Earlier today I was remembering something my dad said to me when I wanted to quit a job to go off and do something else but was afraid my employer wouldn't be able to get on without me if I quit. He told me, "don't ever let anyone make you think you are irreplaceable."
That wasn't an exact quote, and it wasn't meant to be rude, and was, in fact, quite encouraging in its way. What he meant to say was that I should pursue my own dreams and not to worry about what might happen to the people I left behind when I went. They will always find a way to get through life without me there.
Sometimes I really wonder about what I am doing with my life. I've sort of lived with that philosophy my father dropped on me so casually. I tend to just go my own way and not to worry so much how people are getting by without me. The problem with walking your own path is that there aren't always a lot of other people around that are going the same way. It's like a highway at night. There are a lot of cars on the road still, but the closest one is just a speck of red tail light way off in the distance. And for all you know they are driving the wrong way.
The last few years have left me feeling rather lost. Perhaps I am realizing just how replaceable I am. I plow through life without a care as to what I am really doing. Then I just sort of end up doing something else for a while. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to it. My theory on how to live life has often been along the lines of "do whatever you are doing until there is something else to do."
My favorite thing to do is to quit something that I don't like doing anymore. It makes me feel powerful, in control. Then there is the inevitable crash, as there is with all addictions. This is my problem, though, everyone seems to be telling me that life is all about doing shit that you don't really want to do. If that is the game of life then I am not sure I am ready to play.
I am trying to adjust. Trying to play like everyone else. I guess I've sort of been cheating most of my way through. But something that makes me endlessly happy is to sit down and write something with a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other. And you may wonder how I write like that. The secret is to set one of them down for a few minutes at a time. Right now I am drinking a bottle of diet coke, but it could just as easily be a coffee or a whiskey. I don't think it really matters, so long as I still feel like doing it.
For a long time at night I would imagine myself falling. Falling from an unknowable height to a ground that never got any closer. I would just fall, and it would relax me and let me fall asleep. These days when I want to go to sleep I plot out ridiculous zombie movies in my head. To be fair, though, I've pretty much always fallen asleep to the thought of a ridiculous story. Even when I imagine myself falling I am wondering how I managed to fall out of an aircraft so far off the ground that I will never land. Wonder how it is that all the laws of nature and gravity and physics have broken down to a point where I won't, eventually, hit the ground. But I keep falling. Perhaps that is all I'm really good at. Despite what is going on in my head I feel like I am always falling. Always starting from a point so high up that I'm not sure how I got there and falling but never hitting the ground. I'm sure that if a psychologist read this paragraph they would walk away with a certain idea about what all that falling must mean. But I like the falling. It's the landing the sucks.
My brain is all out of whack today. I'm having all these weird connections being made that I don't mean to make. It's like the neurons are firing an artillery barrage at my memories and the few that make it past the front line are standing around wondering what happened to the rest of their unit.
Sometimes I think that I dream about being a writer not because I want to write amazing pieces of literature but because I like to sit in front of a computer typing while I smoke and think. I like the way that I dress when I am at home doing nothing but writing, I like the idea of only occasionally having to deal with people in suits. I think, in a way, that dream sort of sickens me. Is that all I want to do with my life? Essentially what I am doing now, only getting paid occasionally for it? While other people drag their asses out of bed before dawn and get ready and go to work for a big company, where, if they are very lucky, they will get to be boss of someday and tell other people who have to get up before dawn what to do all day? While other people toil away running a small business with the hopes that one day it will be a big business and instead of getting to be in the store all day working with the customers they've come to think of as an extended family over the years they get to sit in an office going over quarterly reports? And while others are fighting fires, catching robbers, and saving lives? They all put so much into society and here I am jealously wanting to sit around and type up a few words and try to get paid for it. Perhaps if that was just what I was doing I wouldn't think much of it, it's just the way it is, afterall, but to actually aspire to that? But I can't hack it anywhere else. I suppose that is just the way it is. Life is all about some people doing the heavy lifting, some people sitting around being rich, and other people doing shit that doesn't make sense to anyone but themselves and expecting other people to want to see what they are creating. Maybe it isn't fair. But why should I spend years of my life trying to work my way up to something I don't think I'm cut out to be?
Right now this probably just sounds like general complaining. That I am lamenting my lot in life. I'm not, I'm lamenting the way my brain works. When I have time to sit around writing all day I don't bother to do anything with it. When I start to run out of time all of a sudden it becomes more and more important till my head wants to explode. I blame this on the fact that when you have nothing to get up for in the morning you sort of lose faith in everything. I've spent a singular week at this new job and I am already starting to rethink everything. It was only a couple days ago when I couldn't tell which path I would eventually want to go down. The thing is that I know which path I'm more comfortable with.
People always say, in addition to life being about doing a bunch of shit that you don't want to do, that you create your best work when you are hungry. When it just doesn't seem to matter anymore that creative spark seems to go away. My mistake often times has been thinking that that meant that you had to be desperate because you had no money otherwise. That you had nothing else to do and no other options. What I am beginning to see is that the times you are most hungry aren't when you are pinching pennies necessarily, but when you feel stuck in something. When you are doing something that you just weren't cut out to do. Eventually the only way out is to follow the only path that you really care about following. To follow those tail lights in the distance and pray to christ that they know where the hell they are going, and to always, always remember how replaceable you are.
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