Positively Glorious!

I’ve never really had a problem with waiting.

I know that many people hate to wait for things– appointments, people, Christmas, whatever. That’s the reason that, as much as I can, I try to be early when I meet with people. I’m afraid that people don’t want to wait for me. At the same time, I sometimes wish people would show up late for meetings with me– even an hour late, I’m okay with that. Waiting, to me, is something of a gift.

The beauty of waiting is that often you have nothing else to do but wait. You usually can’t run some errand or take care of a bit of work or start a new project. You can’t really do anything but wait. That’s probably why many people hate waiting, and why I love it. Waiting is a break, a pause, a space. Waiting is an opening of time where the stretch of experience is expanded, however briefly, into a period of silence, and in that silence there is nothing to do but be.

Waiting is like God saying “Hey, why don’t you take a minute and relax. Chill out and stare off into space. No guilt, there’s nothing else you can do. So hang out and breath.” I love waiting.

Except when I’m waiting for something that might, or might not, be just really, really, horribly bad.

Then waiting pretty much sucks.
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When I was 25, it was a very good year. There were, beautiful girls wearing… nurses uniforms and… telling me to wake up…

“Wake up. Wake up, John.”

Groggy, I opened my eyes to a white and pink room that smelled of a combination of death and the avoidance of death. A few days later, I left the hospital to 30 days convalescence leave and barely another year as a member of the “US Military” club before I would become a member of the much less exiting “US Veteran” club.

The “disabled” branch.

Mere moments later, with the top of my stomach wrapped around my esophagus, I was out of the military.

Off to college I went, assuming– like some blind, stupid fucking idiot– that I would live a long and completely normal life. Continue Reading »

… check. Throttle ignition lock? Check. And we’re descending into Despair in 4… 3… 2…

This is one of those things that sucks to write about, not because it’s hard to write but because the very act of writing it– while it helps me to formulate my thoughts and feelings– proves that it’s true.

And I really really wish that none of this was true.

There’s an onion that I’m peeling in life, lately, with layers upon layers of complicated realities. All of those realities involve a level of despair that I have carried with me for my entire adult life.

This is one of those damn “series” posts, because it’s just too much to write about at once.

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Yesterday, I saw an interesting snippet on Manton Reece’s blog. It’s actually a snippet of a snippet, because it was originally written by Seth Godin:

When I was at MOMA last week, I saw a list of director and artist Tim Burton’s projects. Here’s the guy who’s responsible for some of the most breathtaking movies of his generation, and the real surprise is this: almost every year over the last thirty, he worked on one or more exciting projects that were never green lighted and produced. Every year, he spent an enormous amount of time on failed projects.

This is not at all a surprise to me, because I do the same thing. Continue Reading »