Richard P. Nixon's Blog

All too soon the weekend ended; time to go back to Portora. At least I had my rabbit pelt, though within a few days it wasn’t nearly as soft and fluffy as it had been. Tufts of hair began falling out, and it developed a distinct funk that wasn’t the dirty rugby shorts and socks at the bottom of my locker. I first thought it was the nearby bogs until I took a close look at it.

Terrence Murphy, a sixth former, walked up in Wellies, casually cradling a double-barreled shotgun. “You didn’t cure it, did you?” he said.

“No,” I said meekly.

Terrence shook his head, grinned, and walked away.

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~ The Troubles

Eeyore. Smiling. Awesome.

The other day a friend of mine said he worried that my Sacred Animal Totem was Eeyore. I chuckled because I knew what he meant but also because that assessment is wrong and I’m happy to point that out, not because it means he is wrong but because that’s really not who I am.

For those who may not know who Eeyore is, he’s the perpetually dour character from the Winnie the Pooh series of children’s stories who can never see good in anything. His friends do all kinds of things to help him, but it always falls apart. He’s given up hope because he believes there’s no point in believing otherwise. In that world there really is a cloud of caca around poor Eeyore. He has the worst luck.

Thankfully, Winnie the Pooh isn’t real life. While I believe luck does play a part in our lives, it’s not really a thing that some people have and some don’t. In other words, two otherwise identical people aren’t different by luck. Instead, the luck is due to them already being different. Some say that everyone can be equally lucky if they simply choose to be. Bullshit. That’s like saying that everyone can be an Olympic sprinter if they try hard enough. There are differences in people that cause some to think one way or another, to make choices one way or another, and how they react to the results even is hard-wired to a point. Is that an excuse to say, “fuck it” and give up? Of course not.

Some people seem to live charmed lives blessed in nearly everything they do, but as was posted the other day, we’re comparing our behind-the-scenes with their “highlight reel”. Unfortunately, some don’t understand that and point to the apparent inequities as proof of how they’ve been screwed in life.

In truth almost all that “good fortune” is due to the ability to make good choices. For some that ability comes naturally. For us mere mortals, though, the ability is learned through mistakes and the desire not to repeat them. Touch the hot stove and we get burned. That’s a lesson we should only need to learn once, if at all. If you started early then you have a lot of experience and make deciding on good choices look easy. If, like me, you started late then you have a lot of catching up to do.

Incredibly some people never wise up. They make the same dumb-ass choices over and over without learning from their mistakes or anyone else’s and then cry out how much their lives suck. And they resent anyone who is not suffering as they are even going so far as to look down upon anyone apparently doing better than them with jealous envy, consumed with an insatiable need to tear them down to their level. That’s bullshit, too, of the most pathetic kind because even if you “win” you lose. In fact, everyone loses, and if you’re in a dark and desperate place, it may be game over – know what I mean?

A better idea is to try to pick up on what the perceived “lucky ones” are doing right and apply it to you. It may not be a physical thing but an idea, and you may have to tweak it to make it work. For example, the think happy, be happy mantra. Where I’m at right now this just isn’t possible. However, tweaking it with a dollop of stop, drop, and roll converts it to something I can do. I might read something that makes me angry enough to want to respond, but before I do I stop and think about whether there’s anything to be gained, and since there’s almost always not, I drop the thought and roll on. At least I try. Other times it’s quicker and easier to post a raw, zero-thought rant, like digging out a thorn you can’t ignore. It may be more painful in the short term, but getting the damned thing out is sometimes a triumph enough to warrant parading it around for all to see. Best of all, the irritation goes away almost instantly.

My friend who made the Eeyore comment wrote that he sometimes creates eleven drafts of rants about the things that irritate, annoy, worry, and trouble him. He tosses that and then posts something positive. I chuckled at that because I used to write and rewrite drafts and responses, too. Eventually, though, I found that after enough revisions the reason for composing the piece faded away. About the same time I discovered that posting a raw rant accomplished the same thing as all those revisions but in much less time and without all the fuss.

My memoir is crawling along at a snail’s pace and that bothers me greatly. I’ve been working on it for nearly twenty years now – a very long time, and I’ve little to show for my effort, and that bothers me greatly. I think about how long it’s taken me to get this far, and I map out how far I still have to go, and that bothers me greatly, too, and I’m concerned that when I finally make it to where I’m wanting to go, getting there will no longer matter.

I could declare the memoir done and put it out there, and then pump out some sci-fi books, but I’d know the memoir wasn’t what I wanted it to be. You know what though? Instead of dwelling on all that concern, I do the best I can to emulate my friend and think about what could I possibly do to change the map? He asked me once what it is that I wanted most, and I answered, “To unleash my awesomeness.” He may have misunderstood my comment, but that was the truth without sarcasm, cynicism, or any hint of Eeyoreism. That is how I’m going to change my map. That is what I need most.

And for the record my memoir is going to be kick-ass awesome. 😉