Some kind of courage

It takes a kind of courage to step into the life you dream of. Really, it takes nothing but courage. The mind thinks of many many different things to be accomplished before you have the life you want, but really, all you need is the courage to take the things you want out of the life you already have. You are there for a reason, your subconscious put you there. Whatever it is you want, you must only focus your conscious mind and sharpen your subconscious to provide you with opportunities.

How to do this? Simple. One defines what it is one wants, and applies a kind of logic to that definition and attempts to distill out as much of the negative emotion as possible until one has a pure, unwavering desire to do something, to accomplish something, to bring something into one's life. One has to eliminate any sort of thinking that prevents the accomplishment of the goal. One needs not do anything at this point, it requires no discipline. The effort of keeping ones mind on that desire is all that is necessary. Most people are so caught up in negative, self-conscious thinking that limits the potential of the mind to become a laser-sharp tool.

But it starts with a clear, concise definition of what one wants. This definition will change over time, it may radically alter as one accomplishes things, and starts to want new things in life. The ultimate goal is to be able to juggle these definitions freely, to be able to put one down wholly and take another one up at a whim. When one wants to do martial arts, his laser-like desire may form a picture of Bruce Lee in his head. But, later, after the workout is over, he puts the picture down and then takes up one of a Zen master perhaps, eating, driving, cleaning, with total attention to one's surroundings and doings, moving into a dashing, gallant rake as one decides to hit the bar later on.

No philosophy, no set of morals, no path is inconsistant with any other. With enough thought, enough focus, enough introspection, one can take any and all paths one desires. One can be a break-dancing cook who draws and paints if one desires. The limit is only the imagination, and one's audacity to buck the trends, to become something different.

Time is not a limiting factor. That is one of the biggest myths pervading the common consciousness. It's one of the biggest obstacles to overcome at first, the mind's tendancy to balk at the gate, to put up insurmountable barriers to entry. This is where a sharp and defined desire is absolutely necessary to pierce the fog created by the conscious mind and negative emotion. The desire must override every other thought process. If you find that you cannot bring yourself to want it enough, then you haven't done enough introspection to determine your true heart's desire.

It's hiding in there somewhere, in your subconscious. The subconscious is vast, far, far deeper and more powerful than the conscious mind. All human limitations can be completely surmounted by the subconscious. It can either be directed, or direct you. The process of introspection is specifically to align your conscious mind with your subconscious. You must sit and ask yourself, for minutes, hours, days, weeks at a time, "What do I want?" It is a very emotional process, and will dredge up old fears, memories, difficulties, and other things your subconscious finds relevant to the situation. Eventually, you'll come to a conclusion. It's not something that needs to be rushed, in fact, this process takes an entire lifetime. The conclusion you come to will be but a temporary solution to your problems.

It will be a wrong conclusion, and it will not advance you terribly well. Don't sweat it. Try to learn as much as possible from your error. These errors are produced by a lack of experience, and the need for a certain synchronicity with the universe. You are giving the universe a shot at setting you up for success. But it takes time. Trust the process, and it may well pay immediate dividends in the form of a fulfilled, if not exactly happy, existance.

Repeat the introspection process again and again. Sooner or later you'll have a crystal clear, unshakable mental image of yourself as you want to be, a whole person who has no hang-ups, difficulties, and is wholly asset-oriented, as opposed to deficit oriented.

At this point, the introspection process starts to lose its return on investment. Diminishing returns means you must start living your dream, instead of thinking about it constantly. Depending on how seriously you take it, it might take as many as six years before you have this picture. But at this point, stop thinking consciously about your life and start living it. Go in the complete opposite direction and start talking to others about what you want to do. Don't ask them for anything. You don't need to. Just start talking about it. Sooner or later you'll start displaying those attributes you were thinking so hard about earlier. A little success will fuel the fire for more and more.

What you are looking for is an attitude, a courage, a decisiveness. When opportunities come around, and they will, daily, you should take as many as possible, without reservation. If you cannot take one or two, or even more, don't sweat it. Just do better next time. This is a skill to learn, just like the introspection is. It may well take years to master as well. But once you have, you will have mastered your mind, and turned it into a tool for powerful growth and change. Then, you can go about your body and your spirit. But the mind should come first. Your mind is where you live at, it makes far more sense to master your mind before you do any other work, because it affects so much of what you do.

