One of my oldest friends, Chiz, has the same inability I have: to work a job we consider tedious or uncreative, without creating some kind of mischief in order to keep our minds at bay. Perhaps some choose to medicate their beasts, to take the nagging feelings that drive me and shut it out living in a mind filled with picket fences, atomic families and strip malls. Models of mental clarity. Sometimes this idea is attractive to me, a sudden flash and then… contentedness. Then I realize, that everyone I look up to was conflicted by their own mind, and that the struggle pushed them to their destination. Life is a process, and it’s the methodology you use which gives a destination value. At least in my world.
At the other extreme: I work in an *extremely* conservative “boy’s club” environment, so much so that it’s best if I don’t divulge too much… but not only is the rhetoric strong, but those values are transposed to maximize personal advantage. Here, only destinations matter, and even then… there is little personal responsibility.
To come full circle, Chiz used to select phrases at the beginning of each day, sometimes from notes he had made, something he had read or perhaps heard. He would make a list and one at a time forcibly work them into professional conversation. I always thought this was a particularly genius outcropping of a behavior we had engaged in for many years, spontaneously inventing satirical forms of expression, then trying to convince our peers of it’s legitimacy at face value. Slang, clothes, hair, prose, poetry and art all felt the sting of our disingenuous lance.
As I’ve gotten older I now am able to be constructive in inventing ways to artfully approach the mundane, and allow my blog to satisfy my personal vanity and sense of the absurd. But then, you are here too. Lucky you.