What’s your problem? I think I know. You see it in the mirror every morning: temptation and doubt hip to hip inside your head. You know it’s not supposed to be like this. But you drank the Kool-Aid and dressed yourself up in someone else’s life.

You’re haunted because you remember having something more. With each drag of the razor you ask yourself why you piss your blood into another man’s cup. Working at the job he offered, your future is between his thumb and forefinger. And the necessary accessories, the proclamations of success you thought gave you stability provide your boss security. Your debt encourages acquiescence, the heavy mortgage makes you polite.

Aren’t you sick of being tempted by an alternative lifestyle, but bound by chains of your own choosing? Of the gnawing doubt that the college graduate, path of least resistance is the right way for you - for ever? Each weekend you prepare for the two weeks each summer when you wake up each day and really ride, or climb; the only imperative being to go to bed tired. When booming thermals shoot you full of juice and your Vario shrieks 7m/sec, you wonder if the lines will pop. The risk pares away life’s trivia. Up there, sucking down the thin cumulus, the earth looks small, the boss even smaller, and you wish it could go on forever. But a wish is all it will ever be.

Because the ground is hard. Monday morning is harsh. You wear the hangover of your weekend rush under a strict and proper suit and tie. You listen to NPR because it’s inoffensive, PFC: Politically Fucking Correct. Where’s the counter-cultural righteousness that had you flirting with Bad Religion and the vintage Pistols tape over the weekend? On Monday you eat frozen food and live the homogenized city experience. But Sunday you thought about cutting your hair very short. You wanted a little more volume and wondered how out of place you looked in the Sub Pop Music Store. Flipping through the import section, you didn’t recognize any of the bands. KMFDM? It stands for Kill Mother Fucking Depeche Mode. Didn’t you know? How could you not?

Tuesday you look at the face in the mirror again. It stares back, accusing. How can you get by on that one weekly dose? How can you be satisfied by the artifice of these experiences? Why should your words mean anything? They aren’t learned by heart and written in blood. If you cannot grasp the consciousness-altering experience that real mastery of these disciplines proposes, of what value is your participation? The truth is pointless when it is shallow. Do you have the courage to live with the integrity that stabs deep?

Use the mirror to cut to the heart of things and uncover your true self. Use the razor to cut away what you don’t need. The life you want to live has no recipe. Following the recipe got you here in the first place:

Mix one high school diploma with an undergrad degree and a college sweetheart. With a whisk (or a whip) blend two cars, a poorly built house in a cul de sac, and fifty hours a week working for a board that doesn’t give a shit about you. Reproduce once. Then again. Place all ingredients in a rut, or a grave. One is a bit longer than the other. Bake thoroughly until the resulting life is set. Rigid. With no way out. Serve and enjoy.

“You see your face reflected there in a sweating brow, you hate what you see, but what can be done when there’s no way out, no way out?”
The Chameleons, “Intrigue in Tangiers”

But there is a way out. Live the lifestyle instead of paying lip service to the lifestyle. Live with commitment. With emotional content. Live whatever life you choose honestly. Give up this renaissance man, dilettante bullshit of doing a lot of different things (and none of them very well by real standards). Get to the guts of one thing; accept, without casuistry, the responsibility of making a choice. When you live honestly, you can not separate your mind from your body, or your thoughts from your actions.

“If you really want to hurt them and their children not yet born tell them the truth always”.
Henry Rollins, from the book See a Grown Man Cry

Tell the truth. First, to yourself. Say it until it hurts. Learn the reality of your own selfishness. Quit living for other people at the expense of your own self, you’re not really alive. You live in the land of denial - and they say the view is pretty a long as you remain asleep.

Well it’s time to WAKE THE FUCK UP!

So do it. Wake up. When you drink the coffee tomorrow, take it black and notice it. Feel the caffeine surge through you. Don’t take it for granted. Use it for something. Burn the Grisham books. Sell the bad CDs. Mariah Carey, Dave Mathews and N Sync aren’t part of the soundtrack where you’re going.

