• Unnecessary exclamation marks in titles and names • Good booze and talkative drunks • Rare steaks and hamburgers • Smoking cigarettes, especially at night • Open mics • The gods and beasts of myths • Bears and bear-like animals • Pitchers of beer • British comedy and novels • Big words and small, complicated words
Will dislikes
• Friends who fall for the wrong type every time • Paying bills • People named Tim • Poor tippers • The game of checkers • Movies starring children • The zone defense • Text messaging • Dollar bills that are too crisp • Dry porkchops
So, I can stop biting my nails until the first. It seems I can't acquire more freedom without more responsibility. It's kind of a crap-shoot, isn't it?
I mean, there's a point at which the only freedom left to obtain is a freedom from responsibility. I'm not saying I'm even near that level, but all the same, it makes the whole thing seem so daunting and futile. The only people with that level of freedom are the retired, the dead, and the homeless.
Totally new topic:
A customer of mine, an older gentleman, responded to my question of how he was doing by telling me he wasn't too bad, but he'd be doing better if he were my age. He wishes he could be my age again and know what he knows now.
And I told him that I wish I knew the things he does. If I had the wisdom of a man three times my age, I feel like I could have a better perspective on what's important in life and how to spend it now. Nothing I can do later will grant me back my youth, and frankly, I can tell that right now I have no idea what I'm doing.
I'm not the type of person to regret. It seems like a waste of time and energy to look back on the old days and wish I could have done things right the first time around. That being said, even with the little wisdom I have I can see better uses of my more youthful days.
But then again, I can't say that if I had spent my time "better," that I would not now be saying the same things about what I did or didn't do. I have enough proud moments of my teenage years to be happy with, and these regrets are passing things that won't be on my mind in the morning.
I promise lavish flattering compliments to anyone who can guess one of my top three accomplishments of my teenage years. You get three guesses and one vulgar flattery per correct entry.
Too often from my peers, I hear talk about "escaping" Memphis, and the shininess of the goal and the futility of trying, and my rebuttals don't really reflect what I feel about it.
"It's not so bad." "I mean, I know this town." "It'll always have a place in my heart."
See, that's the namby-pamby shit I say when the talk comes to "getting out," but this is how I really feel about it:
I love Memphis.
It's as simple as that. I'm not saying I'll never leave, I'm not saying that it's never crossed my mind that life might be better somewhere else, only I am saying that this town is my lover.
I love the dirty, wretched feeling of it all. I love that Memphis townies understand hardship and work and silently sympathize about it all in a way that makes Memphis unique as the biggest small town in the country. I love how such a mean city full of grimy, mean people can be so touching from time to time.
The way Memphians can come together over the stupidest stuff and just be excited about it, just celebrate for whatever reason, get drunk because it's Monday, is really a beautiful thing. At this point in my life, I've basically bar-hopped all across the South, from Dallas to Atlanta to Saint Louis to New Orleans, but I would prefer a Memphis bar to any of those places, because Memphis offers something that none of those do:
HOME.
Maybe it's so simple as that, that no matter where I go, the place where I was born, hit puberty, and attended and dropped out of college is a special place. Memphis is so much a part of me, and I a part of it, that to reject it would be to reject myself.
As much as I hate the thought of being doomed to die the same place I grew up, I know I will leave here someday. Only for me, it won't be an "escape" or a "getting out," it will be a parting of old drinking buddies once the war is fought and the dreams of veterans must be realized separately. We'll have a short, tearless good-bye like men do, and walk away without so much as a look back, because the gravity of it all would make anything but stoicism seem like a cheap parody of feelings.
And every time I uncap a forty, I'll tip the bottle to pour out a little bit for my hometown.
Life is like this: it constantly throws at you things you don't want.
Good or bad, all the things coming at you from random chance are things you don't want.
It is our job as human beings engaged in life to take the things thrown at us and do something with them. Sometimes, it's easy, i.e., when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.
Only, what do you do when life gives you pudding? I mean, you're just sitting here at your computer, trying to make lemonade, and in the midst of juicing lemons and mixing sugar into water, you find a bowl of pudding in your lap.
Do you say, "Screw lemonade, I've got pudding right here!"
