Mediocrity. I add up my years and it all boils down to a few syllables. Years of being, feeling, and doing nothing: no proudest achievement, no defining moment. I could create one, but it would be just another part of the fictional tale of my life. The real tale is just a long string of events, a seemingly unending barrage of negatives all stacked up against each other. Negative plus negative equals zero at best in real things. In the real world, negative plus negative is inconsequential, a theoretical concept, mathematicians way of explaining how we use more than we could have. Another tricky concept we’ve all swallowed whole, a big steel pill the nation chokes on. I realized I’d spent years not writing. Now I will sneak around my mental blocks slyly by writing about not writing. Maybe I have waited for that happy ending to make it all make sense. I like happy endings, we all like happy endings. But when the night is still and we are tucked under our covers, mind reeling from another day, we can’t help but wonder, what if there is no happy ending? No light at the end of the tunnel? Is hope only for fools? It serves its purpose, like a maid following extraneous orders, it bends to its master yet that does not give it sense. Hope, another construct to keep us plugging away, breathing smog and looking forward to more of the same old shit? Is it possible that we believe in happy endings because we fashion the based on the real story tale of our lives into quaint anecdotes and because we believe in hope, we create stories that echo of triumph? Society gobbles up the stories of overcoming like a pig at the troth. Without triumph, time ceases to have meaning. Overcoming, moving forward, these things create time. The milestones we give to be sure we’ve gone on down the road, the way we tell ourselves that surely our path is not just a circular journey through the same points over and over again. We rest easy in that assurance. Somehow though, it comes to our attention, over and over again, that we pick up this and that, realizing it’s the same story, different day. What enlightenment is there really? I learned the fire was hot, so I did not put my hand in it (…except when I felt like being burned)? As a writer, one must tell a story, linear story; one that gives meaning to the cadence of our lives, and sells a perspective. We jump into each new thought (or retelling of an old one), because our hunger is never ending. Our eyes open in this world and the one sure thing is longing. We hunger for food, affection, love, meaning, goodness. And in infinite wisdom (or sadism?) this hunger is never fully satisfied. We are big bellies wandering the world, destined to be forever unfilled. Preachers peddle religion to give us the hope of some far off day of perfection. Commercials tell us if only we buy buy buy we fill feel happier, sexier, more satisfied. So, we buy and then we buy some more. We’re the demons let loose in the Garden of Eden. We can and will take so much more than what we actually need, and in the end, the more we consume, the more we want. We mask our worlds in beauty and feel if it is rich enough, clean enough, grand enough that we may just forget the insignificance of it all. Pity we have the pesky human trait of always wanting MORE. I ache to write a few pages, maybe 5 perfect pages, and leave the rest of a book blank. Let you find your meaning there. What can I say that hasn’t already been said a million times before, age after age, since the dawn of human existance? What came after rudimentary language? I am willing to bet it was the development of a way to say more, better, and I want. So say everything, exude honesty in your writes. Your writing sets you free, and gives new meanings, new faces, and a new existence. We must break free of mediocrity!