(Very minimal edit because of budget cuts and time restraints)
INTRODUCTION TO THE FOLLOWING…
WHAT-HAVE-YOU:
We are now at a crossroads where two generations meet. This is where the fun begins.
Everything is so funny. You grow up. You say I’m going to do something. Then you do it. Then you think it’s a game and you learn that it’s not a game, well not a game in the typical sense. But yeah, life is a sport but it’s not a kid game. It’s a sport as it requires courage to keep going in the face of the great human wall.
What I’m getting at is it’s been a while since I’ve let my fingers type in real-time and be spontaneous like the summer storm and dart and feel free and meditate within what was happening right now.
I’ve been pressing on with projects that I’ve been working on for the past two to four years so much, that I haven’t been able to write very much of anything else this summer. I used to just put them on hold but I know to move on I must complete what I started.
And I’m tired and I know it. I got three hours of sleep last night, five a.m now, and I wake up and I force myself to work and I don’t have anything, but still, I really want to know something…
PART ONE: WHAT DO WE WANT?
Somebody asked me if I was an artist the other day. I’m not an artist. I don’t know what that means. That’s such an overused word. I’m a worker. I work with words. I don’t like it sometimes, but I do it, and why, because that’s what I do. I guess I’m an artist once in a while, when I can have fun and lose myself and create, but editing, well man….let’s move on.
When I first started writing was after college, and I mean writing, living like a struggling writer and thinking it was cool and beat man, hip and wandering-fighting-love…not knowing anything while smiling and just going, and I thought it was fun and it was always hard being a writer. But I liked it so that got me through for a while, and slowly after page after page I realized that I was getting better by the week, and that was what, eight solid years ago now. I’ve sold a cumulative 2500 books, and my last couple, less than fifteen a piece, and I didn’t get one dime from that crowd sourcing, which is funny, because people with so much less talent have gotten tens of thousands of dollars that I know they wasted, based on entertainment value. See, I’m not an entertainer and I’m not a diversion to the world, and what’s confusing to me is that I don’t even care. I thought I would be hurt and a bit discouraged but I’m not, and that’s something new to me, and it only makes everything feel more dreamlike.
And so the other day I got a check for three hundred and thirty dollars from my book sales, and I was so proud of myself because that was money that I made with my own hands, and art they say, it’s not about the money, but it is if you live to change the world with ideas, and also if you maybe need a haircut or something. I’m kinda joking but not really. The only mid-life crisis I’ll have is if I can go to the dentist or not or if I have to accept this pain the rest of my life until my teeth fall out.
Come on… Go real, and they say It’s not about the money, and either those people are young cats or are people who have so much more of it than I do, and if you’re the former, you can please stop talking now…wait, those sound like fighting words, retract and censor me never.
It’s not about the money, it’s for the soul man, and then those same people will never pay for the people who stand for a better world and will allow such articles to be read that are paid for by advertisers and appear on the horrid digital pages from the likes of the Huffington Post, articles that after I made the mistake in adding them on book face flooded my damn feed with bullshit that discussed whether or not the new generation is going to have a mid-life crisis or not, and from my point of view that’s irresponsible speculation on the side of journalism. It’s almost creepy to me that an article like that would be published in the first place, because a mid-life crisis? WHO? WHERE? Do you not see the world burning? This is human life you’re speculating on….
A mid-life crisis happens in some areas in my state when you’re ten years old, because your city is bankrupt. A mid-life crisis, and now that’s what you might call a modern conception of what we have no long-term evidence to support. A mid-life crisis, from whose perspective and who the hell are we talking about because I’ve met some people who’ve been in crisis their whole life, and some of those people are now dead and didn’t make it to mid-life.
So Who? The dead middle class. The students who can’t pay their loans? Wall street? Tax collectors? Mail men? The factory workers? Dogs? Humans? Yes! Which ones? They normal people? Who exactly are we talking about?
I’ll say it again, this age of professionalism is killing our culture. It’s not about ethics. It’s about playing your role. Can you accept the guilt? Good. You got the job. Go write this article please.
And it’s not easy. None of it is. I mean, who the hell are these people, how are these writers allowed to get jobs, because they what? They are pleasers and not journalists. It’s a shame and they blame my generation for everything and laugh at us when they themselves grew-up in war and when did they forget, the eighties, the seventies, why was peacetime so destructive to our American culture, where did it go wrong, and did it go wrong? I don’t know but it doesn’t look good. But maybe I’m mistaken.
Again, can someone please tell me what we want? Do we want people speculating if were going to have a mid-life crisis or not, and who the hell do they think they are, they should report the news and speak for the people and not the consumers, AT LEAST NOT ALL THE TIME, and everything is so damn insulting and dehumanizing. DAMN. Let’s get back to something I know more about…
Writing is hard and I don’t know, I do it because it’s what I do, but sometimes I just can’t believe that what I write isn’t seen as professional enough when what is read isn’t real, it’s fake, it’s almost downright misinformation, and you know it, I know it, we laugh at the gossip that we call news now a days and over a sunset we say, this sucks, but what can I do about it?