Six years is only really if you are looking for the entire world, or you are particularly dense. Sooner or later, your introspective process is going to demand that you start applying it in real life. Then you will be compelled to fail, and fail a lot, a lot sooner than six years. Your mind will be particularly difficult here, because the negative emotion attached to failure can easily cause one to give up, and stop the introspective process. You might stop for months, even years, before your subconscious will beg for it's attention again, and you will be forced to start all over again. This is why it takes so long. Mastering the mind is not an easy or quick process.

But it's the only way to achieve lasting, and impressive growth. It's the only way to do anything. It's the only way to wake up. The subconscious can put a person into a sleep-like fog that lasts the entire life. This is, in fact, the state the world's billions of people default to, with varying bouts of waking sleep that can last for seconds to minutes. One cannot tell that one's entire life is a dream, in some cases, a nightmare, until one has these bouts. Then, with that moment of clarity, one has to make the decision to wake up further, for longer periods of time. The introspective process is designed to bring about these moments more quickly and for longer durations.

God rolls dice

Anybody with a brain can see that God does indeed, roll dice. Each roll of the dice is a person's life. Some get great lives, most get crappy ones. It's funny, but most of those with great lives, somehow get it in their heads that they have crappy ones. And, vice versa, those with crappy lives somehow think they have great ones.

It would be wonderful to think that with hard work and effort, we can improve our station. And, on the surface, that seems true. But, if you look a little deeper, you can see that only a few were selected to succeed. It requires a certain mental state to succeed in life, at least in the way we usually think of the concept of success.

Success requires that a person become greater than ordinary, larger than life. A person must come up with ways to serve the needs of many many people, and on top of that, must learn how to make money from that service. It isn't enough to serve. Marketing that service is key. It's that marketing that makes success such a hard thing.

If we could only serve, everybody would be successful. Nobody would want for food, love, companionship, art, or any of the things people want in life, because they would know, that all they have to do is provide, and people would take with open arms and give them back anything they want.

But no, sadly, entire sciences have sprung up around that basic indifference people have towards each other. The truth is, those that give and give and give, are ignored in our society. Doctors, teachers, police officers, fire fighters, in fact, every civil servant around has been getting the shaft in this country for decades. We do not respect people in these professions.

Now that we cannot respect our docs, we have to deal with the mounting problems that result from way, way too much of a good thing; money.

Everybody wants more and more of it, and it is quickly turning into a winner-take-all, dog-eat-dog marketplace out there.

God has rollen the dice, and he decided that some of the people get great things in life, most of them get to fight over the crumbs that the first group left behind. As powerful an argument for God synchronicity is, just as powerful an argument against Him is the sheer utter randomness and brutality that most of life is.

Perhaps technology will forge a horn-of-plenty we can all feast from. My thinking is, it already has. We well have enough food to feed the entire world, all the art to uplift the spirits of the entire world we could ever need, even a network and the means to distribute it all to everyone. Yet it still follows the same distribution patterns it has for the entire history of the evolution of the human race. A few get it all, some get a little, most get nothing.

More stuff will get us nowhere. And there isn't an easy way out. And if there isn't an easy way out, there probably isn't any way.

Why I can't get laid

Now that I'm not talking about my problems and such with other people, instead choosing to focus on far more interesting stuff, I need an outlet for my personal baggage. One of those problems is my sheer incapability of getting women into bed. I'm not a virgin, but it takes some circumstances with some pretty mountainous odds for me to finally seal the deal with a woman.

Which is odd, because I'm a funny, interesting, good-looking guy. I shouldn't have any problems at all. But problems in the way I think lead to a difficulty with sex that almost reaches disability levels. Here is my chance to talk about them in a way that I can deal with. No human listener can listen to my problems without immediately hopping on my back about what they percieve me to be doing as wrong, mistaking it for something they might have been through before. Explaining to them that, no, this isn't the same as a simple lack of confidence with girls, is enough of a chore to make me just quit and move on to more fruitful pursuits.

I simply cannot buy into the whole dating game. I cannot and will not buy women drinks, dinner, and all that other nonsense that guys think are necessary to win over a woman. But it goes deeper than that. I cannot do anything that will allow a woman the power to reject me. Because if I ever do, sure as shit that rejection will come swift and fast. I have no idea why, but I cannot get lucky with women. I am either very successful, with women acting as if they really have no choice in the matter, or utterly useless, in which all my sexual power and conversational skill is in the hands of the woman I am interacting with.

