I have four chronic illnesses. All are exacerbated by stress. As a result, I put a premium on reducing the amount of stress in my life. Still, not all stress can be avoided. Not all stress should be avoided. Some stress is actually beneficial. Sometimes a crisis is just what we need to move forward. Picking and choosing what stress to take on and which crises to entertain can be a challenge and is stressful. Today is a day of that kind of stress. I don’t mind that kind of stress because I know if I handle it well it will mean less stress in the long run.
I’m 46 years old. Like a 12 year old reading 17 magazine I look at people in their fifties and sixties with envy. Many of them are so cool!
At the same time I love the exuberance of youth. I have many friends in their twenties and I adore them. One of the greatest pieces of wisdom that my years have taught me is that growing old sucks and is a complete waste of time – don’t fucking do it!
I met a guy last night who was celebrating his 33rd birthday and feeling pretty old. He begged me to tell him that it gets better. I could honestly tell him that it most certainly does. I never felt older than I did when I was in my early thirties.
This guy was dealing with some physical deterioration and that is a normal part of aging which can’t be avoided, but can be mitigated. I still deal with some of the complications of an aging body but I’m also in the best shape of my life. I’m the strongest I’ve ever been, my weight, blood pressure, cholesterol and heart rate are perfect. Even my mental health is better than it has been in decades. All of this helps compensate for the fact that I’m not getting any younger.
I recently shaved off all my purple hair to let my natural color and beard grow out. Over the course of two weeks I completely changed my looks. The top of my head is almost completely bald and my hair is fifty to sixty percent gray. I got my first grey hair at twenty-four but that is beside the point. The point is that for the first time in quite some time I was actually looking my age.
There is nothing wrong with looking your age but it is optional and I certainly don’t mind looking younger. I throw on a hat and a little “Just For Men” hair dye and I look ten years younger. I usually don’t play the “How old do you think I am?” game but it seemed to come up a lot yesterday. Guesses ranged from twenty-seven to thirty-eight (the older the guesser the closer they got).
The truth is I actually feel twenty-four and that is amazing. In my opinion it is the perfect age. It’s that point where you are old enough to know better but young enough not to care. Most people younger than twenty-four want to be older; those older, wish they were younger. I’m perfectly happy with my age but in a way I really am twenty-four. Twenty-four years ago, on Friday the Thirteenth of January, I nearly died. In many ways I started my life over on that day. This is the year where I feel like I have fully come into my new life. This year has been all about knowing better but not caring and it has served me quite well.
The only thing I don’t understand is why in the hell do I still have acne?!? That just seems totally fucked up!!!
I’ve been through so much. I’ve had so much on my mind. I spent five days in a peaceful cooperative community in Harmony Park and then five days trying to reacclimate to my life in the city. There is so much that I want to write about but haven’t been able to. Instead I have put my feelings into a letter to my US Congressman, Keith Ellison.
Dear Keith Ellison,
I am writing because I am deeply concerned about your support for a limited military strike in Syria. I too am very troubled by the atrocities committed by the Assad regime and absolutely believe that a response is required. For a while I had resigned myself to the belief that a military strike was the best we could come up with but through much soul searching I am now convinced that we can do better… much better. I’m a huge supporter of yours and I’m counting on you to do better.
I hope that you will continue reading because I want to do more than just add my voice to the mounting opposition to military action; I want to help you regain your voice as an agent for peace.
First, we don’t need to respond with force to prove our strength. No one in their right mind doubts the capabilities of the US Military. To suggest that we need to respond with violence because it is the only language these tyrants understand is to lower ourselves to the level of a tyrant.
We can do better.
What is going on in Syria is a disaster and requires a response but what if we started thinking of military disasters the way we think of natural disasters? Yes, these disasters are caused by humans but what if we began to accept that people are part of nature? When an earthquake or hurricane strikes we don’t respond by bombing the earth and skies, we respond by caring for the people who have been hurt and displaced. As tragic and destructive as natural disasters are they bring out the best in us. What if we responded to the situation in Syria the way we responded to the earthquake in Haiti? What if we learned from our experience with natural disasters and did even better?
