I meditate on words, all the same....ommmm....I cannot escape the past and I never live in the future...the present moment leads to the next...that's all...ommmm.
Quote: [of Aldous Huxley:] "You could always tell by his conversation which volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica he's been reading. One day it would be Alps, Andes, and Apennines, and the next it would be the Himalayas and the Hippocratic Oath."
-- Bertrand Russell, Letter to R. W. Clark, July 1965, from the Yale Book of Quotations
Hahaha. Today I look at the world I live in and marvel at the provincialism inherent in my being. I see that others, including Barthelme and Ballard, wrote their fictional best often while wrapped in the cocoon of suburbia, so provincial living is not a crutch upon which to lean my limits.
I'm granting myself some patience here. My blood pressure is up because I am still distraught about giving up the future of running a company and while I'm writing this, I'm converting my pop albums to MP3 that I once bought to impress some forgotten girls (The Moody Blues, Loverboy, Peter Schilling, The Rolling Stones, and Lionel Richie). The time and money we waste on the false sense of romanticism!!! I love my wife but the women I chased until they started telling me all I wanted to talk about was my wife...ironic, isn't it? Pay for dates with other women so they can tell me who I love. That's okay. I can forgive the indiscretions of my youth. It's the boring albums that still clutter my house that make me shake my head. For a person who shuns materialism, I sure am a pack rat. To quote Tracy Daugherty, who paraphrased Henri F. Ellenberger from the piece called "The Psychology of Destiny," published by Donald Barthelme in Forum:
the individual is free to choose from among the traits he has inherited from his family to shape an elected destiny.
In other words, I have elected to accept my pack rat attitude from various family members. No excuses.
As far as my tough business decision goes...sigh... A little background here. A work colleague invited me to his church a few weeks ago for a Friday evening get-together. That evening enlightened me about my strengths, weaknesses, desires and dislikes. As I walked among the churchy engineers and their spouses, watching their behavior -- mainly, their range of comfort in a crowd -- I clearly saw that running a company or being involved in any business at all is not what I want to do in life, despite its attractiveness. As my sister pointed out to me recently, at heart I'm a nonsocial nerd. Thus, I know deep down I will always be uncomfortable in crowds and shouldn't be trying to manage a group of people (I learned that lesson at my last job but sometimes forget about it). Rather than keep being involved in a venture that I'm not interested in and pushing my blood pressure up in the process, I feel it's best to step away now and let those get involved who are comfortable taking the lead. Someone like another work colleague who played sports in college and is successful in sales/marketing, or a prominent local attorney who founded a sports team (in other words, guys who are team players and have been involved in organized sports) tend to do a great job talking up a brand-new product line and running a company better than a typical old nerd like me -- Bill Gates and Steve Jobs being the notable exceptions to typical nerds, of course.
In that, my father and I are different. I remember when he and I were at a sports function one evening and there was a private reception going on. My father felt no qualms insinuating himself into the crowd whereas I understood that we were walking in uninvited. That uninvited attitude of mine is a clear indication that I am not completely a chip off the old block, as the saying goes, and not cut out to hob-nob with business owners and others who feel comfortable mixing with each other as if they belong together. My father has no problem with the instant feeling of belonging to a group. I, however, do not feel as if I belong to any group, and act like a jovial, laughing clown to hide my discomfort. Like Groucho Marx said, I do not want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.
I am not a loner but I am not a joiner, either. I walk my own path where sometimes others walk with me and sometimes I walk alone. I do not need or want others following me because I don't necessarily know where I'm going but sometimes people follow me, anyway, because it seems that some people have the idea that I'm good for entertaining them for a little while.
Such is my life as I approach 47 years on this planet, not having any clue what I'm doing but about to stand up for eleven weeks of four-hour stretches in a classroom and tell kids how to live their lives. God help the poor kids in my classes. If they only had a clue!!! lol Perhaps in my entertainment, they'll find nuggets of wisdom to call their own.
How can the means justify the end if there is no end in mind? Does one seek the mean? Can one find meaning anyway? If there is no meaning, no means, no end, and no bounds for a meaningful mean, then what? Easy answer: laugh at the questions because they are just the smoke and mirrors of words. That which I call a tree looks like a giant stalk of broccoli to a giraffe, a stack of timber to a lumberjack and a house to a bird. In other words, if you find yourself drawn to my writing, don't take anything I say seriously because I'm just playing with the arrangement of words and offer no concrete advice. I am entertaining myself. Nothing more. All else is just a reflection of the cultural norms, ethics, morals and disjointed commercial advertising upon which I was raised. There is not some coherent whole hidden among the reeds that I am slowly revealing to you like a wise sage. But if there is, then let me know 'cause I haven't seen it yet myself. %^D
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