Money, Mountains, and Madness

“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” Charles Bukowski

Lately my life has become more of Hunter S Thompson story than an actual life, which pretty much makes sense. I went from the bottle as a baby, to watching psychedelic movies and listening to the Dead. I never really got was “mainstream” was. I was different, I didn’t like it, but that was just who I was. I had good parents, a decent upbringing, I never went without. I was just different, I didn’t even have a drummer to march to. I was over playing the triangle in the corner sneering at those that were keeping pace. One that that always drove me, however, was the desire to be something more, something better, something bigger, something more awesome than I was.

Flash forward into current times and I still listen to psychedelic music, I still have moments where I end up places I probably shouldn’t, and I always ALWAYS make mistakes. The coolest thing about it, though, is they usually don’t hurt anyone else. Usually is an operative word, and of course I try to defend myself and my wrong doings to the death. I’m human, I get it, I only wish the rest of the world could see how amazing being human really is. Being afraid to make mistakes is about as boring as sitting through a webinar on Sterile Compounding Practices (and that was just yesterday, yawn). Reading back over to Bukowski and his amazing depiction on the average human life, it sucks. We do wake up to alarm clocks, we do shit (sometimes not right away in the morning…) and we do go to work.

Work, “god damn what a bummer” as the illustrious attorney in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas said. We go and make money, usually we’re pretty fucking miserable doing it. There are people we don’t like, things we don’t like to do, the list goes on, but we still do it. We do it for the almighty dollar, we milk it, we watch the clock as it ticks down the end of the work day. Our ambition is never to actually go to work, it’s to go to work or  to make money. Think about it, would you actually go to work if they didn’t pay you? What would be the use?

Not to mention the boss aspect. I can’t relate to this, but I have people that can and do. I have had some shitty clients before, but that’s kind of different. They boss you around because they have the innate right to do so, they are giving you money, and you are going to take it from them. Give and take, right? Not really, the ability for some people to feel they can hulk and god over your life because they’re paying you is asinine and the lack of respect is foolish. It all comes full circle to that “ambition” statement.  Where would we be and what would we be doing in life, looking for money?

It brings me back to one of my favorite quotes by Bukowsi where he proclaims that he woke up a 63 year old man with $1.06 to his name. I wake up that way, although I’m not that old, but it’s ambition that forces me to get up to try to harvest more of that almighty dollar. I don’t necessarily have a lot of expenses, I do live life on the edge of a razor and that can get rather expensive at times. Expensive habits, expensive tastes, expensive desires, but none of this to try to impress a single soul but myself. I’m happy being me, living in excess, and not regretting a single moment. Like I said, these past couple of weeks have been some of the most, well, interesting that I’ve had in a long freaking time, and I don’t have money to thank for affording me this pleasure.

My wealth, my riches, my fortune comes in the fact that I have a personality that seems to lure interesting people into my world. I can go to a grocery store and find random strangers to strike up conversations with, I can talk to anybody at the nursery about just about anything ranging from this fellas track Corvette to a womans messy divorce. I can make people laugh just by being me. It’s was my dad used to call “turning people on” (not in the sexual way). I can honestly say I learned it from my dad, he could walk into a room and turn it on just by being him. Hell, just taking my car to get fixed at the dealership left me with four business cards from random people that just thought I was “cool” (I think they really mean hot, but whatevs, I’ll take it). My life has exploded with people that not only amuse me, but enlighten me as to who I really need to be in life.

All of the struggles with the eating disorder sort of have escaped my mind and I focus on what other attributes I’ve got and what it does for other people in the world. I can make or break a persons day….which the breaking part has been pretty heavy lately too. My reckless disregard for the feelings of others can be harsh, and although hurt never is intended. I can apologize until my throat goes dry, I’m pretty good at realizing when I’ve done wrong, but it’s always hard to explain why I did it in the first place.

“I knew it was a crime, I did it anyways. Why argue, I’m a fucking criminal” -Hunter S Thompson

Although I don’t often break crimes, we’re back to that breaking business. I speed, I might be distracted while driving, I might do other thrashing maneuvers on back country roads and mountains. I’d much rather be the one explaining to a traffic cop why I was spiritedly driving on a twisty road than to be explaining my off-centered adventures. That’s what this whole fucking blog is about, my adventures. Although some of them lately, I’ll keep to myself. As I told a good friend yesterday, I’m going to save them for my next book entitled…..well, I don’t remember, maybe he does.

Sometimes I forget what happened yesterday, sometimes my ambition turns more into a Bukowski like state of mind as opposed to a nose to the grindstone type, but my heart is usually in the right place, it’s just my body doesn’t always accompany it.