Simple doesn’t exist in anything if you examine it long enough, but complex doesn’t have to exist with everything (Logic police alert! Drop the bad sentence and step away from the building!). If you take everything generally and don’t get caught up in too many specifics, life can be more than just bearable. It can be downright pleasant. To say something completely the opposite, though, life can be downright unpalatable. When you find yourself not on the palate of life, change just might help. You don’t want to uproot your life completely, though, unless you’re a drug using alcoholic who likes to murder people. Too much change at once can hurt. If you haven’t had a workout in several years, take things slowly at first, only doing minor exercises until you work up to the major ones. Your muscles will thank you and everyone around you will be glad you’re not complaining about your aches and pains. Quite the beginning paragraph, I’m thinking.
I don’t like mistakes. I don’t like knowing I messed up, feeling like a failure, and being proven to be imperfect. Out it comes. I’m a perfectionist. There are many of us around. Most of us remain in hiding (like we atheists) until a mistake is made (or until God comes up if you’re an atheist). Then, we leap from our stations in life and spring into perfectionist prevention mode. We want to know why the mistake was made, how we can prevent it in the future, and who knows we made the mistake. Survival dictates the mistake must not be known by others. Preventive measures go into effect, but sometimes someone else finds out about the mistake before you do, or your preventive measures don’t get implemented soon enough to prevent the word from getting out that you … I can hardly say it … made a mistake!
Once the word gets out, you go through the stages of post imperfection. The first stage is denial. You look for anything indicating it was actually someone else’s fault and not yours. Next comes the self-hating stage. You can’t believe you made the mistake. You, of all people. You must be an idiot to have made such a huge error. You shouldn’t be allowed to do what you messed up ever again. It’s the end for you and that faulty activity. Finally, you accept your failure (this could take weeks for a persistent perfectionist). You can try to prevent it in the future, but you can’t do anything about the past. It happened, and that’s that. Killing yourself would only be the biggest mistake of your life and the blundering trend is becoming redundant. It takes approximately 2-3 weeks for your perfectionist status to be reinstated. In the end, all you can do is focus on the future when you will be a perfectionist once again.
Instead of talking about life, I’m going to live it. Goodbye for now. I tried to find something to do but couldn’t. I’m not much of a life person. I’m much better at talking about it than actually living it. Wait! Life is calling again. I’m off! No, that was just a false alarm. I thought I saw life nearby, but it was just an illusion. It’s like a false memory, but in the present. I think it’s back now, but I don’t know if I trust it. I’ll just say pause for now. Pause bye.
Three-day weekends are a thing. They exist to commemorate our veterans, former Presidents, and religion’s domination over America, but they really exist to keep full-time employees from going nuts and killing their bosses. Some people plan activities for these three days of glory (as evidenced by the freeways and amusement parks on these days), but most people just stay at home, watching the programs on television they don’t normally get to see. It’s only one extra day, but it shortens the work week after it by a day, gives you one more day to rest, and reminds you why you go to work—to get away from soap operas.
Soap operas are the down-fall of women. I’m not saying that men don’t watch them, but most men find the melodramatic events in soap operas a tad too emotional to take (may I mention some more—alliteration is the life I love). I’m not one of those men. I cry all the time. Gossip is one of my favorite hobbies, alongside knitting and doing the dishes. (Pause) Okay, I’m lying. I rarely cry, hate soap operas and gossiping, and buy into most ideas of what “macho” men are supposed to do. There are a few “macho” things I don’t take part in. One of these things is “hanging out” with the guys. I usually have one or two good friends (now that I’m married, I have a good friend and a wife who is my best friend). Getting together with a bunch of guys and drinking beer (another “macho” activity I avoid), talking about women, and complaining about your job is not what I was put on this earth to do. I was put here to hand out pamphlets that say “What?” on them.
Another manly activity I avoid is working on the car. As the man of the house, I’m supposed to know what is going on under the hood of the car I drive, but I don’t care. My dad has taken cars apart and put them back together. He nags me about my car, and I appreciate it because it keeps my car running. I understand the basics of car maintenance, but do not have any interest in expanding that knowledge.
