This time it was Coldplay. Sorry.
Dunno what the hell key I sang that in. The Key of Me, I guess.
But that’s what came out when I started to sing the song, and I just kind of went with it because I was managing to get an okay tone and I knew that I sure as fuck couldn’t sing in the original singer’s testicular torsion range so what the hell.
So it ended up kind of weird sounding. Call it a “personal interpretation”.
I’m not happy with the video, though. I feel like I should either commit to just having a still image for the whole thing or put the effort into putting the lyrics on screen so that people have something to look at.
I chose that sunset picture today because I thought it gave the whole thing a “karaoke feel”. Like I’m right there in the bar with you!
The stuff I put on screen for the instrumental break is pretty much me in full on Jesus mode. My big warm gooey heart on full display, which is rare for me.
But I really like that side of me. In a way I wish I could be that way all the time. Just go around being sweetness and lightness and love all the time and inspiring others to let go of their anger and their hate and join me in the clean green meadows of love.
I would have made such an amazing hippie.
But of course, there’s a lot more sides of me than that, and I am still hard at work trying to come up with a single sense of self that includes all of them.
I mean, sure, I can go around saying, “I am not my facets, I’m the gem” and that’s certainly true. It’s all me, as complicated as that can be.
Maybe I am just too bizarre a creation for a singular sense of self to be possible. I get the feeling that developing one of those means cutting off a lot of yourself that does not fit and I am just plain not willing to do that.
I am too firmly committed to indecision for that.
Plus I have always been very definitely myself. To a fault, really. If I had been more willing to bend in order to learn to fit in, I might have actually gotten the fuck over myself and made some god damned friends and had a peer group.
But it feels like that was never really in the cards for me. I was just too weird a kid from the get-go. Maybe kindergarten would have taught me the social lessons I needed so badly but that was not in the cards for me either.
I was destined to be weird little critter, I guess. One of a kind.
But at least I have superpowers. That helps. I might be weirder than a snake’s luggage but I am also incredibly intelligent, powerfully creative, supernaturally articulate, glowingly charismatic. and humble.
By all normal measures, I should be able to harness my extraordinary abilities to walk astride this little world of ours like a giant, or at least make a life for myself.
Billions of people would sacrifice major organs to have what I have, etc.
But for some reason I just can’t do that. I could call it indecision and I could call it lack of will and I could call it having a very underdeveloped id, but whatever it is, it keeps me from being able to leave my grotty grotto and find my place in the world.
I’m too scared. Scared of doing the wrong thing and getting hurt, perhaps. Scared of ended up overstimulated and confused and scared and lost. Scared of having to cope on my own and be my own person and develop my own ways to cope.
Scared of being out there, being seen, having to deal with that big bad world.
Everything about that scares the shit out of me.
But as God as my witness, I will overcome that. I will rise. I will escape.
And this phase of my life will finally be over.
More after the break.
What makes you happy
Mulling over our strange relationship with happiness again.
Ask people if they want to be happy and they will, of course, say yes.
And most people have at least some notion of what will make them happy.
And yet, we don’t do those things. It almost seems like we avoid them. Why?
Is there something about modern society that makes us demand new sources of happiness all the time? Because the ones we already know about are… boring?
I feel like on some level, society makes us ever-hungry little piggies eternally worried that if we stop and appreciate what we have we might miss out on stuffing our greedy little mouths to the absolutely maximum amount.
You fool, in the time it took you to stop and smell that rose, you could have stuffed your gullet with TEN MORE TONS OF FOOD!
That’s why one of the most radical and liberating things we can do is settle for less.
To say, “I have enough, thank you. I know that I could get and/or have and/or achieve more but I am perfectly content with what I have and don’t need any more. ”
Odds are, just reading that made you uncomfortable. I know typing it did it for me. It is such a radical heresy that even an outré weirdo like me feels weird about it, and I am the person who came up with it.
But why? Why do we have this universal assumption of full on feckless greed that states that, of course we are all constantly trying to get as much as we can all the time?
Looked at objectively, I find it very spiritually depressing. Not that I am claiming to be immune. I’m a greedy little piggy like everyone else.
We’re simply not allowed to say “enough”. There’s no such thing as enough. Because if there was, then at some point you might stop getting as much and that’s unthinkable.
The very idea of “enough” is unthinkable, as in we can’t even imagine having enough except in a detached, abstract sense.
Sure, we can imagine a nice little lifestyle for ourselves and say to ourselves, “Yeah, I guess that would be enough. ”
But never ever could be imagine turning down more.
That would be absolutely beyond the pale. The sort of thing that leads not to outrage but blank incomprehension. Most people don’t even know that’s a thing you could do.
Before long, people will invent reasons it’s somehow wrong. But the real reason will be that you’re making people uncomfortable and they want to punish you and make you start acting normal again.
All because you dared to have enough.
Makes you think, doesn’t it?
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow. .