I am having to learn how to interact with women in ways that don't allow them handles with which they can grasp to gain the power to reject me. I can keep it up for some time, but to do it for any time at all requires that I am pretty strongly attracted to the girl in question.

I have to make it happen, because women aren't just going to fling themselves at me. I'm not Colin Farrell. Not that I wouldn't have sex with a woman I'm not attracted to strongly, I just can never bring myself to even bother with them. It just doesn't seem worth it. I'm not going to run a marathon to get a chocolate bar.

Not that women don't get attracted to me, on the contrary, it happens all the time. I just never fail to screw up turning that attraction into sex. Most of the time I'm stymied at the gate. Women who are attracted to me, I can rarely find anything other than a mild attraction for myself. And that is a deal-breaker for me as far as pursuing her goes. In my, admittedly small, sexual experience, mild attraction just doesn't cut it, not enough to make pursuing her worthwhile.

In the rare case that I can find a good deal of attraction for a woman who is also signalling her attraction to me, very tiny yet hugely significant things often break off any possibility whatsoever of sex. After years of analysis and experience, I can finally say that they are a combination of an ineptness at playing the power games surrounding relationships, and an inability to keep interested in her through my attempts to break through that jungle. Once I lose interest, I tend to sabotage my chances purposefully and break off contact as quickly as possible in order to save time and effort.

So the question is, how do I proceed? There are a few ways. Swearing off women entirely succeeds only in having a particularly determined woman trying to break down the wall to my heart, only to crush it later, sadly, before we ever have sex. Playing the dating game might get me a little pussy, but it isn't really worth it in terms of time and expense, as well as the loss of dignity. My only real recourse is to get so damn good at the power play that women will be wholly unable to resist me. Sadly, it's an all or nothing affair, one that might take years yet before I finally see the fruits of.

I can't wait until I do, though!

It starts with people

And ends with them too. We are all we have. We should probably take care of each other. I just don't think we know how.

One way, is to simply talk to each other. Find out who they are and who they want to be, without passing any judgements or even opinions. I don't think we as a nation can do that, so simply. We have become a nation of meme-salesmen, purchasing and selling tiny little snippets of mental fluff. We either sell our memes, or wall ourselves off from the rest of the world, with portable music players, cell phones, and laptop computers. We can create the illusion of sociableness while remaining utterly alone.

A funny thing happens when you accept a person for who they are, when you find out what makes them tick simply because you asked in a nice way, not because you pressed their buttons. They become your friend, they like you, and want to talk to you more, give you things, and help you out. All it takes is those two little pieces of information, elicited in a tactful, courteous, and non-assuming way.

Of course, not everyone in the world is going to just open up to you willy nilly just because you asked. But a surprising number of them do, and you can learn lifetimes of wisdom with just random muttered "ummhmmm"s and the occasional neutral eliciting question.

It might seem obvious, but when's the last time you ever saw someone do that? Done it yourself? Had it done on you? One should make it a habit, upon first meeting a person. You can talk about yourself later.

There's a lot of neat little psychological effects this simple exercise has. First, it all but forces a person to open up to you, when you have a bland, open face asking relevant questions. If you keep your eyes on a person, they also can get a huge amount of implicit character information about you subconsciously transferred to them, increasing their opinion of you through, often uncannily. Sitting or standing with an open, leaning back posture, naturally induces people to be candid and forward with information they might otherwise hold back, as does an almost disinterested, "we're just making conversation," attitude.

Justification

I think differently from most people.

First off, I have no concept of truth or falsity. I cannot look at a statement and say, "Yeah, that's right," or, "No, that's wrong," unless it's purely for the sake of conversation. Instead, I just think of different ways to look at something. My mind dredges up whole points of view, complete with premises, conclusions, and extrapolations, almost instantaneously. None of this I have any real attachment to. It might seem like I'm holding on to a certain one for dear life, against all and any opposition, in a thick-headed and obstinate manner, but I have good reason to do so whenever I do. That reason is so I can justify any behavior I want to take.

Like ideas, I don't believe in the rightness or wrongness of behavior. Should I want to do something, I want to be able to immediately do it, with no hesitation or worry for the consequences. I try to live by the maxim: "Any problems caused by audacity, can be solved by more audacity." Rarely does my hoped-for audacity ever run me into problems, but I'd much rather have those problems than the ones of not having any at all. It makes life far more fun when you are able to just say and do what's on your mind and damn the consequences.