I’m not pissed all the time and sometimes I do what you do, and you go there and you don’t read new things and you don’t pay for peace, you pay for what is normal and what you think will work out, and it wont work out. Here’s the truth:
I’m sorry but nothing is going very good right now and the world is in rough shape and we’ve really let things get out of control. If we don’t take a step back and say boy oh boy maybe we should let some people who actually care about us run the show for a while, well if you don’t clean this mess up soon, well then you’re all going to end up like me, perplexed as cat in bath water looking at the fall out of society, wondering what the hell happened and asking yourself when you’re going to be able to start a family, and just starting a family sounds like a dream these days, and that’s sick, that’s insane, and maybe that’s my fault because I chose to be a writer, I don’t know, but something doesn’t feel right and I don’t know, maybe its me, writing, its something else.
It’s august something a rather and I can’t find the date so who cares, and there was a storm tonight and I realized that I forgot how to write, because I’ve been editing so much lately. Knowing that I need to get back in the groove because I’m almost all caught up on my projects I’m going to write a thousand or more words a day (I’m not going to post it everyday). But as far as what I’ve got going on, well I almost have happy in dirt done and maybe I’ll have it done by morning, before I go to sleep again.
That book , like a town on a lake, that was a side project of mine but those both took me a year of my life and then ill go back to the fear and the going. I have about twenty pages left on that and I will probably start working on that book Sunday. I want to move on but I live in the past with my editing, and it’s tiring because the now is in such conflict. I almost feel safe in my past, because I read the news drinking a cup of Joe and I said to myself, nope, peace out society.
Anyway I’m going to get my twain on starting Friday and I’m going on a vacation this weekend and I’m going to walk on bridges and on the highway and I’m going to try to get better. I’m at a new point as a writer, a brick wall, you know what I mean?
PART TWO: THE BRICK WALL
The Brick Walls of life come along when you get done with projects you’ve been working on for so long, and now that you’re done, well what now? Well better get working out and in shape and get both physically and mentally better, and you have to do this. You have no choice but to get better because what you did before wasn’t what the great will look back on.
I’m a person who’s trying to expand outwards until the black hole claims me, and so why do you want to be good? Why do you want to have your words read in the same breath as some of the best writers of all time?
That’s not so simple, and up until recently I used to say that’s dumb, that’s something only a kid would want to have, but no, I want that so the world is safer. I know that I’m a good person and that my words speak for the essence of real life and I know that words can end this bloody conflict we see our silly species entangled with. THE BRICK WALL…
I’m at a brick wall just like the global world is at a brick wall, and we can jump the wall or smash the wall or we can sit over here and look at the wall and say there is no way we are getting over the wall, but we will, because we have no choice, or I guess we do, we go extinct.
As human beings, in the same way for myself as a writer, we have to get over that wall, and we can only do that together, and how, how will we get over that wall? I don’t know, but we will only get over it if we try to stop relying on the past mistakes as the older generations made. We need to now and forever stop saying that’s just the way it goes.
Back to the mid-life crisis topic…
Who? You? Me? I? Them? You? You? Is it you?
Did you just learn you’re going to die. Did you learn you will never be perfect? Did you learn that life is hard? Did you learn that you have no control over your government? What is it? What are you suffering from? Mental insanity? Wake up. You are a real person and this thing called a mid-life crisis does not exist, and if it does, well maybe that’s a good thing. Use this and solve the problem and go do something…
Read a new book, invest your money and buy peace, give your kids the better world that you are always so worried about. Stop being selfish and stop allowing people to kill animals and please stop, please stop burning down rainforests and invest in your country and your schools and please read a book. Stop outsourcing and making slaves out of your own people, stop selling things that don’t exist, stop destroying our water and our oceans. Stop bombing and killing each other. Help those that are sick. Normal things.
THE BRICK WALL, and so if you are having a mid-life crisis that means you are feeling guilty and why, I feel it to, I’m not a saint, but maybe that’s a good thing, and don’t think that you’re too old to change, that’s complete bullshit and a waste of your cognitive abilities, and why? Here’s why:
Because you are going to live until you’re eighty, and who knows, now a days we might be living well into our hundreds. That’s a long time to worry about something that is only in the middle.
This is the future. Wake up. This is not last century. This is the year of traveling to other stars and meeting new beings, and wake up, because we don’t want our house that is our earth to be a mess. Could you imagine if another species ever came across voyager and heard our golden record. They would say what a nice species, and then they would come all the way here and say what a bunch of very loud but strangely evolved posers….CALM DOWN….take a step back, because seriously, we look like idiots. Savages. Look at what we do. It’s insane. It’s petty. It’s killing your own kind. What the hell?
You live and you die and other than that I have no clue.There are brick walls throughout history, and now here’s another one…
You grow and you get smarter and wiser and regress sometimes to as they say, move forward. You work on yourself and as humans we must get better because what we are doing right now is absurd. Most of you are trying and I speak to the abstract soul of the human race, but there’s no doubt in my mind that we’ll get to where were supposed to go, just like I will get to where I know my writing is supposed to go, and I’m tired because life is trying, it’s a sport….
Life is the great sport, the great contest, and I don’t know, we will do whatever we want, and what do we want?
I hope it’s peace.
Adventures In American Writing 