Trying to get myself back on the wagon for good, and my conflicted thinking is telling me it'll never work. The power of positive thinking does help sometimes, but the real problem lies in never having enough money to finance the simple things that keep my psyche within the parameters of what society might deem to be a reasonably measured level of stability.
Sometimes I wish I weren't so highly literate. It's not like I'll ever find the time to focus on music or writing when I'm busy working ten hour days to afford my cigar smoking habit, and nobody likes a smarty pants. I've never been able to find the conviction to hang onto any one job, and I've had scores of them since graduating from high school - mostly the types of jobs that anyone with little more than a grade six education could perform.
My parents never really took my dreams seriously, and always suggested more practical avenues than music and literature. If it weren't for my folks, however, I'd probably be in jail by now.
I don't have a calendar and I never wear a watch. I'm always running late and cannot be counted on for appointments. I change my mind frequently, and break previously made engagements to sit here alone, smoking and thinking about futility. I've never been much of a team player, but I love to entertain others.
Yesterday, I crawled out of bed around eleven in the morning, and immediately began working on a new video after brewing some coffee and making a cigarette out of the remnants of yesterday's cigar stub. The whole process of video production I find thoroughly enjoyable, and the narrative I was concocting as I went along was humorous and strangely poetic. Six hours of inserting subtitles later, I was nearly ready to wrap it up and make any final revisions before publishing the piece to my hard drive when the Windows Movie Maker program decided to crash.
Murphy's Law, it might seem, was in full effect. Anyone who's taken any sort of introductory computing class knows of course that one of the cardinal rules of computing is to routinely save one's progress. Why couldn't it have crashed when I was only two hours into it instead of six? It's almost as though the computer sensed I was nearing the finish line and made an executive decision without my permission to scrap the whole project.
I resolved to make the reconstruction even more humorous and more poetic than the one I'd just lost - if I ever find the time.
My parents and some of my friends are under the impression that since I "don't work" that I should have "nothing but time." Now, I'm not trying to convince anyone that my videos are necessarily worthy of critical acclaim, but even making a crappy video all on your own is fairly time consuming. First you need to get the source footage, then you need to edit the video and line it up with an audio track. Typing out the subtitles. Before you know it, you're eight hours in. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother with it at all, but somehow think it'll earn me some measure of recognition one day.
I don't have any children of my own, and I haven't been in a serious relationship for over six years. The white picket fence and a couple of yard apes getting into trouble at every turn hasn't been, and likely will never be my thing. I'm too paranoid to be a parent. I suppose I could abandon my dreams of rock stardom, go to work every day on time, hang onto some thankless job until I'm sixty eight, get a wife, a forty year mortgage, and obsess over keeping the house tidy - clipping coupons, and washing the car on the weekends - but it's not me - not yet anyway.
I intend to be filthy rich some day, and women have a most wonderful way of encroaching on such ambitions. Suddenly an expensive vacation is in order, or a plethora of specialized products you never even knew existed are becoming daily necessities. Yoga classes, fancy clothes, pet grooming, hair and skin care essentials. Maybe it's just Edmonton chicks... trips to the pharmacy that once numbered no more than twice a year during your lonely, useless period of bachelorhood are now a daily occurrence. The $50, 000 you had earmarked to prudently invest in gold bullion is now in the hands of your brother-in-law the commerce flunky who thinks that mutual funds and life insurance are "a great way to go." No thanks.
When I was fresh out of high school, I got a summer job working at a trucking company for nine bucks an hour. It was a reasonable wage back then considering how many of my peers were earning little more than half of what I was making in their various retail engagements. The job was tough, but I was nineteen, and embraced the macho element of being a trucker. Anyway, fast forward just twelve years, and fifteen bucks an hour hardly cuts it anymore. With my low overhead such a rate of pay is slightly more than ample, but I can forget about ever driving a car or buying a home with such paltry wages.
Positive thinking is all fine and dandy, but if as some predict we are about to see our food and gasoline prices double at a time when employers feel a need to cut back wages, I doubt there will be much room for any sort of rational discourse in the minds of the hungry masses.
Sometimes I feel inclined to pop in to The Wee Book Inn - usually on the rare occasion that I happen to be walking past (though I think I sort-of had it in my head to wind up there) and see how the wee in-store -kitty-cat is faring whilst I'm passively checking out the reference section for stellar deals on dictionaries or atlases. Most often, I'll purchase no titles whatsoever, if not from the classic's section. This time, though, I did happen to make a purchase called, "Anniversary Reflections" - 232 pages of stories and B&W pictures of Edmonton and it's people-folk between the years of ‘38 and ‘88 by The Edmonton Photo Club. For someone like me, this is a great find that only cost a single dollar plus G.S.T., and it's in near-mint condition to boot!