So, when someone attempts to help me, by trying to get me to talk about my problems, and trying to get me to see them in a way that would lead to a certain method of solving them, I simply lose interest. Talking about my problems never makes it any easier to deal with them, because I'm never interested in doing anything about them. I only want to, and I will only ever want to, explore my unique points of view that my mind seems to dredge up out of nowhere. I could really care less about success, riches, greatness, or any of the things America seems to be obsessing about these days, with the notable exception of sex, and it's pretty hard to push off all of the buzzing little bees trying to tell me what I should be doing with my life.

Nothing really matters in life. Once you die, that's it, the world moves on without you. People mourn, then they find newer, shinier things to obsess over, instead of dusty, smelly, dead you. Maybe you get reborn, maybe you go to heaven, you probably just die. It really doesn't make sense to live life for what happens after you die. As large as the body of evidence is for God and life after death, the logical arguments against any part of you that can think surviving after bodily death thoroughly destroys it. Not that I care one way or the other, I'm just justifying.

So instead of chasing stuff that never seems to matter in the long run, I amuse myself by watching the world around me and by coming up with these little thought structures to encapsulate pieces of the human experience. And trying to build some kind of objective reasoning that can withstand the heat of opposition. Something that isn't justifying and that I can legitimately say, "This is really the way it is." As it is, I can spin something up that sounds pretty good, but it would be nice to be truly correct about stuff, instead of off in some important but very hard to see way.

It would be nice, but I really don't think I could ever be truly objective. Maybe cosmic laws forbid it. I don't think logic can even make room for the idea. Maybe I'll forever be stuck with good enough. But maybe that would even better suit my purposes.

Think about it. Would I really want to be right about everything? Actually, legitimately right? What in the world would that mean? That I can argue better than anyone? That I can predict the future? Omniscience? Would my head explode?

"Good enough," suits my purposes just fine. No pesky logical conundrums. I would easily be able to maneuver my way successfully into or out of anything I care to change, on a personal, intimate level. I can remain nice, small, unassuming me.

I think I need to get this thing down, this attempt at objectivity, otherwise I will be working against myself and self-sabotage any of my wants and desires that go beyond which foot to place in front of me whenever I start walking. More importantly, it will make me so much more accessible and interesting to talk and listen to.

Mediocrity rules!

You don't have to answer to anyone, have no image to maintain, and can basically do anything you want to do, within reason, as long as you're pretty smart about it. Gimme a paid off $70,000 home over a mortgaged $600,000 home any day, even if I were to have 50% equity in the latter. If I had the latter, I'd immediately sell it off and buy a smaller house. Big huge possessions just aren't worth it, unless you can afford to buy two more of them without breaking a sweat.

My generation, the so-called "Me Generation," is fucking killing themselves. I hate it, because I have to live with the consequences of the utter apathy of my ignorant dumb-fuck peers. It's their fault debt is skyrocketing, college is an expensive wasteland, and stupid ads can be seen in front of the pisser at the movie theatre. It's our goddamn fault for putting up with shitty music, shitty movies, shitty television and shitty presidents.

Fuck it all. I'm building an insane asylum to house the rest of the world in. It's the reality I just talked about in my last post. In my house, creative free-thinking rules. Solid walls made of concrete will keep all of the crazy people in their little worlds and out of mine. In my reality, people recognize each other for their strengths and don't even talk about their weaknesses, their problems, or other stupid shit. Not that they don't exist, we just don't talk about them. Instead, we trade tips on shrinking the insane asylum and making more people sane.

People who are sane have no need for the incessant drive for more, more, more. Nor are they fucking stupid and want everything without paying for it. Sane people make smart decisions that are bankable and sustainable. Sane people are mediocre and are proud of it. Sane people have no use for our shitty political system and don't even want to bother talking about it. They simply aren't interested anymore in either shitbag that either shittrain vomits up for rigged election year after year. Let the inmates run their own fucking asylum.

