Election Day 2024 is about two weeks away now and it feels like counting down the days to the next world-changing event I’ll experience in my lifetime. I’m just so accustomed to things going sideways that I expect that no matter who wins there will be fallout and I’ll get to watch people be their absolute worst until it settles down.
It is my latest ready-made excuse to sit and wait for something to happen, and paired with the necessity for relaxation caused by fractured ribs, I feel useless. This feeling extends to my creative work and strangles the motivation from me and I just want the time to be past so I can know the world I’ll live in for the next few years.
I don’t love feeling this way but it’s where I’m at and there’s no sense in trying to pretend I’m anything I’m not. I’m not alright but that’s alright.
While on a trip in Scotland, I managed to misstep my way into a hell of a fall and fractured three ribs. The moment it happened I was sure that something terrible had occurred and the resulting pain made me question whether or not to test the “free” healthcare available in the U.K.
I opted to go the route of all of the stubborn men who had died before me and gave myself some time to assess the pain and if it was proceeding to wane. Once I returned to the States, I made an appointment with my local clinic and got an x-ray. The x-ray indicated that I had fractured ribs 8, 9, and 10 on the left side. They informed me that if I was concerned, I could utilize a referral to orthopedics to review options. If nothing had improved at the first and second week mark, I decided that I would take this under advisement and see ortho to be safe.
Now that one full week has passed, I can safely say that my pain level is tolerable with acetaminophen and ibuprofen and taking it easy. Sleep is possible now and it’s only certain actions that cause things to flare up and remind me I am still healing. By the second week, I honestly believe the painful portion of the healing will have passed, and the rest will be happening without my knowledge.
I didn’t need any reminders of my mortality and how close we are at any moment to the most excruciating pain imaginable, but the message was received loud and clear. The initial moments after impact had me comparing the pain to anything I have ever experienced and noting that the fall was equal or worse than any of those events. This includes recovery from open abdominal surgery and the initial shock of my hip replacement. It was that kind of pain for days, and I never felt sure that I could avoid it.
The prognosis for rib fractures is fairly good, and I am sure that mine will be fine once they have healed up. I will see to this with a follow-up after several weeks and request images to confirm things healed as expected.
I’m glad it wasn’t anything more serious and I’m bummed that it basically ruined a couple of days at the end of the trip, but the bright side is that everything will be alright.
Only through the persistent reminders of others can I understand that I can live a life that isn’t centered entirely around the goals of those around me. This is an epiphany that people should have at some point early in life so they can build what they want.
I started off by choosing the most obvious path that was laid before me, not realizing that I would shelve this epiphany for decades. Now I’m 42 and as I have alluded to many times, I am just now starting to understand this fundamental truth.
The life I want is attainable, but I first need to decide what it looks like. I find this to be as daunting as I would have as a young man because it is the first time I have understood this to be true. In reality, I could have done this all along. I could have abandoned the easy path in front of me in favor of a course of my own design, but being a young man at the time, I saw no advantage in such an unknown and potentially risky choice. So I took the easy way and convinced myself that I should do the same given any chance in the future.
I take responsibility for all of those choices now as a man who has decades more life experience to show me that even a road of easy turns can lead you to a dead end. That is where I have found myself. A long stretch of road sits behind me and a dead end before me that I coasted to get to. There are an unlimited number of other roads surrounding me, stretching in every direction imaginable. Every one of them is new to me, so I lack any understanding of the difficulties they may pose. So I am staring down a new life that I’m starting from scratch with the potential lives of many different stripes.
I am left to discard the life I have known because the baggage I continue to drag along from this chapter is a burden I no longer wish to bear. When I say “from scratch” I genuinely mean I am starting from zero. This means that I have innumerable and unknown challenges, but I will, perhaps for the first time, be entirely in charge of my future. There is no easy path. There is nothing approaching certainty.
But it will all be as I choose it, and for myself alone. So that I may become who I was meant to be all along.
I am sure there will be millions of posts today about the events that occurred on September 11, 2001 and I will be one of the voices in the chorus. It has been 23 years since that fateful day and those of us who are still around have seen more than our fair share of shit since then.
All of that extra experience thrown onto a pile of bad times takes nothing away from the memories I have of that sunny day in September. The horror as it all unfolded and the understanding that it would be our next excuse to send soldiers off to die in the name of vanquishing a foe that we helped to create. The fine details have become smooth with time, but the feelings I experienced remain as clear as ever.
