The Fiction of Reality

The things we believe in as kids are parallel what we believe in later in life. Santa Claus is no longer a jolly fat guy that brings you gifts. He is replaced with the thought of a beautiful blond with a killer body and a great personality that you settle down with and attends to your every whim. The Easter Bunny becomes the thought that no matter how hard you party the night before you will wake up feeling bright eyed and bushy tailed in the morning as you head to your dream job. I am not sure what the Jewish conversion is to these metaphors, but I think it involves Hanukkah Harry and a Dreidel. The truth is these ‘fantastical beliefs’ we create in our life are just that, figments of our collective imagination that we have picked up from our friends through legendary college stories and of course every movie and television show centered around that “twenty something crowd”. There is nothing wrong with believing this stuff when you are young, but there is a time in your life when you get to old to believe in finding that perfect person and you settle. There is a time when you have to realize you are too old to go drinking 5 nights a week and still hold down a ‘career.’ Sure some people hang onto these ‘silly’ ideas, like the high school girl that still believes in the tooth fairy, these are also the ones that end up later in life ‘Hello my name is Jim and I’m a…”

Letting go of your ‘Santa Claus’ doesn’t mean you are settling for complete crap or you won’t be happy, but you are settling for less than that perfect person that you have dreamed of since you first heard the term ‘soul mate.’ At some point we all have to settle. It hurts to think of it as settling, but the fact remains that no one is perfect, for if there was that perfect person you wouldn’t be settling for anything less than Mr/Miss perfect. This second option is as close as you are going to get or at least that is what you tell yourself. You really have no way of knowing if there is someone who might be closer to your vision of perfection, which is why it is always a gamble when you finally decide to settle down long term with a second option. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a gamble if you are willing to put on the blinders and stop you’re wandering eyes, but to do that means to ultimately give up on perfection. Making every love story a tragedy cloaked in the disguise of a Shakespearian comedy.

Killing your adult Easter bunny is just as unsettling as moving in with your second choice. It is the first time you truly realize that you are first mortal and second that you have converted from being adult to grown-up. No longer can you go out on a Tuesday night and get care freely blitzed, you have concerns, limitations, constraints of all types to deal with. You have people counting on you to be fully effective on Wednesday, you have responsibilities in your life that you didn’t have when you were 22. Your concerns have grown from trying to deal with an upper level economics class to dealing with trying to make the big sale to your company’s biggest client. You have realized that there are no redoes, bonus points, or cliff notes to help bail you out. This doesn’t happen over night of course, it is a slow and painful realization, and then it hits you like a ford truck running over your pet Rabbit.
This is life; it is full of multiple realizations, good and bad. You find your list of limitations growing, leaving you at times in a panic stricken state. No matter what, you find strength from deep inside that allows you to grind through it all, till your race is won. Ironically, in this race winning is death, so no real pressure to finish first.

Did You Just ‘Art?'

I never feel the urge to explain my art. You either get it or you don’t. Honestly, I don’t even understand my art half the time. Art should not be based off of aesthetics, some deep meaning, or an expression of some built up feeling. Art should be like a squirrel running around in the woods. You should just look at it, do not touch it and NEVER try to lick it. I know what you’re thinking, ‘then how is art made?’ It should be made from an uncontrollable urge. Much like one’s need to urinate. It is in you and it needs to come out or you will just burst. It should not be forced. Maybe if you see someone else, you will be inspired to want to do it. You should feel relaxed and relieved when it is finished, not uptight and stressed. Your stream of creativity should draw from every experience you have witnessed all put into some sort of form, depending on your medium of choice.

I have always felt like an artist without a medium. My head is full of creativity to an almost maddening level and it bubbles out of me in any form I can find. I don’t expect people to understand, nor do I waste my time trying to explain it. It is there, it is what it is, and people are going to think what they will. Life would probably be a lot easier if I could find a medium and stick with it, and just ooze out all my creativity into it. The only issue is I don’t want to feel like a caged monkey in a zoo, being watched and studied by kids and their parents, nor do I want other monkeys throwing feces at me. So I am going to just keep dabbling in any form I can find, writing, drawing, painting, sculpture, fort building, verbal diarrhea, and whatever else I can come up with.

