Take a second look

That familiar place
the one you stepped on a thousand times
sowed your dreams
watched them grow
turn dry and brown
wither away
you watered their corpses with hope
that they will firm up
take root
and thrive.

But there are other plots
other cracks
other lush trees
They may not have sprung from you
but you can climb to their peaks
dive in their depths
swing from their branches
dance with their leafy jewels
and feed their roots with your worn ambition.

It Gets Better?

Constantly, people tell one another "it gets better" and "everything will work out." But what gets better, and what will work out? Life. Life is what they say "gets better" and will "work out." And they are right, life will "work out" to be death, but is that necessarily "better?"

On one hand, death solves your problems by removing you from the situation... the whole situation. But it also wipes away all your hopes: that app you wanted to create, that bakery you wanted to set up, those songs you half wrote and shoved in a shoebox under your bed... So if you want to continue on, you must ask yourself, "What could be better in my life and how do I make those things better?"

If you are like me, you want a hand to come out of the sky and lift you up into the heavens. Then you can chop the hand off from the wrist, fall back to earth and set up shop, claiming to have "God's hand" and sell tickets for $20 a pop. This is called Prince Charming syndrome, and sorry, but it seems to rarely happen. Also, it usually ends up with you sleeping with a creepy old man(no offense Herm, but you do make those eyes at me sometimes...) Anyway, you have to do all the hard work.

So identify something you love and work hard to educate yourself on that topic. Then realize halfway through that you thought you loved that thing when you started out, but more and more of you hair falls out as you explore deeper and deeper into the depths of the discipline. But you still finish your degree and apply for different jobs in "your field."

Then you get a "temp job" while searching for your "real job" and jump from being a professional doormat to feeling like used toilet paper by the time you get home after a near 2-hour public transit commute, fighting through the crowd. You start all chipper, saying "ok, I'm gonna do what I wanna do now that I'm home!" and you are productive for the first few years.

Then you realize how long it's been and no "real jobs" have replied to you, and your "temp job" has become ingrained in your daily routine. You dread waking up early each morning, trying to muster up a smile for the bus driver as you flash your pass, putting up a facade of "I give a damn" to everyone you meet during the day, and coming home too mentally exhausted to care about smelling that rose you saw a few days ago in the back yard. But it's probably dead by now, anyway.