He has a crystal globe
with a texture like diamonds
light liquid across it's surface, alive
But when I see the hollow, translucent world,
I can only imagine it in freefall,
and shattering, the shards cutting us all.
but lets enjoy it now, shall we?
dance with me moon, around the glass
then around the cosmic light bulb,
here spin me more, let me go
let me fall where I may.
I like to think of myself as an optimistic pessimist, I was raised expecting the future to only be worse than the past, which is inevitable if one believes an epic apocalypse is coming soon and there is nothing you can do to delay it a single second. It kind of makes you feel helpless, just a little. To be honest, when I was in elementary school I did not expect to make it to high school before it came, much less college, much less 3 years into college.
Though once I got out of high school I had some hope (if that is what you could call it, disappointment was in there too) that I would make it to a good career before any of that happened, and now I am lost. Is this the stereotypical time to be lost? I thought it was always in the mid-life crisis- some decently well off 40 year old starts wondering when his life became so boring, so he fills it with stuff he bought using his kids college fund or something like that.
At my age you are either supposed to be a starry-eyed future professional or someone who doesnt give a @!#$. I care about my future, it wont work itself out, waiting will only allow me to sink deeper in this quicksand, but I dont know what direction to go, and frankly I am pissed at myself for not finding something I can see myself doing for any number of years. When I see those older than me, those who have gone through tougher times than I, I feel like a preteen fussing about unimportant crap.
Take my uncle for example, he is a lawyer working adoption cases (the best line of work as a lawyer I am sure). He has a fairly large victorian-style house on the hillside of El Cajon, it is not La Jolla, but it is pretty nice. He has a newish benz, my aunt has a nice BMW. He is not "rich" per se but he is not lacking, he does very well for himself and his family.
He never got through high school geometry. He just could not do math, he was decent at english and the writing related subjects, but not math. After high school did he go to USC or UCSD or USD or some other college, no, he went to community college for a while, he had a band (taught himself guitar, cannot read music notes) met the beatles (for real, he has a pic of him and the beatles). But he came to a point in his life where he wanted a family, and he wanted to be able to provide for his family, so he went to a dinky law school in SD (they let in anyone who could pay). He obviously went through it and passed the BAR and became an independent lawyer with a friend as his partner, and the rest is history.
There are so many alternate possibilities where it could have gone so much worse.
Or my dad, he did decent in high school, played football, didnt really sweat over his grades, B's and C's, went to college for film, bicycled alot. but he never got his diploma because he missed the last month of college to film the race across america (bicycle race). Answered an ad in the paper for a alarm company start up, just him and three other guys working from the bed of a truck, the company eventually took off, they made fortune 500 two years in a row, my dad was a partial owner. Sometime after that he out and out quit. He decided to go into ministry, went to the school of ministry. He ended up just having side jobs while going back through college and through the school of evangelism, the time spent in those schools was around 7 years, now he is a full time pastor in a very small church.
My point is, you never know where life will go, and sometimes it feels useless to plan, because your plans rarely work out. That saying, "failing to plan is planning to fail" is really trite yet really true, even if we have no idea what we are getting ourselves into, or what direction we are going, we have to go in SOME direction, but it may not be the right one.
in case you havent noticed, this rant has been the subject of MANY of my poems, that is why I like poems better, they are easier to swallow (that is what she said) than rants.
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