You can polarize yourself with ambition. If you sit down to write a song …and you put yourself under the kind of pressure that’s like “This has to be amazing out of the gate,” two things will happen: One, it will paralyze you. Two, it’s intrinsically amateurish.
-Johnny Marr.
The Bible must be shaken upside down before it will yield all its secrets. The priests have censored and clipped and mangled: they give us a celibate Jesus born of a virgin without the slightest “stain” of sexual contact, which is blasphemous nonsense.
William Blake (1757-1827)
Going to swim. Going to shower. Going to move my body. Going to take my laptop to a library and write. Going to explore a neighborhood. Going to do my best.
I didn’t get the job I thought would save me. Then I remembered that no job will save you, and that you will have to settle with something that will feed you, and that’s all. And I think that’s such a pessimistic way to live. And I wonder if I have been drained of a lot of hope in the last 4 years.
pent the last hour reviewing the poems written this year so far, and deciding if I want to send them out in publication packets in the fall. I love this kind of work. 🙂
Learning to swallow how anticlimactic it turns out absolutely everything is has got to be the secretely hardest part of growing up.
Learning that anticlimactic is often the better outcome is maybe harder.
-Sara Orb-Weaver (Never Angeline North)
This day feels like it is a lot about failure. Reminders of failures past. Jobs I have lost. Jobs I will continue to lose, If I’m not careful with my big mouth. Failures at being a man. Failures at being perceived as a woman. Failure of body and spirit. Failure failure failure.
There is an ideal world where writing just magically gives me money. But I see the misery of the folks I know who are trying to get by on writing alone. The horrible day jobs. The editorships. The professing that they do but aren’t passionate about. It’s all there.
Not everyone get the be the visiting professor of writing and drinking at Rutgers. Most of us have to have a job, or have to creep our cost of living lower and lower. Remove the pleasures from our life so we can survive.
The thing that makes me a good person often makes me a terrible employee. I have a profound sense of justice. And that sense of justice gets in the way of my ability to bullshit. And bullshit is what employers want. That you are happy. That you have never wanted to do anything else.
Lie lie lie at work. Lie forever. My yes should never be a yes. My no should never be a no. It should all be a thousand coats of maybe.
Don’t share who you are inside. No one wants it. They want you to do the useless thing that they hired you to do. Give you money, and call it a reward. “That’s what the money is!”
There is nothing to staying employed. You give up, and you stay given up. Be the happy prol.
“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.”
— Fred Rogers
Also people who do live meetings loudly in a coffee shop deserve some kind of retribution.
You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.
John Maxwell
