Paradigm Shifting

     Enlightenment is not always a good thing. So many details have been glossed over to keep things beautiful and pristine in our deluded state. It is amazing how a writer( or many others with the creative spark)will create the story in their minds that they want to live out. In an effort of blind optimism, we take a situation and wrap it in illusions till it satisfies our desires and we are not even aware of doing so.

      But even this cannot last. Cracks appear in the foundation. The paint begins to peel. And soon, the whole structure that built with sweat, blood and dreams begins to collapse from the strain of sustaining false hopes. The tragedy is that it is not instantaneous. In slow motion, then pieces split and crumble into dust, settling softly on you as gaze upwards in disbelief.

      "These are hard times for dreamers," seems to be the motto these days. Social media is a constant affirmation. You watch with a strange sense of detachment as hopes swell and then are snuffed out in a variety of scenarios. In the back of your mind you keep on trying to convince yourself to stay positive in spite of a multitude of evidence that tries to drag you down. Sometimes, it feels like you are fighting a fruitless battle.

On Apathy

   

 There is something that I really hate about apathy, both when it manifests in myself and when I see it in others.  We commonly see love and hate opposing each other but I think that it would be more accurate to say that apathy opposes all feeling.

     Even if hate someone, at least that person evokes emotion in me, even if they are an enemy.  What I would imagine to be infinitely worse, would be that someone means so little to me that they have no power to wring even the faintest feeling from my heart.  At that point, I can easily cut them from my life, like the stems of feeble plants.

     My entire life has been driven my passion and fury, so it very disconcerting to see apathy sneak in my life again and again.  I find myself trying to place the blame on my past naivety and claim that experience in the world just opened my eyes to what was already there, but I call bullshit. Apathy is the enemy and if left unchecked, then it will spread like a cancer until it consumes the rest of my passion and I feel nothing for anyone.  That is simply not something that I can allow to happen.

I Pity Drivers in Big Cities

     Ever since I sold my last vehicle before moving from Florida to Seattle, I have had to use alternative means of transportation.  I am not going to lie, I was pretty sure that I would be miserable but so far it has actually enhanced my experience in Seattle.  Don't get me wrong, I actually love driving, especially the part where you make driving playlists and go on road trips, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I would be overly stressed out and maybe even get in a punching match if I was driving here.

     What I have come to realize though, is how much more you get to experience the city if it is not just sweeping past you vision at sixty miles an hour. At slower paces you have time to absorb and appreciate the environment.  Know, I know that I am very lucky to be able to just walk to work downtown in about twenty minutes or take a  bus in about the same amount of time. I take it for granted sometimes, but every once in a while it really hits me.  One second, I'll be rummaging through my phone for something to listen to then I'll look up and be struck by the light playing off the skyscrapers or the mountains just beyond the urban sprawl.  When I was driving, I feel that I was often so caught up in the act of driving that I would miss these kind of things most of the time.

     I know that I am going to buy a motorcycle sooner or later and I'll start driving again, but for now I am thankful that I can experience the city in this way. I love the chance to be able to see things in a new light and experience things that I would have missed otherwise.

Happiness can be objective

   

Lately, it has been pressed on me just how much my own happiness does not depend on outside circumstances but on myself and the life that I create for myself.  Over and over I see people that have more than me and have had their lives handed to them on a silver platter being chronically depressed and dissatisfied with their lives.  This is hard for me to accept, even though I understand that depression is chemical as well as psychological.  I know this because it is something that I had had to deal with for a very long time.

     It irks me now because I know that I could be depressed even when so many things were going well for me.  I was propagating my own suffering and as a result my life would steadily decline in a downward spiral.  There will always be problems in life.  This is a fact.  We can choose to let those problems dictate how we feel or be happy in spite of them.  I've started to take the latter stance without even noticing it apparently.  It struck me today as I was walking to work and feeling happy.  Why am I happy?  There are literally piles of problems that I could be obsessing about yet here I am, not in delusion that the problems exist, but not worrying about them either.
   
