While I was transferring stuff from one computer to another, I found this old entry I wrote earlier this year. Just decided to post it since I've been suffering from acute writer's block lately.
Why do we so easily settle for mediocrity when we get older? Why do our dreams plummet from impossible to the plausible and quite often enough mundane? What is it in our genetic code that drives me, as single man in his mid twenties to search out a nine to five job that will never come close to bringing me any sense of satisfaction in my life?
Andy asked me the other day, ‘is it bad that I have no new years resolution’? I didn’t answer, but I think it’s a little sad. We have confined ourselves to dreams aren’t distinctly ours. The dream of the model home with the two car garage and the flat panel TV and the 2.5 kids with 1.5 dogs and 2.25 cars. Is that what we dreamed of in childhood? Or in our adolescent years?
I find the idea of goals to be sometimes funny. I will do X by X days. We so willingly give up the ability to live in the here and now to sacrifice for an indeterminate future that might not even come to fruition. I don’t know why we do it. As youths, we never needed some benchmark within our lives to judge the progress we’ve made. But I guess in the end, I’m the one clamoring for my days of youthful innocence. This responsibility thing is just not what it was cracked up to be. It kind of scares me.
Am I jaded by a life marred by goals that didn’t come into fruition? Or have a clung to tightly to an innocence that is no longer mine to bear? Maybe I just have grown enough to have the dreams of the ostentatious nothingness that has been sold, bought, and marketed, and sold again for a slight profit by every vendor thought imaginable.
I dream of happiness. I dream of fulfillment. I dream of one day waking up and finding that my voice in the head is the voice that everyone else hears. I dream that the person that I see every day in the mirror is just a reflection of the man I aspire to be.
And I dream of sex. Copious amounts of sex. Hahahahaa. Only if that weren’t so true.
I wonder if the path I chose for myself is purposely hard. I wonder if this battle that currently manifests my life is not some intricate chess game between my id and my superego, where my life is the board that they play on. Morbid, no? And fate hovers over, gleefully clasping her spinster hands and she anticipates each move on the board, as if it was carefully scripted by her and each essence of my subconscious mind is an actor in her play.
Outside circumstances that always give me an excuse to take an easy way out. It’s too easy. I can’t really write these days. The characters that I think of, they just seem to be lifeless dolls that are made to feel and look human, but are cold to the touch. They haven’t come alive yet, except in the deepest recesses of my imagination, in some untapped corner of my brain.
I hope this is only writer’s block.
I talked to an artist about criticism today. This is something that I really need to work on. Accepting criticism, at least. In real life, I have a hard time being told I am wrong. It’s a mixture of desire to showboat and insecurities. I am insecure, especially about my intellect now. Fat jokes aside, my academic career has become the fodder of most of the jokes I tell. It’s crazy, because it makes incredibly insecure about it. I look around to my peers and see countless others that have face experiences like mine that have succeeded. And then doubt creeps into my head. I used to be confident of my abilities. But later in life there are no longer aptitude tests that you can take that can confirm to everyone how smart you are. No state wide board exam that will place your reading, writing, arithmetic, and scientific knowledge well beyond your own grade level. No SAT test that you hardly really study for to testify about your ability to do well on standardized tests.
The greatest leap from college to adulthood is there is no longer any grading scale. For sixteen plus years of our lives, we are rated on a grading scale. One free of personal opinion, concerns of hygiene or office politics. Just a pure number. A is equivalent to excellent, B good. With the loss of criteria, it’s almost as we lose a measurement of where we are in our lives and how we are performing. I guess that is the definition of being an adult. Sure, we have a year end evaluations given by our employers, but that, more than any other time in our lives, is more of a popularity contest and testament of one’s charisma rather than a true reflection of one’s abilities.
We grow up with the structure of a grading scale. Take that away and some of us will crumble.
Everyone has advice about how to write. Base your characters off your friends, write about what you know. Can writing be really taught and learned? Or is it truly just an expression. I don’t know. I don’t know. I wonder if those people that have had years of schooling and education about writing have a heads up on me. But then I wonder if my imagination is something that is quantitatively measured. And in the end, isn’t that the key to the worlds that I create? Keep trucking, my boy. Keep trucking.
Pometini
1 oz. of pomegranate concentrate
1 oz. of Vodka
a splash of fresh lime juice from a lime wedge
a spash of grenadine
1/2 oz. of sour mix
1/2 oz. of grapefruit juice
Add everything into the shaker with ice, shake, strain and pour.
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