Friday, February 26, 2010

Down a Peg

Another day, another thought

So I was having a perfectly good day today. It started off kinda miserable due to traffic in my brain, but I sauntered on none-the-less, as one does. One meditation and one coffee later, I was full of beans and ready to tackle another day in the great outdoors. It's nice to come down to earth after too much time spent thinking. It's Friday and I try to keep Fridays free of any writing or feeling the need to. No matter how bad a day was in paid employment, I don't think I have ever felt the need to write it down. Fridays were usually pretty OK in work. It didn't matter what happened there, I could bask in two days of freedom from it until it was time to go back in on Monday and come back down of my joyous cloud of happiness. It was life's way of taking me down a peg and remind me that I couldn't always be happy. I misunderstood this "Happiness" merely for "pleasure". It was a pleasure to drink loads. It was a pleasure to sleep in. Happiness, I found, just came from truth and honesty. If I was to be honest with myself, I wasn't "happy" in that damn job. if I was honest, I wasn't happy sleeping-in all weekend long, It was just overindulging in pleasure. I was working to get drunk and party and buy shit. You may think I'm just playing with words here but in fact there is a huge difference once that ignorance switch is in the "off" position.

And so it came to pass that I decided I wouldn't work for a while as I had lots to think about. What would I be happy doing? Rephrase: What would I enjoy doing? Will I go to college and do something because I should, or should I spend my limited years being happy, like I mean really happy? Was spending cash really the key to happiness and was selling my days to a company the best way to do it? Sitting at home thinking is not very productive either. In fact, It's very time-consuming. So those years were to go ticking by slowly, month by month by month, until I decided.

See I have always been rubbish at taking advice from others but yet others would come to me for advice. A strange trade-off it seems but it's often hard to take advice from someone especially when you never asked for it in the first place (See "Pedantry" discussion). Advice, as any seasoned living being will tell you, is pretty much useless and mostly ignored in general and our innate ability to learn is dominated by the need to experience things first-hand. It's best to save your breath in 99% of cases until you are asked for it. Advice to me came in many forms: be a nurse, be a language... dude, you could be a feckin' PRIEST (that is the funniest by far) etcetera etcetera. I have taken all of these seriously at one point or another and it took a great many years to flush them down the toilet. "What could be my "thing" to do?". This bothers me daily as well as other things.

And then this thought eventually clogged the plumbing in my man-brain too much so I had to wedge it out and write it down, just to see what it looked like. I wrote it down on a piece of paper and stood, looking at it, for a great many more hours. What do I want to do? WHAT DO I WANT TO DO?? It was no good. This was no use. I was becoming obsessive. I walked away from it many times from frustration until I noticed that when I left it there, It never bothered me again. Because this thought was now trapped between the ragged edges of manufactured tree remains, It could not get back into my head! My thoughts were free to flow! But alas, they were to flow far too fast and eventually, they merged together until they were inaudible and unreadable. The great flow of dialogue, comedy and tragedy was too much for my poor brain to handle after many years of keeping them behind the gates of the lock of my mind. They were cascading and deluging to such a degree that the brittle barriers of my brain were eroding too fast! Action had to be taken! I needed to make those thoughts my prisoners! Quickly and franticly I wrote them. I franticly penned them on to as much manufactured tree remains as possible! I typed them and typed them. I still wasn't sure that they made sense, but I did it anyway! I had to. They were going to destroy me! I eventually had the guts to post them on a God-forsaken blog somewhere.

I never did get back to that one thought that released them all. To be honest, I cannot find it anywhere. I swore I would shred it if I ever found it so as to bury it for good, or I would take the remains and clog up the pipes again and perhaps go back to the simple life I had before when I obsessed for hours and hours about what I should do to make me happy with my time. Perhaps I was happier then, when I was just like every confused man in the world looking for his place. I was to be my actions, An Office Clerk, A Warehouse Operative, A Shop Sales Assistant, rather than my thoughts, my musings and my daily wondering. Maybe I should hang up my bass too, stop playing music. Stop being busy with my happiness. Stop being busy living. Wait, that sounds like something...Get busy living... didn't some book guy say that once? I dunno. I think so. What right did he have to say it?

Someone should take him down a peg. Get a real job like the rest of us. I mean, who the hell wants his advice anyway?

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