Merely a speed, not a vector

"We are all going to die screaming, so why would you not fill it with wonderful experiences?'  -Kevin Smith...  abridged.

I am trying to figure out something that has struck me as odd.  I didn't think of it as odd at first but now, as I spend all of this time watching TEDTalks and Kevin Smith Q&As and other miscellanea  that is geared to my intellectual self, I see the oddity.  They talk about passion; they talk about a drive; they talk about a force that pushes those smart folks, and they talk about goals.  I have had goals; oh I have had goals.  I have wanted to be a teacher, a musician, a game designer, a good father, a writer, a transient bum living out of my car.  I lack direction, something that intelligent people seem to have.  I have no direction.

I have had this consistent concept of moving for a long tome.  Since I was a washout C student high school student, up until I am a washout C college student, I have had this concept of moving on, marching though the mire and muck until one day I would be somewhere.  It kept me patient, easy going, and really, it kept my life in perspective that anything I felt was struggle was actually just resistance, a thing to push through until I got what I wanted...  This brings us back to the previous paragraph,  What good is all of this shit wading if I'm not going somewhere?  So here I sit, at my computer at 5 am, trying to figure out my life.  I am tired now, but I cannot sleep.  I need to get these thoughts down to someplace, to someone.  It is unfair to my wife, to my family, to my friends and to my parents that I embark on this quest to make me an adult, only to find I have been walking in a pit of muck and walking in a snazzy pentagram pattern.  Perhaps the problem has always been direction, and I can only think of one time I really had any direction at all.

I can remember being driven by only one thing.  I was a 6th grader and hanging out with a guy with a crush on a girl.  I followed him and his girlfriend, and I met someone else,  a redhead, to be exact, her name was S.  Now S. was an odd duck, an awkward seeming young lady who had a pension for X-files trivia.  She became a friend of mine, nothing too serious, since a friend of mine consisted of someone I talked to about every 3 weeks or so (Really introverted I was in those days.)  The less I saw her, the more I thought about her.  Now compile this against what I can only can describe as teenage angst and depression.  This turned into a full on fixation that I was consumed by.  S. was a stain on my brain, a scorch mark on my psyche, a nagging noise that could not be auto-tuned out of my soundtrack.  I never acted.  I never told her that I liked her.  Not until I was a freshman in highschool, and I left her a note before Spring break.  She shot me down promptly.  This killed me.

Now, when I say killed me, I mean killed me.  I realize that I experienced grief in all 5 cliche steps.    I bartered, got angry, etc. for about 3 years.  I actually had girlfriends during that time, which amounted to just mind games and guilt for a few months.  I could not break this idea, this pattern, but I was passionate about this loss.  I filled notebook upon notebook of poetry; I wrote songs and stories about S. and my pain and anguish.  This is laughable to me now just because I realize most of this navel gazing was my own damn fault, and I should've let it go, but I couldn't. I had to resist the release.  After that, I was careful about anything that required any sort of infatuation.  This lead to the concept of muck walking.  If I pushed on, no passion, only the monotony of every day, I had no space to be lost in something, no space to be passionate, no space to follow things, only the space to plan the next stride and fuck the direction.

So I walk around, but not in a direction.  I push on, but not toward any means.  I will be thirty in less than a year, and I am set up for nothing.  Jesus started his life at thirty, and as we all know, that ended well for everybody but him.  I need to find my passion again, and place it in unattainable things.  I need to find how to give myself over to what I love.  Loving my family is not enough.  Loving my wife is not enough.  I do love those things, but my pushing into nothing is so destructive to myself, that I cannot take care of them, those people to which I have legal, financial and spiritual responsibilities.  Loving them is not enough; I have to find a goal.  I have to find something that I can pursue.  I need something that I can push on with so that I can support my family.  That conclusion I guess can wait, It's 6 am and I have yawned for the first time in 6 hours.  I figure that when I get all of this out, I will sleep like a fuckin' baby.  Until then I intend to contemplate this shit on this blog.