What if we could find millions of people who were so fed up with war that they were willing to leave their homes and everything they own to find peace? Instead of thinking of the Syrian people as victims, what if we thought of them as pioneers for peace? What kind of world would they build if they had our support? I believe that within the refugee camps lie the seeds for a peaceful, cooperative society like nothing we have ever seen before. Granted, this would take a lot of work but we have a lot of people who need work. They just need resources.
We have the resources. As you know, we’re not broke. For the cost of even a limited military assault we could provide billions in humanitarian aid. But that is beside the point. A military strike would not negate the need for humanitarian aid, it would simply be a waste of money and resources.
I’m not under any illusions. I realize that what I am suggesting is a complete paradigm shift that the US Government may not be prepared to make but my concern is not with the US Government as a whole, it is with you as an individual. I want you to be brave, to be strong, to be a voice for something better than war. It’s what the Fifth District expects from you and it’s who I know you to be.
For the first time in seven years I don’t have to deliver City Pages on Wednesday. All my stops have been covered and it is no longer my responsibility. I received a phone call today from Twin Town pedicab asking when I wanted to work this week. I told them I was taking the week off. Both of my kids are back in school. I’m single, I don’t have any roommates; I don’t even have a best friend. My time is my own.
I’ve spent most of my life running; running to keep from falling down. When I slow down I stop. Like the shark I have to keep moving or I will die. Well, not die, that is a bit of a dramatisation, but it feels that way sometimes. In 1999 I was struck with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia. I am convinced that it was my body telling me that I need to slow down. It did more than slow me down though. It brought my activity to a complete halt. Since then I have been working tirelessly to get back on my feet.
I’m finally at a place where I feel strong enough, healthy enough and capable enough to do anything I want to do. But I’m not cured. I still have to struggle with these illnesses. I can’t keep running. I have to slow down sometimes. I want to move forward but I’m still trying to catch up. I want to be there for other people but taking care of me is a full time job. I’m finding that I do better when left to my own devices; but what is the point of doing better if you have no one to share it with?
I’m taking today to do what I need to do for myself. Tomorrow I head to Shangri-la to share what I have with the bliss junkies of Harmony Park. It’s a balancing act with competing extremes. No one understands what it is like to be me but I see a little bit of me in everybody. It’s like being alone in a carnival funhouse where every mirror has been smashed into a million peices.
It’s okay. I’m doing fine, even if you think I’ve lost my mind. I’m sure it’s around here somewhere, it’s just now what I want to find. I’m going to follow my heart to the land of lonely souls. I’m going to look without seeing to discover what the blind man knows. I may seem weird to you but I’m no weirder than you to me. Our differences are symmetrical, that’s our commonality. So you be you and I’ll be me. It’s the way it’s all been planned. The missing jigsaw puzzle piece is right there in your hand.
I’m taking today off. Actually I’m taking the next week off. I feel like I’m taking a vacation but what the fuck is a vacation when you don’t have anything that resembles a normal job: no boss, no regular hours, no paycheck, How do you take a vacation when your career is being yourself. I can’t really take time off from that although it does seem tempting at times.
And what the fuck am I doing writing if I am taking the day off given that writing is a big part of what I’m doing for work these days?
I don’t know, I don’t care and I think that’s beautiful.
The only thing I have to do today is see Adam Ant perform live; something I’ve been wanting to do for almost 30 years but really thought would never happen. I was so convinced that it wouldn’t happen that I didn’t even bother to buy a ticket until just a few days ago. The last time he was in Minneapolis was 1995. I was trying to figure out how I missed that and then it dawned on me that I had a one year old child at the time and wasn’t doing much else. I’m not as excited about the venue he is playing this time around but I actually think this will be a better show. After two decades of tabloid turmoil he seems to be on top of the world. His new album is amazing, perhaps the best of his career. It’s everything I love about Adam Ant with a sound worthy of the modern age. Certainly better than his last album, 1995’s Wonderful, the one Adam Ant album I don’t own.
Oh yeah, one other thing that I’m doing today is shaving my head completely bald… but then I’m not letting a razor get anywhere near it for a week. I guess that’s what I consider a vacation – not having to shave!