Sane people aren't afraid to call each other on their bullshit. Sane people don't take anything too seriously. They take everything constructively and never bring negativity or drama. They seek out other sane people to befriend, to work for, to help out, to fuck. Sane people take care of themselves and each other, themselves first. Sane people realize that at the end of the day, everybody is out there for themselves, and never throws 'shoulds' onto anyone. Instead, they challenge each other to get more and more selfish. We know that selfishness is a good thing, and we never begrudge a person his due, whether it come by pure luck or hard work.

Sane people treat insane people with aplomb and disinterest, avoiding contact whenever possible in order to avoid contracting the disease. We just don't sweat it, because we know where we are going and how we are going to get there.

Sane people deal with their own problems, and won't admit to having any. We know that discussing problems only exacerbates them, and that talking about a problem is much, much different than solving it. If a sane person needs help, he asks for technique and expertise, with a direct goal in mind. He does not complain, and gets his frustrations out in private through some kind of artistic pursuit.

Sane people live right here, right now, focusing on whatever they happen to be doing in the moment. Sane people do not waste time planning the future or reliving the past, except when alone and in reverie.

Sane people have sex, and have it often, and are not hung up about sexuality. They aren't afraid to seek out new and interesting sexual partners. They understand that sex is about the connection and play. They are not afraid to take to a sexual level any friendship in which exists mutual attraction. They do not take sex too seriously, and aren't afraid to drop the sex from a relationship when the attraction fades, and know that all attractions eventually do, sometimes even after the first time.

Sane people take the long view in that no relationship is worth keeping that is taking a toll on one or both partners, and are not afraid to put distance between them. There are always more people to meet, more people to love, more people to chat with, more people to grow with. No one person is so great that a person has to always be with them, for now and forever. Sane people realize that marriage is a civil contract and little else.

I am always right, you are always wrong.

The Queen's truth, absolutely incontrovertible. Why, might you ask? It's quite simple.

See, in my reality, nothing is right, and nothing is wrong. The entire dichotomy simply doesn't exist. When a person chooses to interact with me, they are interacting with my reality. Since my philosophy is so thorough, so deeply penetrating, so powerful, as an interaction goes on, they are sucked into the deep waves of my own reality. It's like entering a Star Trek holodeck where you cannot control the program, and a person gets tossed around by the nature of my reality. I have no compunctions about overturning decades of sacred cows built up into people's unconsciousness. Instantly a person finds himself put off, attacked, brought down, by the sheer force of my convictions.

But what seems to be my convictions aren't convictions at all, for I am not married to any particular philosophy, idea, or set of ethics. These are things I surf around in, building sand castles with and tearing down at my whim. These sorts of things are the stuff of life, and I paint with them like a child finger-painting. To me, life is the most unserious affair there is, and the freer the mind, the better the person. So, naturally, I try to free the minds around me.

It matters little to me what another person thinks of me. If they do not like what I say, they must only stop interacting with me. It matters little to me. As a modern-day Socrates, I can just talk to anyone around me, playing with their realities at my whim. I have no need of networking, girlfriends, money, success, or any of the things most people concern themselves with. I only want free minds around me.

It is impossible to prove me wrong. I do not say things that can be proven or disproven. They are incisive, cutting things that tear loose centuries of poorly conceived of and destructive modes of being. A person might take issue with me attacking one of his sacred cows, and end up trying to prove me wrong. Quickly that person realizes the talent and resourcefulness of my argument. But the most important reason that it is impossible to prove me wrong is that I am not interested in being right. Other people are interested in being right. I am not. Unavoidably, however, my skill always puts me there. To me it's all a grand play, discussion and dialogue. My appetite and relish for this type of conflict always puts me there.

Who loves to ramble on about useless stuff? I certainly do!

Economics is a funny animal. It is, essentially, the science of getting large numbers of people what it is they desire. Whether it's a job, a sofa, a significant other, drugs, all of these things have their roots in economic science. I am of course using the word science loosely, as a term for anything which uses careful and considered thought as well as experimentation to produce results. On an individual level, economic thought doesn't hold much sway. The same methods used to generate jobs don't translate very well to getting and keeping one job. Ensuring that the institution of marriage survives is not nearly the same as ensuring that your wife doesn't leave you. Life is hell, and we often seek to escape that hell into the sublime notion of reason.