Something fundamental changed in me that day and it fostered a healthy skepticism about the government and its intentions for the citizenry. I was skeptical and remain so to this day, bolstered by the many deliberate and unintentional missteps since. I will never trust them and that’s fine, that isn’t what today is about. I don’t want to feel anything whatsoever about our government because they just go to work and do their job every day, but that isn’t the world we live in.
Today is about remembering the fallen and feeling the familiar sting of a squarely landed blow to our collective jaw. We haven’t been the same country since, and many of us would commit a litany of offenses to return to the one we lived in on September 10, 2001. I don’t know a single person who was personally affected by this tragedy other than vague secondhand accounts, but that doesn’t stop it from hurting and it probably never will. It was the general human suffering that was on display for all to be seen.
The same kind of suffering we are seeing televised from all around the world now in places like Gaza and Ukraine. Pointless bloodshed for sociopolitical gain. Posturing to look tough while civilians are being bombed in appalling numbers. Instead of making the reasonable calls for sanity and a cease fire in every direction, we stoke the flames of war because we haven’t learned a fucking thing. We deserve whatever comes next based on our conduct and it doesn’t look promising for the world.
To those personally affected by the events on September 11, 2001, I extend my deepest condolences and the wish that some day you may find the peace you lost on that day.
Yesterday I woke up feeling a little off and by the middle of the day I was in a full-on state of depression. Nothing could get me out of the valley I was in and it felt as though I was determined to stay there.
Today is a much better day but the root cause of this foray into despair remains. I have recently come to fully grasp the state of my life and how it has essentially been brought back to the beginning of adulthood. That is to say that in some sense, I am right back to feeling like I did fresh out of high school. I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life so I punted and took the simplest path forward, to take part in the family business. I figured I’d get going and take a new path once one presented itself, but no path ever appeared so I maintained course.
Decades later, I had given so much of myself to the business that I could hardly recognize myself outside the context of that endeavor. And the rest is the history I’m trying to pick myself up from still. Two years ago now the primary reason for keeping the doors open died, so I pulled the plug on the business and resigned to take some time to figure my life out.
I’ve been spending most of that time shifting my service from the needs of the business to those of the household I’m a part of and the family I live with. But in doing so I’ve traded one evil I know for another, making zero progress on determining what my actual purpose is and focusing on those needs. Now I feel it is time to pull back on those efforts and truly focus on myself to establish who I am and what I want to be doing with my life.
At 42.
I realize it is somewhere in the middle of the potential game, and that many folks have made their greatest works after even 50. But that doesn’t stop me from feeling daunted by the prospect of starting from zero. I feel the same things I did as that naive young man, but with the wisdom to know that one fact remains true. I am capable of anything I set my mind to. It is that old nugget of inspiration that my folks gave me like so many supportive parents did for their kids. I honestly believe it’s still true, because I have seen first hand what a steady practice can accomplish in any field. Greatness is seldom spontaneous, it’s normally the work of many years behind the scenes.
The work I have been doing all of these years behind the scenes primarily revolves around my writing and I have to acknowledge it as my most profound gift. Transmuting that effort into money takes a lot of work, but the payoff is worth it for the way it makes me feel.
Travel is the other thing that brings me to life just thinking about it, so it follows that I need to write about travels. I also need to approach it as a business and make it the bulk of what I spend my days doing, the way I did with the traditional business I helped run with the family. I don’t need to go for broke, I’m already there.
I consider myself a person who is able to experience the creative works of others deeply. I commit to a complete understanding of the work and the motivations that brought it to life, and I am utterly fascinated by other creatives. This extends to every conceivable medium and it is an amazing time to be alive because the sheer amount of content to consume could serve as a full time job.
Now if there could just be a full time job that allows me to consume creative works non-stop, I’d be good to go for life. I could spend my time immersed in the worlds others dared to create and share. I could promote the works I feel the strongest about and hope that doing so could encourage others to bring their creations to the world.
I believe that the creativity we all possess in some form or another is the primordial spark used to light the flame of consciousness burning in all of us. This spark lit a fire in me decades ago and the fire has never went out, at times consuming everything. Yet other times the flames will be absent but a bed of hot coals remains ready for new fuel indefinitely. So long as I breathe, I continue to provide one of the key components to this infinite combustion.
I want my life to be about the pursuit of creativity. The creativity in others is every bit as crucial to me as my own, and I want to champion this superpower that so many of us possess. How I go about doing that in a way that helps me pay the bills is still just beyond my understanding, but I feel it is possible. It is a task that I am certain I’d be great at, and it would thrill me to no end.
Now that I’m able to stomach the news cycle again, I clicked on an article on NPR that was detailing the polling for the presidential election. The default map displayed is referred to as the “Electoral Weight” map and it shows how much of an effect each state has on the overall election.
