BLONDE ON BLONDE

I discovered for the 400th time recently that memory, no matter how you perceive it, is vital to who you are or who you become. Somehow, while nostalgia continues to be a motivator, I’ve found a way to obscure or manipulate how my memories evolve. I translate or obscure what has actually happened in my life to become the thoughts or ideas that my mind has imagined. It’s a false reality that I’m comfortable with and that means what I need it to mean with no intention of ill will. It’s safe and okay.

I think that this is directly related to wanting to be a writer (?) and may, I guess, be considered a hazard or problem for some. The way I break this down is this – when I was snot nosed and starry eyed, I knew that I had to experience cool shit to write about cool shit. And I guess I did. But, well, when the cool shit was happening wasn’t the cool shit that I wanted to be a part of, I found ways to make what I was doing, days later, after the events happened, cool shit. Never out loud or relayed to anyone as fact, I would obscure events, conversations, and whatever the hell I wanted to to make what I thought was a good story.

I guess maybe all writers do this in some way or other but what I’m thinking is that in some weird, to me, way, everything that happens now goes through this fiction machine immediately and either gets tapped out on a keyboard soon after or it remains living in my head with the actual events. Two versions. Sometimes very similar. Sometimes very different. Sometimes hard to tell which one actually happened.

Again, not a problem. Adding spice to the dish or something like that.

Cleaning out my old apartment and paging through words that I wrote when I was wide and wild-eyed really opened me up and made some things incredibly obvious to me. While there’s little opportunity for me to return to the reckless (read-irresponsible) imaginings that emptied pen ink all over those pages, the underlying excitement needs a kickstart.

First, I found that I’ve lost sight of what I want to accomplish or what I want to do with my life. I’ve let everything around me consume and occupy a good portion of who I am. This is not to say that I don’t have and take advantage of my time or appreciate what’s around me. I don’t enough. But my equilibrium is jacked. And that makes it as unfair to everyone, especially the most important people around me, as it does to myself.

That’s my most recent wake the fuck up realization.

One of the things that I’ve always wanted was expertise and mastery of something. Of anything actually. And I don’t have that. I don’t seek it. I rarely think about it.

Instead, following the ebb and flow of hours, days, weeks, and months is easier and requires less fight and vigor. Requiring less of yourself when necessary is understandable but making it a habit makes you passionless. Dead. Boring.

And secondly, it is becoming more and more obvious that, besides God, I need to find something that I believe in. That’s it. With little explanation the vanilla dust that coats my existence is starting to cake.

WAKE UP!