    This is really going to ruin the whole tortured artist I had going.  Damn...oh well.  I will be to busy not wanting to shoot myself for once to actually mind.  I find it funny that something like this emerged out of one the worst bouts of depression that I have ever had in my life.  It was like I was so sick of feeling like shit all the time, that I just turned all feeling off and decided to take a step back for a while and let the chips fall where they may, not something that comes very easily for me.

    I know that it would be naive to think that the depression will disappear entirely, but maybe if I am lucky it can transform into beautiful melancholy that still shapes what I create.

The Count

 


   To say that I can be vindictive would be like saying that Edmond Dantes had a slight bone to pick with the people that wronged him in The Count of Monte Cristo.   It is not something that I am proud of and if I were to blame anything, it would be my choice of literature and film.  I was always drawn to stories of revenge, where the oppressed protagonist exacts what he sees as justice.  That is not to say that I enjoy brutalizing my antagonists(at least not physically), but there is just something that is satisfying about seeing someone who thought they were untouchable, no matter what amount of harm they caused others, get what was coming to them.

     This is a flaw of mine, but who can really say that they have never imagined bad things happening to those who hurt them. I think that it appeals to our baser natures, something that the self-righteous chose to ignore or refuse to admit that it exists. It is a primal need, as deeply ingrained as food or water and it takes an effort of will to deny them. And since I would rather not spend time in jail due to eating someone's kidneys in an act of revenge, I've had to be a little more creative.

     When it comes down to it, revenge is pretty bad for your health. You think that it will makes things better or make things right, but it doesn't satisfy you in the end.  But here is the problem. Try telling someone while smoking about how bad cigarettes are for them and see if you get a positive response.  Knowing that something is bad for you is one thing and actually stopping is another. Lately, I've been trying to be a more positive person and trying to not stew over the things people do to wrong me, and I would definitely say that the process is akin to quitting cigarettes after being a chain smoker for years.
   

Royal Flush

     Any person that follows my Facebook is bound to know that I post a lot from my life, almost to the point that it is voyeuristic.  Although, I would rather have an interesting life that is worth writing about rather than just talking about the details of what I had for lunch or whoever I happen to be dating at the time, because no one really cares.  Any why would they?  On Facebook, you are simply a detached series of pictures with words attached. There is no intrinsic connection, no matter how many poignant song lyrics that you post.

     What I am trying to say is that people see what you decide to show them and even that is limited by each person's power of observation.  I used to play poker poker a lot when I was living in Portland.  I liked the idea of social gaming laws that allowed poker to be played in dimly-lit bars that catered to my deviant nature even more so than casinos.  While I would never say that I was the best player, I did pretty well for myself despite the fact that I broke all the poker stereotypes.  I was never stoic, never wore sunglasses and baseball caps and chattered away while drinking and generally having a good time.  It baffles me how I managed to win consistently at first, but then it hit me.  Someone who is stoic is more likely to have tells that show what you are thinking over someone who projects their persona like a wall around them that protects the fevered thoughts racing inside from being seen.  I  discovered that I could be holding a royal flush that would blow everyone away at the table and still be chattering away like I had nothing of importance.  I imagine that it could be pretty damn infuriating to the people that I was playing against when I would show them my hand at the end.

     I have taken this with me in life.  I have always had a problem with over thinking and over analyzing things.  The inside of my mind always seems to be a raging torrent of thoughts, but I could never get ahead in life if I was an open book to people all the time.  So I decided to take what I had learned and apply it to my every day life.  I could have just been closed off but since my profession is dependent how well known I am, that would be like shooting myself in the foot.  Instead, I crafted a character of who I wanted to be while still keeping my "cards" hidden.  I feel that anyone who has lived in the spotlight and have managed to not have been consumed by the mobs in every aspect of their lives have probably developed a similar approach to their lives.  Part of me wishes that things could be different, but I know better.  I am too aware of human nature to be that naive.