Too many ideas swim through my head. This usually happens at the cost of never reaching the immediate shore in sight, because a new horizon becomes reason to change course.
I’m pretty sure distraction is a concept everyone relates to. Though it might make life exciting to pursue random tributaries that give you unexpected emotional rushes, the detours become a massive hinderance to following through with the hard-core paddling that needs to be done along the main river.
Feels like a day to do a little ranting. A bit of purging does wonders for the soul. Perhaps offensive humour might not be your cup of tea, but perhaps you’ve also mistaken me for someone who gives a rat’s ass about your fucking tea.
Now don’t get me wrong, I think positivity’s a wondrous thing. I try to pump out some quality food for thought when I can. But sometimes an enema’s necessary to purge all the compacted bullshit we’ve mistakenly swallowed over the years.
And we’ve ingested a lot of it.
Let’s play a little game.
It’s simple, ready?
Answer this question:
“If you knew you had one week left to live, what would you do? How would you spend your days?”
Don’t answer right away, think about it for a bit.
I’ve heard a lot of the same responses over the years…
I would tell my boss to go fuck himself.
I would travel the world.
I would buy a big bale of cocaine and a team of hookers to cook my meals while rubbing my balls.
All noble plans, but not really that imaginative.
Time is a funny thing. We spend so much of it doing shit we don’t really care for, hoping for it to slip by as quickly as possible, only to arrive at a point in our lives where we wish we had more of it.
Everyone has experienced time’s subjectivity. Lost in something you love, it blows by. Engaged in a job you hate, it crawls.
But is any of it actually real?
Ya gotta love it when shit comes together.
It doesn’t always happen as fast as you might like, but if you stick to something you want to accomplish, you can’t help but make progress.
After breaking my wrist last summer, and somehow letting myself get sucked into 70-hour work weeks at a job I wasn’t all that fond of, my first boating season was a bit of a bust, somewhat literally. A few times out on the water, and then it was October before I knew it.
I wouldn’t say I’ve been dicking around this summer, but I definitely haven’t pushed myself as hard as I could have when it came to my sailing ambition. I’ve spent far more hours helping my buddy work on restoring his boat, putting his trimaran in the water, messing around with our sailboat dinghy, and immersing myself in writing projects. All worthy and commendable activities which I don’t begrudge in the least, but I haven’t actually had the balls to take my own sailboat out by myself.
So yesterday I finally said Fuck it!
The human experience is filled with such an overwhelming variety of challenges that many of us will spend our entire adult existences lost in a turbulent sea of cumbersome thoughts, barely keeping afloat, and choking down far more salt-water than we bargained for.
From the moment we recognize that certain sounds being uttered in our direction have specific meaning and intention behind them, we begin a lifelong process of documenting all the instructions, rules, and crazy ideas constantly thrown our way.
Our mental filing cabinets fill rapidly, but we don’t always take the proper time to categorize or organize the information as effectively as we should. We all have the same bright red metal box labelled DANGER, beautifully alphabetized for a quick reference to any of the less than positive experiences we’ve had over the years, like the time you poured gasoline into a sewer and subsequently lit it, to see what was down there. The eyebrows grew back, but future rapid access to the “N” files provide the extremely helpful “Never do that again, stupid!” documentation that helps to prolong Earth existence.
It pisses me off when I’ve re-read a piece a hundred times over, sent it out to the masses, then re-read it again later to find at least one word not in the place it should have been. A word that wasn’t necessarily spelled incorrectly, but made me look like an ignorant ass all the same. And I’m not even sure if re-read should actually be spelled reread.
Fuck.
Imperfection can make me a little nuts sometimes. I find it a tough pill to swallow, much like cod-liver-oil gel caps, which seem to have been designed with the notion they were to be downed by hippos.
It’s easy enough to make excuses, of course – I don’t have a proofreader, I was tired, the LSD kicked in, whatever. But I have no tolerance for bullshit excuses. I missed something I shouldn’t have missed, and it really get under my skin.
I mean gets.
Fuck!
Although I just posted a rant on lightening up and dealing with fuck-ups, the lesson seems to have revisited me, so humour me as I get a little more practice in…
Oops.
Bah.
Meh.
Whatever.
Sometimes I fuck up. We all do. We can beat ourselves to death over it, or suck it up and move on. Fuck-ups happen, and it ain’t the end of the world. As I sit here and obsess my shortcomings, I realize that I’m not really sure if fuck-ups should have a dash in it.
Fuck!
Meh.
I’m doing my best to let it all go. Perhaps the point in engaging something you’ve developed love for is in accepting the reality that you won’t be perfect at it, but the more you practice, the better you’ll get. I’m reminded of a Vince Lombardi quote I painted on a mural wall many moons ago:
Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.
Not too shabby. Chasing a little tail isn’t such a bad idea either every once in a while.
I won’t beat this mule anymore. Just a reminder, mostly to myself, that we should never stop putting the best of our time and energies into the things we actually care about the most.
And that last sentence makes me realize how many times I’ve been pointlessly overusing the adverb “actually” lately. And I’m not even sure what the hell an adverb is anymore.
Fuck.
So I looked it up…
Adverb: a word or phrase that modifies or qualifies an adjective, verb, or other adverb or a word group
Fuck!
This means nothing! Globs of dried jizz have more clarity than that definition.
Okay, okay, let it go. Some of the best songwriters on the planet don’t know how to read music. They still kick ass. I can get by without understanding adverbs.
Wait a second, I’m justifying my ignorance again.
Fuck.
Okay, enough. I can improve and I will. I can hone my craft to greatness. I can become the greatest grammar-talkin-guy who ever lived!
Or I can just lighten up a bit.
Cool.
Fuck, I mean, kewl….
