When Is Enough

The difficulty of motivation is obvious to anyone who has bothered to write, or paint, or draw, or work, or invest any part of themselves in an activity or pursuit that is painful, uncomfortable, or plain not easy.

When is enough far enough?  What do I want?  What do I want to accomplish?  What do I need?  What can I disallow myself?  What must I disallow myself?  When I was younger, growing up through early adulthood, I heard so many "no"s.  Everyone and every system telling me what I can not do, where I could not go, who I could not speak to, when I must disappear.  Molded and shaped by the enclosure, dreams fade.  Fade until they're forgotten because it hurt too much to bring it back into consideration every day, every week, every year, to see that not only was I no closer to anything I set out to do to satisfy my soul and mind, but I was further from it than I was the year before.  The mind falling apart.  The costs of keeping it together steadily rising.  People telling you again and again what your ceiling is, not out of a fear of what I could do, but out of a strange compassion for seeing the war fought inside to maintain a level of sanity and "normal" against mental disorders eating away at the fringes of my consciousness.

Can I be content now?  What else do I want?  To be left alone.  There is still a lot of work to do to arrive there.  That may be the only ultimate goal.  To be left alone with the things living inside my head and a few animals to keep me company.  People are out of the question.  They can be trusted, but they are out of the question as quarters draw closer and closer.  There is not enough space now.  That is what I need.  I suppose a bit of both.  Can I be content now?  As long as I can avoid hurting myself too intensely, too viciously, I won't need health insurance.  I will likely only live to 60 or so.  Would it be that far a leap of madness to arrive to that end 15 years early?  No.  Would it be foolish to drag my feet to that end 15, 20, 30 years beyond?  Absolutely.  Don't be absurd.

I can hardly maintain a conscious coherent line of action for 12 hours because I have to lie in bed for 12 hours because I can't sleep for more than two hours at a time before I wake up and need an hour to get back to sleep.  To achieve an eight hour work day, I need four hours to prepare and four to undo the damages, eat, unpack the interactions, bathe, and prepare for sleep.  Every where I look I am losing time in human maintenance that is impossible to make up elsewhere inside the sweep of the clock.  Until I melt down, lose control, and fall apart in a heap of wails, tears, and broken tissue, begging for an end to the insanity of trying to fit myself into these chains of events for money.

How long do you keep smashing your own extremities with a peen hammer before you wake up and decide this is as far as I am willing to go and I am going to learn to live in this tiny cage and make it work because I know I or some around me will die if I try to reach any further.  Life is long.  Many people can race along it's rivers.  I am not one of those people.  I've got no use for your money.  I wish I had no use for your money, is more accurate.  I suppose that is where I am heading.  Retirement is another name for being left alone to leave life in peace and enough isolation to prevent anyone around you from being hurt and to be able to let myself live among the shadows in my head openly and happily with everything I need to survive until my body fails.  Retirement is a pipe dream.  I'll find another way.

When is enough?  When I have my own paid off house in the middle of a thickly wooded wilderness or some cottage at the end of a one lane drive to the vanishing point of a horizon plain?  When I've found a place in the world where I can not be found?  A place to hide and mend and dance with my broken brain and that's all I have to do to continue to see sun's rise?  I don't want to think about it now.  Enough is not yet.  I have to keep chugging along down the damned river, occasionally stopping to fish, at a blisteringly fast (to me) half knot and continue to hope and strive for the best and make due with repairs whenever its engine sputters and dies and hope I don't run out of supplies or the some day passerby who toss me a pipe, wrench, or a handful of wire harness to keep it going until I reach my tributary to one side or the other to glide down and stake claim to a bit of land no one will find for ages after I'm gone.

Who knows when enough is.  I do know I am not close yet and as much as I want now to be that place, it is not.  Wrestling with motivation won't get you killed.  Picking up the hammer eventually will.




///Jon Hopkins - "Candles"

Seventy One, Count Down to Twenty Seven

Ten days until the clock ticks over. I don't expect anything fantastic. It will be nice to be one again. I don't like being old. It takes too much energy, too much reflection, even the effort to look forward. A time consuming affair, the growing old. The metering. The constant gauging if older is keeping pace with wiser and if wiser is keeping pace with double faults and if ... how many times did I almost die this past iteration?

Let me see if I can recall. Not going into detail, but trying to recall. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Hmmm. Eight. The ninth time is a stretch so I won't count it. It was just before the tenth time, but even that one was more of a panic than a definite thing. So we'll leave it at eight. I believe I did say at one point that if you're not nearly dying more than ten times a year, you're not living hard enough. At the same time, though, that was a much more reckless me. Not careless. There's a difference. Intent is plastic explosive.

Not that I am that much more reckless then. Maybe, more unconscious. I do have some things to take care of in this body before I go skipping off in my next one. The seventy first birthday step. I definitely miscalculated how many birthdays I could pack into one year. Seventy one sounds about right. Well, seventy three, come day zero. Nothing like a midlife crisis at your twenty sixth iteration. Mostly I suppose I am trying to work out a way to celebrate my last iteration in tandem with my last birthday, so it'll take some fine tuning. Some years of fine tuning.

I think this year I'll go for eight day spacing. See how that turns out. I can't remember what happened on my last birthday so I assume nothing. Checking... no results found. Nothing is right. This iteration I want, I want to be a real trip. A real jumping off point to wake face up in a river with nothing but stars, beloved. It's going to be great. It might be my delusions of grandeur. My all knowing, all loving, stupidity with no regard for real or reasonable conclusions. Maybe I'll go get my ears pierced or something. There must be something to mark the occasion this time. Maybe a 27 shot poem. I was thinking about a 54 post facebook status. Maybe both. Because I know no one is taking me out.uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuum, <<< thats what my kitten typed. His mark for posterity. I'm not going to die. Because I have a kitten to take care of now until he is at least a cat. So that's good timing. No space for oopsies for a while. So I'm kind of forced to commit to another year. Happily so. Apparently kittens don't like less than 55 degree weather. The little bastard keeps shivering. I can see my breath. Which means I should probably get to bed soon. But anyway, where am I going with all of this? It's been a long time since I had reason to be excited about a new iteration. A lot has changed. A lot has stayed the same. I'm going to continue to reflect on it as the days tick down. Hopefully with more clarity than I am mustering now. Trying hard not to muss new year resolutions and birthday wishes. Trying to aim low and let the reciprocating action of my mental Kalashnikov land me a headshot this time around. Don't force it. Be the leaf. Be the leaf in the wind, and for eulogy's sake don't die before dawn. In terms of goals though, gotta set goals, I have a few for the upcoming set of birthdays. Finish the crappy book I started to write. Make the mistakes I don't need to make when writing the second book. Get laid by people I can remotely care about. Embrace the dark side, and by dark side I mean myself. Consider flaunting it. Take more pictures of myself and distribute accordingly. And take a fantastic drug trip on something, anything, without dying halfway through. And finish the tricky dream hunt. Because that kind of big game hunting blows back and backfires way too easily. Not huge goals. Just real ones. We'll see what happens. ///El-P - "The Dance (Instrumental) ...one more year at the never ending prom