Fleeting

There are rare moments in one’s life, brief snippets of pure unbridled happiness. They are never the moments you expect; not the grandiose planned out moments like weddings or graduations. It is something so simple, so basic; something probably done a million times before by many other people, maybe even by you, but it truly deeply means something this time and you can’t explain why. It is not a forced moment, it comes out of the blue and you don’t recognize it till it is over. It is completely spontaneous; the architect of it all, being some magical unseen forces that aligned everything in the universe to lead up to it. Time freezes for an eternity upon realization and what everyone else sees as a meaningless almost forgettable moment, you see as a life altering moment, that doesn’t change your life in the least. You embrace that moment; try to keep it in your mind, root it into your soul. It resonates with you like a wave made by a falling acorn into a puddle. Reverberating to the brink of madness, yet calming when done. And your life goes on, to mention the moment after just happening would curse everything, like saying Macbeth in a theater. It should be thought upon and studied over and over in your mind in a playfully obsessive way. You cannot recreate that moment, so don’t even try. This is a pure moment of happiness that will not sour over time; it is a fine wine that gets better with age. It will stick with you long past most memories and forever feel like a warm blanket on an oddly cold August night.

The Pandemic of Bieber Fever

Every now and then a thought pops into my head that makes me feel much older then I actually am. This is going to make me sound like a father from the 1970’s, but the world is doomed. The future leaders of industry, politics, the visionaries of tomorrow are all currently insane Justin Bieber, Jonas Brothers, and Miley Cyrus super fans. Right now, the first female president of the United States is probably in a fist fight on a middle school playground with her best friend over who is going to marry Bieber. The next financial guru is a boy named Jimmy that loves to rock out to Party in the USA. There is precedent for this. Look at our current recession. My grandparents were right; rock and roll is going to ruin the world. This generation is worse, for at least Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Who made great music, and not auto-tuned, prepubescent poop. I mean pop. You may try to make the argument that these misguided youths are no more insane then the Beatlemania in the 60’s. The Jonas Brothers are no Beatles, musical or talent wise. With technology these days, the hype of the Jo-Bros is 100 times what the Beatles ever were. Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Youtube and ringtones make ones’ love for an ‘artist’ travel faster than a wildfire in drought ridden California. I digress. The youth may be tech savy, but in the process they are becoming dumber. Their minds are being filled with fluff, they are thinking as a collective and not as an individual. They are becoming brainless zombies to the world of teen pop. They lack original thought, ideas, and wonder. Self examination is gone.

Our only real hope with that generation are the angsty tweens, let’s hope it is just a phase, for they are bright enough to see through the mass produced crap. Sure they are wearing Nirvana t-shirts and weren’t even born when the band was around, but they have the mental tools needed to save the world through original expression. They have hopefully dodged the bullets of Selena Gomez and Twilight books and started reading Hunter S. Thomspon and Kurt Vonnegut at too early of an age. They may look sad and disingenuous about the world around them, but wouldn’t you if you had to deal with sheep whose shepherd is MTV on a daily bases?

You might think I am being a little hard on these 8-13 year olds, which you are probably right. I should be harder on the parents for letting their kids be horrible people. Kidding… Maybe…

Lebron James… Would You Be My Valentine?

With Valentine’s Day paraphernalia being out for the last 3 weeks, I find it is never too soon to write about the controversial day. When it comes to holidays, most people are on the same page. No one hates Labor Day or Thanksgiving. You don’t see people calling St. Patrick’s Day a cheap gimmick by beer companies and the color green to stimulate their sales. Valentine’s Day is the Lebron James of Holidays. Each has three distinct set of followers. Those that think it is overrated and horrible, those that really don’t care either way, and those that love it like no other.

There is no way you can change the minds of those that despise Valentine’s Day, just like LBJ anti-fans. The damage has been done; it has been melted into ones psyche like the idea that fire is hot. It cannot be overcome. Sure you will have your good V-days or the vindication of your team beating LBJ’s, but that doesn’t change anything when they come back around next year. Even the people that loath V-day, still know it is a great time to go to a bar and easily pick up a single girl, it is like watching Lebron drop 55 while shooting 68%. You recognize the greatness that it was, but still have that awful feeling in the bottom of your stomach and regret it later in the week.

