Hmmm. It’s funny how often these little epiphanies hit me. And because I am maybe senile, or I just forget and stop caring, I rarely pen err…I mean type them up. I complain a lot about technology being the bane of human communication, but I definitely do much better writing with a type writer…Or computer, because erasing is much easier than with an old or even newer word processing machine.

I was considering what two people had written lately. And how the tone of their posts seemed ingrained into some kind of melancholy because life had finally settled down into a pattern of sorts. It struck me pretty intensely that people are never really that inspired to be great unless they are immersed in shit. Literal or figurative. Like when I spent a good deal of time in the basement on Wayne St in JC, I kept dreaming of getting the hell out of there. The mold in the walls, the floors that were falling apart, made a perfect recipe for a pretty well imagined and well honed fantasy future life. Get me the hell out of here and I will be famous I promised myself. Get me out of here and give me some sun, I kept telling everyone else. And it has made a world of difference, changed how I see a lot of things to have some sunlight in the morning to hit my face…to have the ability to open my window up and breathe the clean air. Ok, not clean exactly, but better than the cobwebbed wonderland outside my windows in JC, and certainly better than the complete lack of windows on Meeker ave.

Why is it that being miserable is such an intense inspiration, and mediocrity is a boring propagation though? Someone wrote recently about not being able to live an un-dramatic life because it seemed wrong. It takes me back to that whole deserving thing…do you feel that you deserve a happy life? Is an even perceived happy life better than an un-dramatic and raging confusion of a life? I’m confused about this actually, because it feels as if I might suffer from the same affliction. Perhaps it is an affliction of being bored…that needing drama to fuel some energy back in feels natural. But maybe happiness is just a fleeting thing, changing shapes and forms more often than we can keep up with. Do you need to feel stressed and maniacal to want to change things in your life? Do you have to be at the literal end of your sanity to dream of a good life?

I don’t necessarily think that this is a true statement for everyone, but I do believe that this affliction is what is normally referred to as apathy. Does apathy have a way to fuel you smiling through life? Do your dreams of living in a foreign country or up and packing off dependent on being completely miserable before you are able to act?

I think that this might be the problem with becoming, or settling into this idea of adulthood, and might coincide with explaining why America is just sitting on its proverbial butt, doing a lot of nothing to change what should be everything. Have the literal number or assortment of problems gotten so big and so plentiful that living a normal projected simple life is enough to make us all sit on our rears and get old. Is this what broken dreams are made of?

One thing I do know. People who really do succeed in life don’t let themselves get bogged down in forced mediocrity. They don’t reach the plateau of normalcy and just stop. I suspect that they keep going and going and going. Not forever and ever. But up until a point when the apathy is but an afterthought to what is really important.