It’s now been five hundred days since I sat down and wrote the “birds fall” haiku, and said, I’m going to do this.
The number of times I’ve wanted to turn back, to give it all up and just start over, start fresh, back at the beginning?
Probably almost equal, if not higher. But I’ve been starting over, giving up and turning back since I was twelve years old. I’m done with it.
The older I get, the more friends and family I lose, my body is turning on me and life is getting to be too “life”, and not enough life.
I am running out of time. Do-overs are no longer truly possible. I’m not hip. I’m not cool or famous, nor do I know anyone cool and famous. I’m too shy, too much of an introvert, too passive to reach out to famous people.
My Nineties-era disillusionment and sneering keeps me from enjoying the cool and the new, because popularity and recency have zero bearing on quality.
Things can be unknown and be epic. Things can be world famous and still awesome.
Contrarian I, I was never the one to tell a band to go fuck itself because it got big. I stopped listening when they started to suck. And sometimes, their old shit?
It was garbage.
Someday, hopefully, someone will call me a sell-out even if I’m doing the same thing, because I got rich doing it. Someday, I don’t care if I’m rich, I’ll be comfortable and able to do what I love full-time. I’ll have the quiet life of which I dream, and the assholes can do whatever it is they want to do, as long as they stay the hell away from me.
Target: 1500 words
Written: 1315 words, novel: Father Lightning