Okay, time to face reality : I was a hard kids to get along with.

Especially for adults. This is a hard truth for me to face because I think of myself as an affable, relaxed, user friendly kind of person who is eager to please and cooperative and easy to be around.

And the thing is, I am and have always been all those things. Up to a point, at least. But I was also a lot of other things that made it hard to deal with me.

Things such as :

1. Being the smartest guy in the room. That’s one thing when you are an adult but quite another when you are in elementary school. The truth was that I was smarter than my teachers and could think rings around them. They had no intellectual edge over me. This is one of the main reasons that….
2. I did not respect adult authority. Nor did I fear it. Adults were just people to me. People I unconsciously treated as equals, which is pretty weird for a kid. I had no sense that adults were wiser and smarter than me and that therefore I should do what they say because they had my best interests at heart. There was also the undeniable fact that…
3. I was undisciplined. Literally. As in, my parents rarely disciplined me. And neither of them were the type of people to provide a lot of structure and discipline for their kids, especially when you are an unplanned fourth kid and they are already tired and stressed from dealing with the other three. Before I went to school, I had no experience of discipline as other kids knew it. So I had never had to learn to just do what I was told. Combine that with the fact that…
4. I am extremely stubborn and willful. I have a very powerful need to be autonomous and I do not respond well to force. Try to force me to do something and it will not go well for you. So that avenue of control over me was not available to adult either. Plus :
5. I was a smartass. Blame it on being the fourth of four. Blame it on being raised by sitcoms. Or blame it on being a smug little prick. But the truth is that I did not take adults seriously And they could tell. Even when I was being good and doing my best to cooperate and do what was asked of me, which was most of the time, I still had a smartass attitude towards life. That meant :
6. I didn’t take school seriously either. I did my school work with contemptuous and sardonic ease because it was all so easy for me. At the time, it would never have occurred to me that by doing so, I was in a sense insulting the teacher and the school system. And finally,
7. I hated being talked to like a child. Even though I was one at the time.

I say all this not to diss myself but to modify my internal narrative of innocent victimhood to include more of the real picture. Yes, I was just a child and as such it was the adults in my life to figure out how to deal with me, and all that.

But it’s also true that I was a weird, fucked up, hyper intelligent kid unlike any they had ever had to deal with before, and so I have to forgive them for not being up to the task.

Truth is, I was pretty hard to deal with. So much so, in fact, that it would have taken a very special kind of person to reach me.

And those are in very short supply.

More after the break.

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This is not enough

I am finally willing to say it : this blogging I do every day is not enough of a creative outlet for me any more.

There. I said it. And I am not taking it back.

I need more. I need something that can contain more of my creative drive and deep need to express myself than these thousand words a day.

The more of my creative energies I can express, the happier a person I will be. I know this. I know it because way way back when I did my crazy ass million words a day project, I experienced periods when I felt pretty good. Not depressed at all.

You’d think that would have been all the proof I needed to justify continuing to do it, but it is, of course, not that simple.

So I have to up my game, and the only way I can think of to do so is to move to a richer form of media. Like a podcast. Or videos. Something.

And here’s the thing. The world needs me.

I know that sounds like a massive brag but I assure you, I have not succumbed to delusions of grandeur. Yet.

I’m waiting for some real world success first.

Seriously, though, I think I can really contribute to the world and that the world needs someone like me who can articulate what people are feeling and who has the clarity of thought to be able to come up with real solutions to the world’s problems and the visionary insight to see what needs to be done no matter how radical or unusual those solutions might seem.

And if I can’t do that, I can at least make people laugh, and that’s good too.

So consider this my official announcement : I am going to get something more than this here blog going. Video. Audio. Interpretive dance. Nude skydiving. Something.

I have all this intellect, talent, insight, analysis, and wit just sitting around gathering dust in the warehouse of my mind. It’s high time I put it to some use.

I just have to get over being scared of how big I might become.

So something is coming soonishly. Don’t know what it will be.

But it will be something more.

Because this shit just ain’t cutting it any more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.