Day Blends into Night Blends into Sleep

Ten hours ago, you were in the same chair.

Ten hours ago, you were thinking the same thoughts. Harboring the same ideas, concepts, reasoning, holding yourself accountable for mediocrity and failure. Idleness was never conducive to happiness, hormones or not, but you know you really don't believe that; you've seen yourself with a distanced eye and smiled knowingly at your conquests and medals and name plaques and deeds, winked at your future-self with a taunting smirk that screams, you'll never be as beautiful or fruitful as I am at this very moment; you'll never be this young again or feel what I feel or clasp another with my innocent disdain, my contempt for the aging world.

Then, you were at the top of your game, bar second to none, raising your flags and stabbing the ground with markers and picket fences, carving out your imaginary territory with your empty words and saccharine promises, phrases, actions.

Compassion? Please.

And now your future self, now a present self, soon to be a past self, you're still trapped by that deceitful smirk from your long-past self in his youthful exuberance, his toothy grin, his cocky turn-of-a-step, bobbing down Massachusetts Avenue with an incredulous beat in his head. You're charmed, charmed to memories and longing and nostalgia because you knew you would shape that fictitious world and line it with sweet scents and recollections worthy of a private collection. But for that mental prison, you only have yourself to blame--your confident little self, foolish as ever but oh-so-charismatic, perfect in his execution and immortal in your memory sans wicked executioner's mask.

You think, you're growing old; soon you'll exit your teenage years with the same gusto and vigor you began them with, wholly unaware of your temporal surroundings. You think, what kind of society allows youthfulness as grounds for arrogance? The young are stupid, brash, and confident. They're cocky and inexperienced, discontent and incomplete. They want to burn things and build things and break things and make things; they want to make their mark on the world before they pass on into adulthood and merely settle for what they find.

And you know--past, present, or future--what you hate most is settling. You hate that one-way street with the parking spots on the side; you hate the single-chance walk through a field of roses with the task of choosing one. You hate it, hate it, hate it--at the supermarket there are wide aisles, giving space to undo insolent choices. Two-way streets are a must.

Settle, you fail at life. Your youthful quest should brim with choices of daring fate, challenges against life and love and liberty itself. You need a great struggle, but all you've managed to contest with involves your own life. Your memories. Your great war is inside your head; your depression is your world.

Human lives around you balance surreptitiously on fulcrums of weak choices and decisions because their eyes are blinded by insolence and youth and general incompetence. People, you've realized, are stupid--and you, exactly like nearly every other human being in the western world--believes himself to be above average in intelligence. You meet a stranger on the street, you'd like to think you have at least a fifty-fifty chance of being smarter than him. You'd like to think, save for a few people in the world who are clearly smarter through a gift of genetics or God, you've got the brainy advantage over them.

Surprise! Brains don't matter.

You won't find yourself sooner because you're any smarter than the next guy. And, plus, you're dumber than you think. Really. You, of all people, should know that.

You've had those inexplicable moments when puzzles or problems or issues should have solved themselves in your brain, but you just couldn't pump out the raw power necessary; you couldn't find the energy or the formulas or the thinking pattern to manufacture a solution in due time, and that's probably because you simply aren't as smart as you think. Sure, you have moments of cleverness--nearly everyone does--but how many of those moments of ingenuity are genuine? How many are based on problems you've seen, issues you've already encountered, scenarios you've already tossed around inside your head? Do you consider intelligence based upon experience?

Yet, you believe intelligence is not fixed. You think, someone can grow smarter throughout their life, and you hedge your bets on this fact, or else you'd have long ago wasted yourself away and settled for a life of mediocrity and lottery tickets, hoping one way or another to get your big break, to find your winning numbers, your seminal research paper, your artistic muse.

And you say you want to write.

Look back at yourself, think about your memories and your experiences, and think about what would possibly make you a good writer. You have no talent with words, no clever turns of phrases. Do you tell stories well? Can you tell stories? Can you write without excess words? Sure, no one is born a great writer--but are you on your way to becoming one?

You can probably only wonder how much knowledge is out there, waiting for you to gather it. Or maybe you're still bent upon dwelling on your past and your memories, fresh nostalgia, only recently canned and sealed with a fresh vacuum packer. You want that squalor and misery because, maybe, you feel that no good writers are happy.

Maybe the problem is, you don't have a problem.

Maybe the problem is, you're lying.

Think long and hard enough and you'll realize you aren't happy. You remember, don't you? You remember the fictitious elation, the phantom walks through town and empty promises and words, filled with amusement rather than affection, hope rather than wit. You remember passing through thick fog, yellow smoke and clam-shells while sitting on a warm carpet floor as the evening opened up, bright and promising and just a little bit chilly. Your memories don't deceive you, but your nostalgic side does.

You've spent weeks and weeks at home, waiting for epiphanies that will never come and ideas that will never spring up because your muse is dead, dead as a lone lost sock behind the dryer. Forgotten to you, unknown to your present self, a stranger to inspiration. A stranger to your ideas and your thoughts and your wishes, because you never really know someone.

Face it; you're alone on this. You, alone, against the world, one sentence at a time. So write away; write your clever phrases and analogies and metaphors--write your similies and sentences and dot them with alliteration and anaphora, you'll feel clever. You'll feel witty. You might feel smart, but you'll feel emptier than ever.

You can throw away your ideas. You can focus on the immediate, the present, the now. You can make yourself happy, but that's running away, you know how easy it is. Thinking about being happy is, in all honesty, all it takes to be happy--the hardest part is separating "happy" from "content," because you know you can't do that at all. That's one thing you don't have a talent for, and you know that. So you know that isn't a possibility, though farces and sly smiles are hardly out of the question. You think, and you know the world is your playground. And you've been trying to re-create the same fucking sand castle for much too long.

The hardest part of living is waking up.

The hardest part of waking up?

Getting out of bed.

You want to start your life, your book, your screenplay, your poems; you want to make music with your hands and love with your words and pure pleasure with your pots and pans and sauces. You want so much for the world that you're willing to overlook how it'll be gone soon enough, as will every breathing brother or sister God or genetics has throw at your side. You are willing to overlook that a better life is arbitrary and that entropy exists.

You're willing to never ask the last question.

But, in spite of all that, are you still willing to write?