“When the future comes, you’ll know it.”
Or so said the astral bard as he crept into my thoughts, sometimes through music or movies or sappy television commercials, but often just out of nowhere. I watched several futures pass me by. I could have been an animator for a 3D company out of Ohio that turned me down because I had a family. At first I was disgruntled but later realized that they work their people to the bone and if a project goes belly up, so does your paycheck.
I could have been a travelling bardsmith, forging a life out of barefeet westerly walking and scrounging for change to buy ink for my quill, scratching notes on whatever garbage scraps of paper I could find until eventually I would save enough to rent a library computer and finish my big novel.
I missed out on the opportunity to travel the southern hemisphere with a wandering gypsy who would have showed me a world that I wasn’t, at the time, prepared to live in.
When the future comes, it’s often easily dismissed. “No, I couldn’t possibly do that.” Opportunities are presented like mustard and ketchup on paper plates and because they don’t arrive on a sparkling silver platter, a thousand and one excuses come around as to why we should continue eating from our glass dishes rather than take the chance that we might lose out.
I’m going to lose out, or die trying I suppose, but I’m going for the paper plate. I’d rather have the choice between licking mustard or slurping ketchup and seeing what the next course is rather than spinning spaghetti noodles around my fork for the rest of my life, my head in my hands and wondering why I’m still living in Erie and unhappy.
My typical excuses were “Well I can’t leave the boy behind” and “But at the rate I’m going, I can retire pretty young and be set for life” or “Shit, I think I’d rather just get drunk tonight than think about this.”
But now I realize that I don’t have to let anyone behind. And I could give two shits less than a week on the pot about retirement or old age (as illustrated here) and well, getting drunk just doesn’t do the trick for me anymore. I have grown the annoying habit of either not drinking enough to get too pissed to think straight or else drinking so much that I can’t help but think five thoughts at once.
And now I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I do know that I’m first heading to Chicago this weekend, and then from there all across this great nation throughout the summer, until autumn arrives and I do a little dance across the clouds until I fall down somewhere on another continent.