Maybe its just that time of year
Aight, a few disclaimers…
- Yes, I think too much. Yes, I’m over analyzing with everything i say in this post.
- No, I’m not depressed. See point 1.
- Watching movies, getting phone calls from old friends you haven’t spoken with in a long time (who introduced you to the aforementioned movie), doing your boring part time job and drinking amazing Port is a sure way to ensure that point 1 happens.
- Working crazy overtime in your real job is yet another way to push myself over the edge and return to point 1.
- Did I mention point 1 yet? Oh, ok. Good.
For some reason, I’ve noticed over the years a tendency for me to be drawn to movies that contain two items: a main character(s) who have absolutely no idea why life is as it is and secondly, filthy adult humor. I’m not sure exactly how the two of these relate, but looking over the rows of DVDs in front of me, the them just can’t be missed. Clerks. Clerks II. Fletch. Fletch 2. Old School. Hot Fuzz. Van Wilder. Austin Powers. Pretty much all of Kevin Smith’s catalog, actually. I could go on, but I feel you have a pretty good understanding of this by now.
So why did all of this hit me so much tonight? No, before you ask, it wasn’t the alcohol. Its a work night… and that right there starts all the problems. I’ve never been a person who drinks large quantities of alcohol. Yes, there have been those few incidents, such as Einstein’s Hair and Porcelain Cuddle Buddy not to mention Semi-hot NYC Chick at the Beach, that my friends refuse to ever let me live down, but those situations have been remarkably rare.
I’m not saying that I want more of those, but part of me wonders about those people who do have those memories. Am I really missing something there? Did I totally skip over some part of my second childhood, as I refer to the decade of my 20s? Its not that I like being drunk, it sucks rather thoroughly although it was better than the alternative in two of the three situations listed, but did I really do it right?
My movie choice for the evening starts out with what looks like an amazing party with some pretty interesting people. You then find out they are all coworkers as they drag their miserably hung-over, yet still smiling faces, into work the following afternoon. I realized that is an experience I’ve never actually had. Yeah, I’ve been tipsy on a work night, but never out of my mind hammered. It just seems odd to see people that happy with their evening despite their heads pounding. What’s that like?
I am going a bit far afield, with all the alcohol discussion, so lets pull this back to the next part of where my thoughts went… the main character. As in most of the movies I listed, you’ve got a person who is at a point in their life where a change is just absolutely necessary. It isn’t necessarily situational or relational, but it can be just changing your mental attitude about where you are in life.
The problem is, I really can’t remember a point in my life where I this attitude did not pervade my thoughts and ruminations. I feel as if I have been constantly stuck wondering what I’m doing and why. Read my past blogs and you’ll see this to be true. When I choose to, I can be one morose individual.
No matter how good things are in my life, there’s always a part of me that just can’t be happy or even joyful with what I have and what I’m doing.
I don’t know a way out of this. I don’t believe that I’m really alone in this, but I do think I am probably more acutely aware of this than the average human. Part of that is because I remove most traditional forms of entertainment from my life. I don’t watch TV (movies don’t count, because even though I have many of them, I rarely just turn one on and watch it; they’re more like background noise). I don’t read magazines. I do quite a bit of web surfing, but even that in recent years has decreased as I can find fewer and fewer things worth viewing. To say that there is a great deal of time for silence and reflection in my life would be a great understatement.
Its fall. Finally. Summer lingered far to long. Fall will probably be given amiss and we’ll go straight on into a cold winter. Come January I’ll have been in my new job a year. That’s only 3 months away and will come all too soon. What will I have to show for my life in that time? I can only realistically say, probably nothing. That’s not doom and gloom, just a good bet, based on historical reference.
So why don’t I do something about it? Why don’t I just get off my duff and go do something about it? Great question, glad you asked.
My response is quite simple… what? No matter how much I wrack my brain, I just can’t figure out… what. If I were to do something radically different with my life, I have no idea exactly what it would be. I’ve had many chances and I know that anything I wanted to do, I could. That’s just my personality. If I put my mind to something, it happens (within logical reasons, of course). My problem I have is… what?
In Dogma, a Muse gives up her role as an ethereal inspirer to come to Earth and create. She had inspired 9 of the top 10 highest grossing films of all time, yet she ended up working as an exotic dancer because… she had writer’s block. Its exactly how I feel, minus the fact that Muse had a clue about what she really wanted out of her life. Not saying I’m gonna go rip off my clothing for a living, especially given that my man-boobs wouldn’t allow me to feed myself. :)
So, its getting late, and so I guess I’ll go get ready for bed so I can return to my job and spend another day doing something that isn’t whatever it is I really want to be doing.
Additional content:
I had an hour or so to think a bit more and want to clarify a few things about this post…
What it comes down to is that the last few years of my life have been rather boring, when compared to the number of adventures that happened during my mid-20s. Its as if all the absurdity has leached away into someone else’s life and while I am left with a wonderful life, it is a life that is tame compared to the one I lived only a few years ago. Its as if what passion was there in those years has diminished.
I have big adventures now: St. Lucia, Mammoth Cave, California, Connecticut, Atlanta. A few years ago, I had a year and a half long adventure through the country of France. But its the little adventures for which I really long. Those little weekend or evening gatherings of friends, thrown together at the last minute, which just brought so much to my life. Now, schedules are more hectic and more things exist to take up time, pushing out those moments in life that were so cherished.
Part of me wants to just blame this all on my friends for going off, getting married and for popping out kids. Maybe they have put aside their selfishness and are now spending all their time investing in just a couple people. I still can’t help but feel my life be diminished by how little I now see those people who just a few years ago were so often seen in my company.
Its not that the past is something for which I have an insatiable craving. I liked those years, but I want more of them, not to just return and relive them all again. I guess that the thing I just really don’t understand is why I seem to be the only one who remains restless for those more random and wild times. I hear my friends complain about their lives and how busy they are, but they only continually add things which drive them away from the things they claim they really wish they could be doing.
Are they deluding themselves into thinking they want something they really don’t? Their actions, and mine, too, just don’t match up to our words. Is the fear of losing what we have, which is all we have left when compared to what we used to have, so great that we hole up and hunker down, throwing up barricades that not only secure what we have but also shield us from knowing once again what it was like to be relatively carefree?