It looks something like this, stolen without any sort of permission from NPR:
Pretty self-explanatory, right?
Those of us out here in the middle country are small-to-medium sized squares, almost exclusively dark red. This represents the states that the GOP can reliably count on securing in November. That should come as no surprise when you look at the states in question, many of which push some of the most backward and regressive policies the country is capable of. Perhaps a more important detail is that you can see with few exceptions that most of these states have much less of an effect on the electoral college than the ones on either coast.
I just think it is a fitting picture of how little the concerns of Middle America actually register when it comes to decisions of leadership. This is reflected in the words and actions of both campaigns as they blow tons of cash in the “yellow” states in order to persuade as many independent and undecided voters as they can. Granted, you can make an argument that Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are all considered Middle America, but they are exceptions, not rules. But for those of us who aren’t conservative and Middle American, it can feel like we are being abandoned.
I completely understand that it is sound strategy to go for broke in the states that actually decide the election, and I have come to terms with the fact that I don’t live in one of those states. I live where we routinely go back in time 50 years to a simpler, more openly discriminatory state.
It should be noted that all of this is educated guessing based on poll aggregation on today’s date. So if the election were to happen tomorrow on Tuesday the 27th of August, it might turn out like the map shown. This is just data as it stands, and it should be treated with a healthy dose of doubt. I am honestly amazed that there are so many states that are effectively a toss-up, and I’m confident that this election will be another that won’t be decided for several days or even weeks.
I am also confident that if Donald Trump loses, he will refuse to accept defeat. This is not a statement of praise, it is an admonition. He refuses to believe any result that involves him losing in anything, and he’s been that way his entire life. I am not confident I know what will happen next, but I am sure that it will have his face on every news channel and publication for months. The exact thing he strives for to his core will be his if for a brief time: attention.
If he wins, I fear it could be the end of democracy. And although it can feel as though democracy died decades ago out here in the middle, I know that it is alive and well elsewhere in the country.
I spend entirely too much time in my own head bemoaning the direction my life has taken. None of this does me any good but it can be a hard trap to free yourself from.
I am 42 and I need to figure out what I want my life to be about because all it had been about for decades is no longer relevant. That life doesn’t exist any more, so I am left to build one from nothing. I am unmoored and drifting and I am ready to right this proverbial ship once more.
The nothingness is daunting, though. I fail to see an ideal direction to take so I do nothing. I focus on a task or series of tasks, look up, and hours have passed. No meaningful progress has been made in achieving traction, and I feel once again discouraged. The days blend together in a meaningless cycle and it makes me question whether this is all there is or not.
There are so many different lives being lived by others right now and I can’t help but think that many of them are waking up to a dream every day. I would be happy with that being the case for any portion of time.
Some days are better than others. Today isn’t great.
There was recently a security breach somewhere in the government which exposed the private information of every man, woman, and child that holds a social security number in the United States. This puts over 300 million people at risk of fraud as this information can be used to apply for credit of all sorts.
The press coverage on this has been small thus far, with a little blurb here and there well down the list of links in my news feed. But it should be one of the first items that everyone sees.
I am astonished that this information was stored anywhere that a group could illegally gain access to all of it. It feels like the sort of thing that should only be available locally at the facility used to house the computers that store it all. The kind of data that was compromised should never be facing the public at all because this was inevitable.
The information must be worth billions of dollars on the dark web, and I’m sure whichever group is responsible for the breach has already made a mint.
There was a twenty on the sidewalk in front of the gas station and as luck would have it I saw it first. I reached down to pick it up and inspect it, looking around for a possible owner but there didn’t appear to be anyone missing it.
A few people to the side were talking and noticed this happening, congratulating me on my good fortune.
“Did you find any more?” – A man broke from his conversation to ask with a chuckle.
“No. Why, do you need it?” – I wasn’t really asking.
I walked over, placed the bill on his motorcycle seat, and proceeded to go about my day. The man looked at me in astonishment and he may have even thanked me but I wasn’t around for any of that.
A completely random event reminded me that the $20 didn’t matter to me. It wasn’t mine and it wasn’t that man’s either, but I have enough that it didn’t bother me to give it away. I feel fortunate to have everything I already do and what’s more I have reached that elusive goal of enough.
Most of us have a gnawing sense that we need more, always more. But if I can live in relative comfort with the occasional chance to travel, that’s plenty for me. Money is a means to an end and we must guard ourselves from letting it become a god we spend our lives worshipping.
I didn’t need reminded but the world conspired to do so anyway.