Equals Force Times Distance

Of course I can't sleep.  Apparently I forgot to pay the mental peace bill.  Perhaps they went paperless, but I don't remember it coming in the mail, and not one phone call, not one.  Did I overdraft my account?  Did I not keep it current?  I've lived in the same house for over 6 months now, I should have a constant billing address.  But I'm still awake..  cringing.

I have been unemployed for over a month and a half now.  I have lost 15 or so pounds and I am going to the gym with my wife, something that I am not philosophically aligned with, but participating for the novelty of a 50 dollar a month bill.  It's not that I feel that it is silly, or I am too healthy for the gym, or that I would rather be fat, or that "Da Geem's too hawd... I huwt aw ovew."  It's more on the physics definition of work.   W=F*D that indicates that when I move equipment up and down, back and forth, around and around, and it returns to the same place, D=0 Therefore 0*F=W=0, nullifying any force that I expend at this supposed bastion of health.  In the end, working out in a gym according to physics is an oxymoron.  I am in fact convinced that for every hour spent in a gym, a person gains an hour at the tail end of their life, so spending the cartilage in your joints will ultimately yield a net gain of 0 years.  But I go despite this.  It's something I can do with my wife.   I still have a wife!  Lucky me.

Of course, I am using this formula of work to illustrate other things in my life as well.  I got fired from Wal-Mart over a stupid mistake that I made a few months ago.  It started much like this evening of latenight blogging.  I couldn't sleep.  I was finishing homework for class, reading texts, sorting MTG cards and found myself showing up late for work by a matter of minutes.  I clocked in late a few times, which I was reprimanded for and sent on my merry way.  Now fast forward to a month and a half ago.  I was scared to lose my job.  If I was running late, If my schedule was not perfect, if I wanted a few more minutes of study or a few seconds more with my family, or if someone needed something before I went to work, I was guaranteed to be stopped at every red light to work, and come in late.  If this sounds like an excuse you miss the point completely, in fact this is my mistake.  I seem to have been a push-over in my social life enough to take it upon myself to be a good person and care for my kids, make sure I had things covered, as well as slightly absent minded to not realize what time it ACTUALLY was.  I never wanted to be this guy who was always late, but here it goes, constantly over estimating myself and always finding myself lacking.  It is not the reason I got fired, it is the mistake that lead up to it however.

I started adjusting my hours, by a minute or two.  I did this a couple times, not to get paid for work I didn't do, but to try to keep a job I really needed to provide for my family.  My second sin was fear.  I felt that I could get away with it for a while, and when summer rolled around, I could get my shit together, show up early, work hard, go home and feel good about providing for my wife and children.

They fired me for misconduct.

Completely ineligible for unemployment, completely out of a means to pay for anything, completely back where I started, all of the force I was exerting  was canceled out by the amount of distance I had covered.  W=F*D, D=0 therefore F*0=W=0.

School as well has demonstrated that I am back where I started.  I am out of student loan money.  I had been using that stuff to live off of for the past 7 years, supplementing my shitty job with money that seemed to always disappear into last semesters expenses.  I remember a time in my life where I had 2000 dollars in my savings account, 1000 in my checking, a combined total of 3000 dollars of credit, a good attitude and a credit rating that looked like the record holder's score at a bowling alley after 3 games.  Now, I have nothing.  I have sold everything that I can sell, traded everything I can trade, I literally have no collateral to borrow, no money to use, no income, no force.  I am almost done with my schooling, but I have no foce behind it anymore, F=0, W=F*D Therefore W=0*D=0.

So I can't sleep.  Perhaps it is the lack of work I have done, not for a month and a half, for 7 years, I have expended force until I don't have it, and have gotten nowhere.  The bill collectors for my peace are hassling me now.  If the work was complete, I would have the distance and the momentum to pay them.  The penance of my sin I would figure is the collections department trying to take my stuff and realizing that all I have is shit and stone.  Nothing to pawn, nothing to put up for collateral.  I am out of options.