An Argument for the Differently-Thinking

I prefer to spend my time imagining possibilities (daydreaming), watching and sharing in my nephew’s growth and development (playing with children), indulging my need for culture (goofing off), discussing possibilities and growth and culture with others (goofing off), and then writing about all of it at the end of the day (goofing off), when other minds are sleeping off the number-crunching and customer-pleasing and profit-mongering of theirs (using various substances to keep them hard asleep so they don’t have those freaky dreams that keep them awake and make them think about the decisions they’ve made all day and whether or not they make any real difference).

Apparently, this makes me one of two things: Batshit crazy or “High as a kite.”

Those are the choices offered. I have finally been feeling like myself again. More like myself than I have felt in a long time. And the best part is, I’m feeling like an even better self each damn day. I kinda like it. It makes me want to do stuff. Gives me confidence that I can do stuff and do it without screwing it up. And it makes me want to write. And I write. And I keep writing. And I don’t think I would ever stop writing if I could ever figure out how to stop letting them get to me, but I do and I start to give in just a little bit and feel guilty (GUILTY! Ha!) about spending time “writing my little stories” when I should be out there earning money and making the lives of everyone around me more comfortable.

Then I start to resent having to pretend being one of you and I slowly give up on the writing and turn my attentions toward giving you everything you think you want even though I can see how it’s going to end for you, for both of us, for all of us, because I know in the end that you wouldn’t listen to me if I told you the truth anyway and it’s just easier to get along by not disturbing the pack.

It never works.

I end up back here each time.

Maybe, just fucking maybe, the reason we are lagging in development and design is because we’ve medicated away all the creativity. Differently thinking. I am not mentally ill. Fuck you. Fuck you all. I just think differently. And guess what, you assholes, you bloody motherfucking assholes, I know and trust what I think is right and I have sifted the monuments and remains of thousands of years of thinking before mine to back me up. But even more importantly, I have sifted the remains of thirty some years of my own thinking and am working hard to shed the ways that keep me back. 

I am not part of your pack. Stop trying to make me run along and hunt with you. I'm not even a damned predator.

I keep forgetting to title these things

Just had the most insightful, rational, educated discussion I have had in weeks. It was with my eighteen year old son who convinced me with my own words to let him skip the remaining years of high-school (or "box-filling" as he says) in order to start his own already successful software company. That's right, bitches. Your boy was prom king. Mine is his own CEO.

Okay, totally uncalled for. But still, suck it!

I'm sure that, when he and his father and I made the decision a couple years ago, there were certain people who were highly critical of that decision. This is the only way it's done. Your fifteen year old honor student doesn't drop out of high school with no plans to return and no (real) plans for a GED. Responsible parents don't let that happen!


That was a thought communicated to me throughout the kid's childhood. Sometimes people told me. My mother still lectures me about him not having a GED, even though he already has a successful LLC, and pending contract with a very large company. Sometimes people said nothing, but I could see it in their expression. The years I lived in Richmond on my own - the first year when I let him stay behind with his dad for a year, or when I had to bring him back because I had to bring myself back first, even the extra year that I was too poor, oppressed under the weight of debt, to pay for his move back with me.

 I still remember one particularly skeevy grad student who put his hand on mine (which was on my knee), squeezed, and tried to comfort me through my obviously difficult time with a Mormon prayer.

I don't know if that's a real thing. But he was Mormon. And he did offer to pray for me.

We go through so much of our lives assuming there's only one way or there's a natural way that we just don't know how to  respond sometimes when people behave otherwise. You are a mother, the skeevy Mormon seemed to be saying, You should be with your child. 


I won't pick on that guy. Or Mormons. I like them. As much as I like any religious group.

Seriously side tracked. It's late.

I got it a lot with the kid. The questioning. The assumption that what someone else knew was best. So I decided to be the one who knew best. Or at least as well as any of us knows anything. I dedicated myself to learning as much about the universe from the inside out as I could, in hopes that I could one day share my knowledge with him. I tried a little writing on the side too, but . . .

The rat bastard was already reading at a college level in sixth grade.

This is too rambling. Too long. Too disjointed. But I wanted to write a little about my son, who I think is just  one of the coolest dudes I know. After all, how many eighteen-year-olds' Friday night discussion topics included Qaddafi, the Hegelian Dialectic, his own corporation's success, and Sisyphus?

Wasted time, wasted chances

I have spent far too much of my limited time in this existence trying not to become him. I should have just focused on becoming myself. Being myself. Because I am better than him. I know how to control it. And when I stop obsessing about it, I don't even need the control.

Power is nothing but a construct.

I will no longer let my life be controlled by other people's made up rules. I know what is right. I will do it. As I have always tried.

Trust yourself, and you shall know how to live.

You should check this out

One of my uber-cool friends has started a poetry journal. And no, not her own personal journal of poetry (though her poems rock and that would be fabulous too), but a literary journal. And she (and her co-founder) solicited some really great poets for their first issue. Here's the link:

http://www.diodepoetry.com/

Go. Read. NOW.

All five of you.