Those that could care less about Valentine’s Day sound exactly like those that don’t follow the NBA. They say the same phrases, “I don’t see what the big deal is,” “(ESPN or greeting card companies) are the ones pushing the hype on us,” and my favorite, “I could really careless about it, none of this affects my life in the least.” These people are swing voters; they will unintentionally stay in the middle till they sway to one side at the last minute. You can debate with them all you want, you won’t sway them. It will take an event or someone special to convince them to one side or the other, like a lover that is obsessed with the day or seeing Lebron play live.

Finally you have the obsessive’s, those that no matter what has happened in the past will always love Valentine’s Day and/or Lebron. They will send cards, buy chocolates, wear the red heat jersey with pride. They will overlook the time they got dumped on February 10th or July 8th. True loyalists, fans for one reason or another, everyone has their own reasons, usually rooted in delusional remembering’s of childhood fancy. The time in middle school when the boy next door you had been crushing on for years gave you your first kiss on the walk home from school on Valentine’s Day. Unwrapping your first basketball jersey, a wine and gold number 23, and then going to your first game with your father. Small moments in life that you remember as perfect, which never really played out that way in real life. The boy accidently bit your lip and the Cleveland Cavs lost by a dozen. None of that matters to them. They are thick skinned and optimistic to the point of no return.

No matter where you stand on either Valentine’s Day or Lebron James and how much they are blown up, over celebrated, picked on, loved or hated, they are here to stay. Of course this is barring some sort of cataclysmic event doesn’t destroy us all in 2012. Fingers crossed.

No 'Win' in Winter

The winter is long, harsh, and cold, especially in the land of Ohio. January is the worst, the excitement from the holiday season is over, and the warm glowing light at the end of the tunnel, called spring is too far in the distance to see. This leaves most people feeling down and depressed. Trying to find the motivation to get out of bed every morning gets harder and harder. It looks like midnight at 6pm, which only makes things worse. What is one to do? How do you fight through the ‘Cabin Fever’ and not end up like Rider Strong? You can attempt to embrace the situation you have, sled riding, snowboarding, ect, of course if there is no snow and it is still 10 degrees outside that is not really an option. You could stay in and have all the movie marathons you want, but that only dulls the pain. You can DVR The OC and watch people hang out in the warm sunny glow of California, but that will only lead to jealousy, envy, and a crush on the amazing Adam Brody. You could plan a trip to a warm place and then realize flights are expensive and you really have no vacation time till June, but it is the thought that counts. RIGHT. If you thought I had the answers or the cure you were mistaken. I might be an idea man, but some problems have no answers, although if there is no answer is it really a problem? Mull that over with some hot coco and a 1500 piece puzzle.

"It’s my birthday; I can get drunk and vomit on you if I want to"

To many times we give people a ‘pass’ when they do something stupid on their birthday. Shouldn’t we give their mother a ‘pass’ on their child’s birthday? Basically aren’t we celebrating the fact that the mother decided to have unprotected sex and not abort our good friend Allen? Shouldn’t we be sending those that raised our morally challenged pal, a gift for installing in Allen the ability to put off natural selection for 1 more year? Really what did the birthday person do to deserve a celebration? The answer is nothing. It is almost like rewarding them for using a toilet and not the kitchen sink.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no issues with people that celebrate their birthday in grand style. My roommate goes over the top every year, and I don’t complain. Granted I do mock her when she tries to drag it across 3 months or claims that the universe owes her because it’s her birthday. Birthdays make no sense to me at all. All it is, is a good excuse to party, which is why I am all for holidays like Labor Day and Presidents Day. It is a day where it is all about ‘LOOK AT ME,’ ‘HONOR ME,’ I am surprisingly not that type of person. I want to start a trend where people send cards to the parents of the birthday person and not the actual birthday person. Mix it up a bit. It would open up a whole new market for the greeting card industry and people will use the postal service again. In fact, it might just end the recession.