We Deserve Ourselves

"Apparently nobody likes working there but the pay is good."

I wrote that in my last post and didn't find it disturbing enough to recoil like I'm recoiling now. What I said is a pretty stupid thing to consider. Here I am, in one of those wonderful periods of a certain time (now) matched with a certain place (here) when people can make whatever they want of themselves with the least amount of obstruction (early 21st century USA), and all I want is a crappy job that can pay my mortgage and bills? A resound FUCK THAT is in order, it seems.


And I apologize for not realizing that sooner.


I want to be a woodworker. I want to carve beautiful things. I would love to make my own dinner set, table and chairs. I could do that, if I could find the devotion. Now's my chance. The information is in front of us more than any other generation. That's the point. We have an unbelievable amount of free information. How do we use it? Well, I guess that's up to us.


I want to be an author (I'm working on it, I swear). If I could write something that affects someone else like Gabriel Garcia-Marquez (translated, of course) affected me, I would know that I did something great. One year, I bought my bookish family a copy of 100 Years of Solitude for Christmas. Yes, all of them. They've never spoken to me about it since. It makes me worry that I'm not a part of my own family. So be it. If you haven't read the book. Do so, twice, with some time apart.


I want to be a welder. How cool would that be? Not just to mend, but to create. I see the towers of our day and wonder how they could possibly keep standing while the world spins and we all run around inside of them. There is science and art in construction (and why would we every consider them separately?).


I watched a coworker struggle to put together a sample of a certain toy chest we carry. He did it admirably, eventually. "Unscratched and square!" I said in praise. "Yeah," he said, "look at my luck." That's truth.


I want to be a musician (goddammit!). I know the theory to a point, because music (at least in these westren climes) is structured and predictable. These days, music people have the pop music stuff down, totally formulaic. And that's cool. I want to write stuff and sit on a stage at a bar and have everyone ignore me. That's a musician.


I want to do work that is worth doing. The more I think about it, the more I hate gyms. What a fucking waste. Sure, you can run a treadmill, pump deadweights, do classes... Fuck that. Because you could do physical labor for any number of worthy causes. Imagine expending your labor to improve your neighborhood. I know, weird, right?


We deserve ourselves more than anything else.