I laugh at myself. I should have known that I couldn’t condense my thoughts into a few small posts and accurately reflect my past week. Sometimes I wish that I was a comic and could put everything that I want to say in 14 words. Luckily there are some brilliant people like Joel Pett who can:
The other morning, to be specific, the morning of Tuesday August 20th, 2013, I woke up with the most incredible sensation. As my eyes opened to greet the day I felt absolutely convinced that life was beautiful and that we lived in a world where everything was exactly as it was meant to be. For that moment in time I was living in the best of all possible worlds.
Then two hours later I woke up for real. I had in fact only been dreaming of this world. But could there be some truth to it? Could it be that life actually is beautiful? Many people have suggested that it is but given that I write a blog titled “Life Sucks, So What?!?” I clearly have my doubts.
Still, for two hours I was living in the best of all possible worlds. I was completely safe, happy and receiving everything I needed or could possibly desire. In that moment what I needed more than anything, to the exclusion of everything else, was sleep and what a beautiful sleep it was.
So this begs the question; does life suck or is it beautiful? I don’t think that I am going too far out on a limb to say that it is both. I realize that this might upset some of my friends who are convinced that life is beautiful but welcome to reality.
Actually, that is the real question. What is reality? I love my happy-go-lucky-life-is-beautiful friends but sometimes I get frustrated because I feel like we are not living in the same reality. Perhaps that is the case. Perhaps there are multiple realities. Or as I like to think of it; reality is just really, really fucking big and no one person can ever see all of it at once. Sometimes we see the parts that suck, sometimes we the parts that are beautiful. Some people carve out their own vision of reality by only seeing what they want to see. Actually, that might be most people but I don’t have the budget to do the research and frankly, most statistics suck. Feel free to prove me wrong it you want to conduct a study and quantify the beauty of statistics.
My life is as an artist… or philosopher or whatever the fuck I am. I see my job as looking at everything, trying to make some sort of sense out of it, and doing the best job I can at communicating what I see. My job is to connect the dots. My job is to bring the universe back to earth. What I am quickly realizing is that the universe is really fucking big and that there are a lot of dots. I feel like an astrologer looking up at the ancient night sky and thinking, “there has got to be an answer in there somewhere”.
The truth is that all those dots are connected. They all affect one another. Some connections may be more significant than others, just like some of our personal relationships are more significant than others, but the truth is we are all connected. To be honest, the dots connected by astrologers seem a bit random to me, but so what?!? We all have to make choices in this universe and if it works for you, who am I to judge?
Reality is big enough for everyone. If you want to believe that life is beautiful, go ahead. There is plenty of evidence to support that theory. If you want to believe that life sucks, it’s pretty easy to do that as well. If you think that there is a supreme order to the universe and that everything happens for a reason, be my guest. If you think we live in completely chaos, I feel ya there too.
On this particular day in late August three young people including a toddler and a pregnant woman were shot in my neighborhood. While no one was fatally injured there is no denying that this was a tragedy and the outrage exhibited by the community is completely understandable. My heart goes out to all the victims and to everyone affected by this incident. This has got to stop and our communities have got to come together and do a better job.
Still, I feel it’s important to point out that there were 387,750 people in Minneapolis who were NOT shot that day. Our odds of being shot on that day in Minneapolis were less than 1 in 100,000 or 0.0008%. Fortunately I don’t need a big research budget to come up with those statistics but they don’t exactly help much either. Crunching numbers and connecting dots seems pretty stupid when we have bullets connecting with flesh.
On that same day I took my daughter and her dog Toastie for a walk along the Mississippi River, across the Stone Arch Bridge to explore the ruins of the old mill city. It may very well have been one of the best days I have ever spent with my daughter but what I found most profound was that my daughter had a dog. She got this dog just a week before but she had been dreaming of it for two years. She even had the name picked out. So many people tried to dissuade her from her pursuit of getting a dog but she persevered. I encouraged her to keep her dream alive because even if it was unattainable I know that life can only be as good as our dreams.
And her dream did come true.
My dream in which I discovered a world of beauty could come true as well. I doubt that it will but so fucking what?!? Of all the misguided dreams and false hopes out there, believing that we can make the world a better place is one I’m willing to embrace.