The final “macho” item I don’t agree in (though not the final of a complete list of machoisms I do not take part in) is that being a man means not being able to control their want for sex, their rage, or their mouths. I have control over my body and my mind. A man who rapes a woman and says he just couldn’t control himself long enough to hear her saying “no” or a man who beats his wife and says he just couldn’t control himself belongs in jail. On a smaller scale, the man who says whatever he pleases even when he knows it hurts or offends women needs to live life in the shoes of a woman some time to appreciate their world. I realized long ago that women’s lives are much more in control and difficult than men’s (except the whole getting beat up and ridiculed thing by other boys when you’re young). Women are more sophisticated, they live longer, and they deserve more respect than men. I have more to say on this issue (and probably will say more in my speech to the League of Women Voters), but not a lot of space left in this paragraph, so I’ll stop the paragraph here. Well, on second thought, maybe I’ll stop it here.
I’ve watched several specials on Punk music recently. They weren’t on TV. They were just randomly picked from my recorded television video collection. For some reason, Punk music is followed by Rap music in all the specials I was watching (which I only mention because … well, you’ve seen the title of this paper). I think I watched the Punk specials (after all, I could have fast forwarded to the Rap music) because I’m poor. I’m not as poor as some people, but I’ve been far better off financially. In fact, I am at the lowest financial point in my life. That’s why the Punk music spoke to me. I could identify with its anti-establishment message because I am definitely not a part of the establishment. Being a musician, I can identify more with a sparse sound right now. I can’t afford a new guitar or to get my recorder fixed, but that shouldn’t stop me from playing music.
Punk not only uses repulsive sounding cheap instruments, the “musicians” in it don’t play that well. The one thing they have is attitude. It got them past their lack of skill and possessions in their lives. They didn’t have money for an ad in a magazine, but they had a loud voice that a bigwig in the establishment could exploit and put on a record. The irony of watching the special is the Punks were all saying “screw the system” while living in mansions with their own record labels. I’m not saying they abandoned their roots and are sell-outs. They have as much right to being established as those who are already established. They’re making a living like most people, playing their music, and getting paid for it. It’s a job. Both specials mentioned Nirvana and other bands I know as “alternative” being a continuation of Punk. I guess they’re right. Kurt Cobain is just another Punk who shot himself in the head. Oh, those Punks. They’re just crazy.
I’m going to become a Punk star. I now have the background for it. I’ve been disillusioned by the system. I’m going back to my roots and play songs that express my angst. I needed my recent tough times to gain angst. I didn’t have angst before. I only had a want for people to “like my stuff.” Now I have a message to go with my madness. I’m going to write songs with just a few instruments a small group of people can play and deliver my message to the people. Even though I can sing and play (even orchestrate songs with other instruments beyond guitars and drums), I think I can fake my way through my talents. Improvisation is key. I will make a whole image—from the clothes I wear to the way I talk and do my hair. I will establish my own establishment by screaming about the establishment. Have I established myself in your established understanding of the establishment?
I don’t think I really have to scream to get my message across to the masses. Elvis Costello didn’t scream, and he is one forefather of the Punk movement. Being what I am and bringing what I bring to the music, perhaps someday I will be looked back on as a “forefather” of some new type of music I helped establish. Every job field has its forefathers. Jerry Lewis, Richard Pryor, Steven Spielberg, and Carl Reiner are some people who come to mind when I think of forefathers. They were all doing the same things other people had been doing, but they did them in such a special way, it made others want to do what these forefathers did in the way they did them. I want others to look at me and say, “What an idiot. I could do that.”
I’m currently working at the District Attorney’s office temporarily. We don’t have satisfied customers. We don’t actually have “customers” at all. McDonald’s has customers—not all of them satisfied. I could never work at McDonald’s. I don’t like going into most McDonald’s, let alone working there. I would rather do without than go insane working at McDonald’s. I do, however, have to work from 8 to 5, Monday – Friday, which is driving me numb. If I’m going to be doing something for 8 hours a day, I figure I should enjoy it more. I should go into the porno industry. I like to have sex. I’m good at it. I could be the star of my own series of sex films. The only things holding me back are three things: Most people don’t want to see me naked (luckily, my wife is not one of those people), I will not have sex with anyone but my wife for the rest of time, and—if both these things weren’t true—the diseases would keep me away. That’s two jobs down and several million to go. I’ll just keep trying until I find the right one. I seem to remember a paragraph about becoming a Punk star.
Thoughts from Life 
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