Or is it something like, "Man, to Hell with this pudding, I've worked so hard and long on this lemonade, that I'm going to eat it, Goddamnit!"
I don't know what to do. I'm sitting here squeezing the shit out of some lemons, and trying to guess at how many I need to make a refreshing pitcherful to stick in the fridge to cool me off on a warm day, and I've got a bowl of fresh chocolate pudding in my lap that looks delicious.
I did no work to earn this pudding, so it would be less satisfying, but I know it'll taste better than my shitty, ill-planned homemade lemonade. The worst part is that I know for a fact that the two don't go together.
Pudding and lemonade? Gross.
And the really confusing part is that the pudding is literal, but the lemonade is figurative. I have a fantastic prize to whomever figures this out for me.
"I need a man who knows who he is and has a plan," said someone tonight.
I guess self-awareness and direction are big turn-ons for some women. I know that self-awareness is for me, although direction and drive can put me off sometimes. They tend to make people rigid and unable to seize the opportunity in front of them for focus on a goal in the distance.
Pipedreams. Unfocused direction. Eyes on a destination that is not at the end of the road you walk.
I think I just encounter too many who fall into a trap at either extreme. Either they seek to attain a goal that is way below their potential or aim for a goal they'll never achieve, either because they lack the talent or because they just go about it the wrong way.
Sometimes they dream of an outcome that relies too much on chance.
I much prefer to meet people who simply choose a path they enjoy and accept where it leads them. I mean, wiser men than I have said that the journey is the better part of any trip. Why not treat life the same way? Why not live a way you enjoy and let the final destination be an inconsequential consequence?
That's The Sirens of Titans talking. After 6 years, I finally figured it out. Beatrice Rumfoord and Malachi Constant each know their collective destiny, but that knowledge brings them nothing but struggle and unhappiness, since there is nothing either can do to avoid it (a fact which stops neither from trying), and that destiny is such a totally detestable situation to both when they hear it from the mouth of Winston Niles Rumfoord, a semi-time-traveler trapped in a chrono-synclastic infundibulum.
See, knowing where you're headed, even some of the things you'll see along the way, is nothing but a blight of knowledge for a human being trapped in life. The universe treats us how it will, which is inevitably in a very cold, impersonal manner, so it seems like a better plan to go where events take us and try to eke out a little enjoyment along the way.
I leave you with:
A man said to the universe: "Sir, I exist!" "However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me A sense of obligation."
I miss this. I miss the vague sort-of interaction one feels at blogging. Maybe I've just spent too much time in my own head today and I need to get something out into a semi-public venue, but the shame of spending all your 9a.m.s asleep for so long is that you don't know what to do when you see one awake for no good reason.
As in, I don't want to have to explain to any of my daytime friends what the hell I'm doing awake at this hour.
As in, I don't know what the hell normal folks do now besides work.
As in, for once in so long writing in a journal only I'll ever read isn't good enough.
So, I spend an hour and a half in the morning surfing on the internet, and the search for some word I learned one day and forgot about led me to my livejournal to see if I had posted it here sometime in 2005.
I didn't, if anybody reads this and cares.
But so long perusing old stuff I had put down and the things my "friends" (I only use quotations because the roster of my blog's friends doesn't encompass the roster of friends as I know them traditionally) had said about them made me wistful and gave me some realizations.
1) I'm a much better writer now. 2) I was a real ass in those days, but not in the upfront sort of way I'm an ass now, in a shitty passive-aggressive way where I make myself sound smart instead of listening to criticism. I'm sorry to everyone I offended with my old assery. 3) There actually is a positive to this sort of communication. It lets us have meaningful conversations we can't be bothered to make time for.
So yeah, meaningful shit I can't make time to discuss around busy schedules: Walking half an hour to get cigarettes makes the nicotine sweeter. Sleep is overrated. I get frustrated when I can't solve a problem I present myself. I'm depressed that I can't remember song lyrics when I'm walking alone and not listening to the music. ("Piano Man" is a lot shorter without any accompaniment.) Loneliness is my greatest fear.
I need to flex my mind-muscle. Someone provoke me.
(Ha ha. As if anyone is actually reading this.)
Edit: Ossify-- to become bone or harden like bone. "Bridges, Squares" by Ted Leo
