Month: August 2008

So much for skeul

Here are some just-received words of advice from the keyboard of old Ukee friend Markus (now moved on to bigger and better), whose judgment is unimpeachable:

I think I forgot to say, FUCK UNIVERSITY.

Don’t do it. Since commencing a Masters in 2000, I have stopped writing songs and poems. And stopped dancing — which used to be my identity, no shit. People that knew me before then think of me mainly as a dancing fool.

Nuff said. It kills your soul. Fuck that. Now I work for [a government department].

Okay, that about puts paid to that little pipe dream, ’cause i trust Mark’s opinion more than my own. I also must admit to serious subterranean doubts about the ultimate use of more skoolin’, as i’ve mentioned in a previous entry.

This here’s a good spot to post this Life in Hell cartoon, which spoke to me so eloquently some years ago that i went to some trouble to scan it, and then hang onto the file all this time, now to be posted for your edification. (Click to enlarge, duh.)

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Jee-zus Kee-flippin-rist. As i type this entry musing on my own self-worth, the TeeVee next to the computer displays three musical geniuses playing a Haydn piano-violin-cello trio (i dunno which one). They are twelve years old.

And i gives up.

Self-definition

I’m wallowing in a funk of self-definition these days, or rather, a funky lack of self-definition. The principal building block of the self, in my culture, is what you fill in the blank with in the sentence “I am a _____.” And i have little these days, and seemingly less day by day, with which i feel i can fill that blank. At times, the most suitable gloss seems to be: I am a blank. Which can leave me feeling rather empty and useless.

Oh, there’s plenty i want to full the blank with, or feel i ought to fill it with. “Writer” is a big one — t’would be great to pontificate to the masses as one’s job, one’s outre (but still respectable) social function, treading those delicious lines between fame and influence and privacy.

Then there’s “environmental activist,” “entrepreneur,” “Zen adept,” “teacher,” “drummer,” “performance poet,” and more. I have yearnings in all these directions, and ability and potential. What i don’t seem to have is the je ne sais quoi — discipline, maybe, or narrowness — to latch onto one of them and hang on long enough to, with luck, establish a blank-filling reputation, if only in my mind. (But then, my mind is every mind, in that i’m the perfect reflection of my surroundings.) So i pick up one of them for a while, when the spirit moves me; but then the spirit moves on and i’m floundering again.

Strangely, the main flounder factor is not so much aimlessness as being restless with the aimlessness — the feeling that life is zooming by and i’m not engaging with it, in the beer-commercial or adventure-race sense (where every moment is jam packed with whole-hearted FUN or riveting ACTION or even simple, bone-deep HAPPINESS).

Bah. Written down, this puling limns its own “solution.” It’s written down right here in the box, compleat:
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Simple, no?