This is the year where hope fails you...
This year has been...less than spectacular so far, I'll admit. Things were working out alright. I was out on my own, with a solid friend and roomate, making good money, doing my thing. In the last six weeks, though, things have taken a pretty ridiculous nosedive. I was suspended over some horseshit accusations, then the company went bottom-up and left my parents, four siblings, my roomate, and myself completely without jobs overnight. It took six weeks to get unemployment to pay me. My sister is back in the hospital. I have to go to a family barbecue next week. Its a nightmare.
Then again, I'm not complaining.
See, I wouldn't trade this for anything. Not all the money in the world, man. No fucking way. My bills are getting paid, at least for the moment, and the money from that job never really mattered to me that much. It was a means to an end. But when I really look at it, that place was taking all the best out of us all. We're intelligent, capable people, why are we wasting time in a place that can't (through no fault of its own, really) appreciate that? Why work 90 hour weeks when we could find something else that paid just fine and only work 40? Because that wasn't an option before. It was always "I'll look at it on my day off....next week" or "This might be great but I can't take a pay cut" or "Gosh, if only I had the time to do this". Well, those aren't issues anymore. We all have time to pursue the things we want to do, rather than settling for what comes up first. We're all in a better place, I think, and I can't imagine better people to be stuck here with.
Speaking of people, I want to thank you.
I'm not, I find, really cut out for a regular life. Nothing about it appeals to me, emotionally or intellectually. Finding a job, settling down, getting married. It seems great and I have some friends that are very happy that way. Russ and Cathryn (whose last names I won't mention but whose initials are absolutely Bauer) are incredible people that found each other, marked their territory, and mated for life. I love them both, more dearly than I know how to say, and I love their bond and their happiness. I hope they live forever that way.
It just isn't for me. I like paying bills. I like having responsibilities to keep me grounded. But I need open roads and blank pages. I need plane tickets and midnight truck stops and strange hotels in strange cities. I need to move and not be constrained. So, sure, I'll pay my rent and my insurance and I'll need some income to do all of these things but, when it comes right down to it, writing and music have always appealed to me so much because I'm just not made to stay static.
So that's what I'm doing. I'm sitting here, getting my unemployment, looking for writing jobs and, in the meantime, planning my adventures. I'm starting a second blog devoted to my writing. I'm starting a novel while I edit two (maybe three) others. I'm tuning up my banjo and singing and, by the fucking gods, I'm living the life I need to live because, for the first time, I feel like I can.
I want to thank you for understanding that even when I didn't. I've been told, never directly or in such detail, by a dozen people over the years that this is what I was meant to do. The writing and the traveling and that life. I need to tell stories. I need it. That's what I'm built for. I'm made to talk and write and make people laugh. I'm here to rely on and be relied on by this group of people that give me more than any partner ever could. My friends, my family, and I have this deep, unbridled love that is exactly what I need to sustain myself. So that's what I'll do.
The thing that I love about my closest friends is the ambiguous relationship we have. People that would be just as comfortable with passionate sex at three in the morning in a hotel room in Cincinnati as they would be borrowing ten bucks for gas during a tight week, or discussing the merits of teaching Shakespeare's comedies rather than the same old Romeo and Juliet fare at every high school in the world over a cup of coffee and a pack of smokes. I don't have platonic relationships because I'm not platonic. Its always just a little bit romantic, a little bit sexual, completely innocent (naturally) but something special. Something not many people share. Thank you for that. Thank you so hard.
What I'm getting at is simply be thankful for what you have and don't let the world get in your way. Things will work out as they will, the wheel weaves as the wheel wills, there will be water if god wills it, the word is the law is ka. That sort of thing. Learn who you are and learn to love it, because this life is pretty fucking awesome, if you ask me.
Ecstatically Yours,
-S.R.