Reason is the idea that people have an ability to simplify life. They use ideas for that purpose. Ideas are so much easier to deal with than situations. Thinking about the things that one can do to increase one's dateability is often easier than going out and asking that cute girl if she wants to sit and have dinner with you sometimes. Reason is the idea that there are "rules" to life and that if you follow them, you will succeed. Everybody seems to think that the rules to life are something that they know, that they can use to their advantage. That if you do 'this', you will receive 'that'. Rarely, if ever, is that the case. Time after time again, I find that the rules that actually apply to life are so neutral and unassuming, that it would be far better to assume that there are no rules to life at all, and to let it all go and just be what you want to be. The 'rules' don't care about you. They don't have anything against you. The only thing that does is ourselves.

It is people that make the rules. It is hard to grasp the significance of that statement. It means that should you decide that the rules simply do not apply to you, they, more often than not, won't. But it is not so easy to throw off the burden of other people's rules. They are ingrained into us from childhood. Your subconscious picks them up, and uses them to form a picture of life. What the subconscious sees and what you see are very different. The conscious is far more cerebral, far more in the moment than the subconscious. The subconscious follows deeply embedded rules that can date way back into your earliest moments. Those rules set our behavior and our responses and our idea structure.

Who you are is a product of what the subconscious presents to you and what you consciously think. A persons entire world is inextricably locked up in that perspective. Everybody is, without question, completely solipsistic. That bears explaining.

As we grow older, and our conscious mind starts to diverge from our subconscious minds, and we gain the ability to choose our actions, a gradual process that begins in adolescence, most people's conscious minds become aligned against our subconscious. Once that happens a number of things occurs. The first is that we become completely and utterly broken. We cannot function, we cannot mate, we cannot even tie our own shoes without having to be told to. A huge gulf is created in our psyches, and we crave other people to fill that gulf. We become needy and utterly useless. To some extent, everything we do is locked up in this rift. It is absolutely inescapable, until we and our subconscious's make peace.

How we see each other is now a culmination of one's subconscious judgements from the past,about people that we've interacted with in the past. The other is doing something that resembles those earlier interactions, and we judge them on the basis of how we saw them in the past. At no point are we ever able to see people for what they are, because the rift in our beings ties us up in subjective, useless 'understandings', drilled into us from the time we were kids and didn't know any better.

I would go so far as to say that should we be able to mark all that we see on a person, figuratively speaking, as a blue haze, all we would see in front of is is a vague, shadowy, formless blue figure in front of us.

What can be done about it? I'm not so sure anything can be. Certainly not at an economic level. This sort of logic doesn't scale. I may be able to bring ten people to believe in it, but those people aren't seeing the philosophy I am trying to export, they are of course, seeing their subconscious reaction to it. The only thing I can do is peer further and further into the nature of the subconcious, and see if I can bring one person, just one person, to comprehend the massiveness of this idea.

I seem to be the only person doing this. Or perhaps many do it, plumb the layers of the unseen, I just never see or read about it. I read lots of things that impact it, that skirt around the edges of the huge gulfs we have in our souls, but nobody I've seen can actually think logically about it. Either they completely avoid it, or wallow uselessly in it.

I don't want to write useless stuff. I want to write something useful. But, when I'm up against this sort of problem, when the entire nature of self is stacked up against you, even doing something simple takes a monumental mental effort. What does it mean to be useful? When the entire self is broken and useless, and I see countless examples of it daily, what can one do?

I can give advice to people all day long, but they will never listen. They can momentarily listen, and I can give them a little power over their world, but ultimately, the rest of the world's as well as their own rules will set into place, and make it impossible to proceed further. I can write like this forever, and nothing will happen. I can make all the money in the world, sleep with all the women in the world, do my damnest best to help people out, and in the end get nowhere near the goal of eradicating that gulf in even one person. In the end, people are going to keep missing the simplest things they can do to radically change their lives for the better.

My way of thinking could never become mainstream. Oh, a certain small portion of it might find resonance with the throngs of broken souls out there. But to actually apply conscious thought and to understand this stuff? I don't think anybody, myself included, can do that.

There's no class of people that 'get it' and don't 'get it'. Nobody gets it. And yet, it's the simplest form of thinking in the world. Listening to the sounds of ones thoughts, one can easily come up with a half dozen strategies for improving one's station in life. Once one gets the meaning of the trick, coming up with life-changing ideas is a simple process. But when we fail to follow through, to put in the effort, to actually do the work of change, we sabotage ourselves and put us right back where we started.

