supreme confidence, and other crimes of passion

for once, everything in my head makes sense. i know who i am, where i fit in, why i'm here, who i'm here for, and why i do the things i do. i make sense to next to nobody, which makes perfect sense to me. you say money, i say passion. you say sacrifice, i say but, why? you say stay strong, i say i've been pretending to lift these weights for years. you say bitchy, i say yep. you say funny, i say packaging. you say alimony, i say unemployment check. you say crazy, i say "if you say so." you say "i get it," i say you either do or you don't. you say writer, i say thinker. you say parent, i say mentor. you say shame, i say "nah." the tiny little bread trail of memories i left for myself seemingly haphazardly along the path i've been stumbling along all these years just jumped out of the bushes and reminded me of the one thing i know most for sure: everything i know.

you say "get a job, " i say "this is my job."

last week i was ispeaking with fospo (yep, back to that one. can't come up with an appropriate title for his majesty going forward. suggestions welcome!). we were having a shitty little text battle when i childishly told him to enjoy his run to nowhere. texting by iphone whilst jogging? in case he needed to hold a meeting in his mobile office? likely. at any rate, his shitty retort to me was something on the order of, "that's amazing coming from the king of nowhere."

what was intended as a lead bullet hit me like a golden arrow. the amateur archer turned alchemist.

to understand failure, you must be very intimate with risk. to be intimate with risk means you respect the passionate urge while holding no grudge against whatever outcome ensues. if you take no risks, you can have no failures. if you have no genuine life-forming failures, your capacity to understand that visceral place that drives one to risk for the sake of conviction, but without the promise of reward, is limited. deeply. you can have no empathy for those who challenge risk to cough up its rewards. by the time we meet our well-known successes, their years of failure to succeed have been cleared off their value bankruptcy statement and the ordinary man reveres him as if he were a success all his life. and maybe he was. but not if he didn't think so no matter the size or style of his "failure."

the only value in failing can be discovered once you've managed to get back up only to do it again and again and again. because once you've learned to fall, you start paying better attention on the way down and pretty soon you're just a stunt double to yourself and falling's just a job. when you fall publicly, voluntarily, that's clearly some stunt double footage. most of us like to keep our most glorious failures trapped in a vault, and that is if we have any to hide in the first place.

this is what i do. i fall down. i get up. i type about it and then stir the simple syrup of irony into my musky cauldron of tragic lemon compote and see if i can convince anybody it's kool aid. drinking of my cruel aid means that you might just have it in you create to that very delicate pairing of anchovies, cold fruity sugar water, and the ground-floor perspective of just punishment for committing a crime of passion -- which is what taking a big risk is when the motivations are genuine. it's some fun shit. they call it life.

you know how they say there's no way to fly if your feet never leave the ground? you say 36 years, i say running start.

xod

* * * * *

all that said, inertia outside my brain is the order of the moment.
granny's birthday was tuesday. we're celebrating alone this weekend.
my restauRANTing associate was out of town for a week. that eff'd our flow. both kids have been sick -- two days of much-needed mother/mentoring. i missed those mofos because i had to move the last of my worldly possessions out of the house that hasn't been a home for a year and some pocket change. what was supposed to be a 4-hour scenario turned into an unfortunate, 3-day test of my will, but now we're really bursting at the seams of this little apartment. the scapegoats kids are getting walk-up fever and so am i. we're ready to find our home together. it feels like its coming soon, but only because it's been getting nearly all of my attention lately. the house is in foreclosure and the banks are suddenly on my johnson, so the divorce finalization is on hiatus, apparently. i'm sick of ex-husband euphemisms, legal bills, those without inspiration, being root-bound in tiny spaces where there's no room to grow, and wondering what i'd be by now if i had taken my life's biggest risk sooner. cookies are calling. crabby chic couture is calling. restaurant smoke jumping is calling. jacket copy is calling. getting the fuck on with it is calling. the professional amateur is standing by to take those calls. but not until she returns all the ones she's been dodging for the past year, finds a home and gets all moved in.

30 days or less? a ridiculous goal. which makes it totally worth pursuing.