argument. I don't think I can count on any resolution if I depended on him to make sense of my inertia for me, or if I depended on him to just help me resolve my dislocation from assurance. I don't want to depend on him even though I should be able to. Despite best intentions, he just wasn't there for me the way I needed. Seeing children grow up without guidance pains me. I don't know if its something I could live with if I had a child accidentally with nothing to give him and then have us forced apart or I winded up being forced to rationalize being separated from him or even worse, found myself distancing the child over emotions of indifference I hide behind some obligatory appreciation for vague concepts of whatever the hell it is stupid young men think about fatherhood. I'd rather sign up for a large term life insurance policy after getting in shape and then pay someone to steal my wallet and blow my brains out so the kid gets the money. At best someone can tell him I was trying to rescue somebody and he can build some awesome romance around it. Even if he hated me for it, he couldn't refuse to believe the act was noble and I'm sure the nest egg would give him the means to pursue his passions and test his ideal on the world.

That's a lot more speculation than I should invest in a blog entry but I don't really know what to do with this yet. Being consistent would still be a ginormous step up for me. Growing is easy when you obviously don't know shit. When you think you know is when you start to fight for inches.

Yeah, well . . .

Blogging isn't exciting anyway. I could spend 500 words speculating on the reasons why people do it and essentially I'd call it therapy, but I'd lie if I said it had nothing to do with an idea that someone with the ability to amplify might notice my message.

Self improvement, or discipline as its otherwise recognized, is hard because it's unnecessary. It breaks the equilibrium. It leaves us potentially bewildered and left thinking distracting thoughts like "why am I on this treadmill? Why am I spending hours trying to control my fingers on this stupid keyboard? Why am I saving this $20 bill? Why am I bothering?"

I submitted a readmit application to Brooklyn College earlier this week. I also recently invested in some test material software for IT certifications. I'd like to be self employed by the summer with maybe a restaurant gig to hold me down. It's all fantasy at the moment but I can't help but wonder if it really isn't all there for the taking. I'm in NYC after all. Hustling bring people together. Hunger leads to wealth and hunger is gravitational. I just hope I'm not a delusional 26 yr old. I know I'm afraid and avoiding more than a few things. Even now I prefer sleep to this rambling. I just know though, that if I don't write, I'm breaking myself and killing my future. I wouldn't feel it cause that kind of death takes a life time to a achieve, a lifetime of putting your dreams aside.

We fight for more than these dreams. We fight for hope itself.