Subtle desires

This sort of stuff is all I can talk about, all I can think about, in different forms, in different conversations. Everything ties into it, the same stories play out over and over again, the same dramas unfold, the same, yet different than everything before. Occasionally, I might have a normal thought, like, "Fuck this stupid traffic," but those are the exception, not the rule. I learned a long time ago not to think in such ways, how counter-productive they are.

Entire modes of thought are completely unavailable to me, gossip, water-cooler chat, chit-chat about material things, emotional blathering, not only do not interest me, but I find myself thoroughly bored with such things. Luckily for me, though, I have ways of driving conversation to modes that interest me, but right now they only work on a single person. Group conversations, I cannot keep up with, because of lack of interest and a hesitancy to control them.

My favored place to have conversations is at a coffee shop, or failing that, a bar. People like to unwind there and talk about interesting stuff other than the crap they have to listen to at work. There, my social methods work out to my advantage, everywhere else, other factors force my silence, except in extraordinary situations.

In times past, I would have forced myself into situations where I'm not good at, to somehow make myself better by eliminating my weaknesses, I know better now. I can't even bring myself to do anything else but have the conversations I want to, to leave situations when I don't want to speak or participate, and to do it in ways that don't piss anybody off unless that is my aim.

In these cases, I've learned to listen to my whims and sudden impulses. They keep my mind free and unfettered. Anger doesn't affect me longer than it takes to change my mode. The only real difficulty I have is the strange inability I have to approach the things I want, I am perfectly capable of avoiding the things I don't. Fortunately for myself, I don't think I need the second ability as much as I have been thinking that I do, I think that as I perfect my ability, the things I want will simply come to me, because there won't be any of the other left to bother me.

A question of desire

I seem to be unable to work for and attack that in my life which I want. I know that all I need to do is cultivate the desire for it, and go with purpose, but I can never get off the ground. However, many people seem to like and enjoy and listen to whatever I say, and tell them to do, as if my words contained some kind of innate wisdom. Wisdom I cannot myself follow, I can tell others to follow, and since they have the desire, they can follow through on what I cannot. Perhaps I am some sort of savant, capable of distilling issues down to their very cores yet incapable of putting it to work for me.

At times I seem masterful and strong-willed and capable, yet I don't seem to have it where it counts, in the willingness to do the drudgery that is required to succeed. All I can do is put in hours, my heart may never be fully in whatever it is I'm doing. Perhaps it is my subconscious that is doing me a favor, by keeping me in a state most amenable to the collection of insights and wisdom, I don't know. I have pushed myself into and out of situations where the only thing that is keeping me there is a desire to do something, anything, but not a true desire to accomplish anything, even when I know it is not only possible, but very probable should I simply want to.

I do not want to pigeonhole myself into anything. I want all the ups of certain things, but I want to avoid the tedious, mind-numbing stuff. I have the temperament that should I get a windfall of financial wealth, I would be able to use it productively and frugally, but I cannot bring myself to accumulate it slowly.

I could advise someone on how to build an empire, should they need someone with direction, vision, and cojones, but that seems to be all I can do. It would perpetually seem like I am doing nothing important. Eventually I would be driven from the company for not aligning myself closely with company goals, messing around, and other nonsense that comes from a desire to never grow up, but as soon as I'm gone, so would the youthful spirit that brought people there in the first place. Eventually, the blessed status that came from my mere presence and influence would fade and the organization in question would revert to a bland boring state, and those in question would be forced to compete on the same level as everyone else.

I've seen it happen, witnessed it happen, many times, with web forums, pagan groups, friends and other groups. At first, people aren't quite sure what to make of me, then gradually learn that I am in it for everyone, in my own way, and the opinions rise. At some point, people grow resentful that I am not subject to their influence, and the opinions lower and I am driven out. In some cases, the group in question doesn't survive long after my departure, in all cases, it just wasn't the same without me.

It will forever be that people will need me more than I need them. It simply doesn't matter to me, I will happily (or unhappily) go from group to group looking for acceptance, knowing how difficult it is for people to recognize my value. I think the first group that acknowledges that will find itself in incredible places under my guidance and it will quickly become apparent how useful and unique my own particular brand of wisdom is.

Anyone looking for new and novel ways to experience life and reach out and grab your greatest dreams would do well to seek me out. It really doesn't matter what you do, or how you think, or who you are. I can work within any paradigm, I have made it my pleasure to look at things from new directions.