Speaking of dreams, given that tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom I want to leave you with these words of another unrealistic dreamer, Martin Luther King Jr:
After sleeping most of the afternoon, recharging my batteries in preparation for the most impossible of endurance tasks, I reach for my favorite energy drink of hops and barley knowing that it may be the only thing that will sustain me during this marathon mission of sitting still.
This summer has clearly seen a decrease in the amount of time I have spent writing. I guess that is understandable. I have been busy but lack of free time is not really my excuse. Technically, all my time is free and I probably have more of it during the summer than I do during the winter. I just can’t stop moving. When I do, I fall asleep. I’ve been trying to write every day but I never seem to get anywhere.
Tonight I will try again. TIme has a way of condensing and solidifying my thoughts so rather than writing about every mundane detail my hope it that I can highlight some key experiences and their relevant conclusions. Rather that one long disjointed post my plan is to write a few shorter posts that get right to the point. The thought gives me a bit of a chuckle but let’s see how it goes.
I had this absolutely awe inspiring transformative day on Tuesday. This day came on the heels of an incredibly fun, thought provoking weekend. I couldn’t wait to get home and write about it but as soon as I walked in the door I recieved a phone call from a friend who wanted to discuss disturbing hallucinations, emotional outbursts and horse ballet. Obviously, that was more important.
It also made it clear to me that my life has become a little too humdrum so instead of writing about my recent enlightenment I decided to go out and see what the rest of the world is up to on a Tuesday night. There are secret lives of fascinating people going on everywhere, even on a Tuesday.
Perhaps it’s all just too much for me. I can’t stop thinking. I can’t stop writing and rewriting Tuesday’s blog post in my head. It’s brilliant. It’s wonderful. It’s poetic… and really, really long. Actually, it’s kind of confusing and disjointed. I can’t remember ever being so simultaneously excited and apprehensive to write anything in my life. I’m sure that I have but at the moment I am completely consumed by this present quandary.
And it is exhausting. All I want to do is sleep. I don’t want to see anyone, talk to anyone or do anything. I just want to be left alone to do nothing. I guess I need more time for my thoughts to either solidify or dissolve away. So today I wait for the future in which I can meet my past with rested eyes.
Since I started driving pedicab back in March I’ve been trying to figure out an economic model that works for me. I do the job because I love it, it’s good for my body and good for my soul. I need to make money doing it but if money was my sole motivation I would never do it.
My favorite rides are the ones I give for free, or at least not expecting any money. My second favorite are the ones where people totally over tip. That makes me feel good too. I usually I get a good balance of the two but one day a couple weeks ago I had a day where no one over tipped, but no one got a free ride or under paid either. Everyone paid their fair share and I made as much as I usually do. For some, that would be the perfect system and something to replicate but it didn’t sit right with me. It didn’t seem real. I want greater diversity. I want people to get rides even if they can’t afford it and I want people to feel good about paying more if they can.
What I really want is to be able to do my job without thinking about the money. What I really want is to be able to make a living by just being me and doing what I do naturally. I don’t feel comfortable accepting payment for services rendered because I consider the service to be priceless. The idea that you can get someone to haul you around on a bicycle if you give them enough money feels like bribery to me.
So I decided that no one would get to pay for their ride. I’ve saved enough money that I can do this, at least for a little while. In essence, that ride has already been paid for through the generosity of riders before them. My hope was that even though nobody had to pay me anything they would still want to. Since they couldn’t pay for their own ride I would let them pay for somebody elses. The belief being that we are all in this together and everyone does their part to support the community. It’s like I could never charge one of my friends for a ride but at the same time they have been some of the best tippers. I would just treat everyone like my friend. I thought it was a brilliant and original idea, but would it work?
Actually it’s not that original and it has worked. It’s basically the principle of “pay it forward”. Karma Kitchen and Seva Cafe work that way. There are numerous other examples of people paying it forward in real life.
Since I’ve been doing this for the past week and a half I’ve found it to be a pretty sound business model – at least for me. I’m getting the diversity of riders that I want and my income has stayed pretty much the same. Everyone who wants a ride can get a ride and everyone feels good paying what they can pay, even if that is nothing. Those that can’t pay it forward with money I ask to pay it forward with an act of kindness. Everyone has something to give and if we all do our part we can make the world a better place.
Life Sucks, So What?!? 