Cut your hair. Don’t worry about the gray. If you’re good at what you do, no one cares what you look like. Go to the weight room. Learn the difference between actually working out and what you’ve been doing. Live for the Iron and the fresh air. Punish your body to perfect your soul. Kick the habit of being nice to everyone you meet. Do they deserve it? Say “no” more often.

Quit posturing at the weekly parties. Your high pulse rate, your 5.12s and quick time on the Slickrock Trail don’t mean shit to anybody else. These numbers are the measuring sticks of your own progress; show, don’t tell. Don’t react to the itch with a scratch. Instead, learn it. Honor the necessity of both the itch and the scratch. But a haircut and a new soundtrack do not a modern man make. As long as you have a safety net you act without commitment. You’ll go back to your old habits once you meet a little resistance. You need the samurai’s desperateness and his insanity.

Burn the bridge. Nuke the foundation. Back yourself up against a wall. Have an opinion one way or the other, get off the fence and rip it up. Cut yourself off so there is no going back. Once you’re committed the truth will come out. You ask about security? What you need is uncertainty. What you need is confusion; something that forces you to reinvent yourself, a whip to drive you harder.

“I never try anything - I just do it. Want to try me?
White Zombie, “Thunder Kiss”

In Dune, Frank Herbert called it “the attitude of the knife,” cut off what’s incomplete and say “now it has finished, for it has ended there.” So finish it, and walk away, forward. Only acts undertaken with commitment have meaning. Only your best effort matters. Life is a Meritocracy, with death as the auditor. Inconsistency, incompetence and lies are all cut short by that final word. Death will change you if you can’t change yourself.

“If I can change one, then I can change two. If I can change two, then I can change four. If I can change four, then I can change eight. If I can change eight, then I can change.”
One Minute Silence, “If I Can Change”

Thank You G.D.

Read this three times, printed it out, read it again…extremely affecting.

Read it twice, ended with “wow” both times. Thanks.

Wow.  Just….wow.  Strong stuff.  Thanks for posting that GD, I’ll be chewing on it for quite some time.

Good stuff. Knowing that Mark Twight likes to spend 72 hours at atime hanging from really high very cold places, makes more sense now…

Those of you who have had the pleasure of “Jonesworthy”, this is it’s author- no slacking !

Makes sense, as courage comes to mind in reading this.

Inspiring and depressing at the same time.  He brings up great points and definately gets to the heart of some questions/concerns/thoughts that I have had for some time.  His recipe was so dead on it was scarry.

I hope that some day I can realize that type of dedication.

The problem is too many people read this and are not bothered by it.

Does anyone else find themself on autopilot some days? I want each day to be an experience, not a date on the calendar. But to do so is an active profession. It is my hope that when I say, “time is flying,” it is because I’m having fun, not because I slept through it all.

Many years of “conventional” living created the illusion that there was only one way. And during one lengthy period, I was forced to operate solely in survival mode. Still, did becoming responsible really have to suck the life out of me? Somewhere along the line, my desire to achieve excellence (not for others, but personal excellence) was lost. I think I got so caught up in being a “good” person, I forgot to become a “better” person.

Emerging from the fog of complacency is arduous, at best. It takes discipline, and the setbacks can be many. There is pain and fear involved in the “cutting away” process. A recent excruciating event has driven this fact home to me like a well-honed knife. But the renewing of the mind and spirit that inevitably takes place is reward in itself. I am not the same person I was a short year ago. In many ways, I am regressing, but in the best possible way. I look forward to tomorrow, and next month and next year. Not in the passive manner I used to, but in anticipation and wonder as I am learning to focus on what really matters: my faith, my husband, my children, my true friends and (much to my surprise) me.

So at the risk of sounding angry, I say screw the worry, screw the perfectionism, screw anyone who would me make me feel like less, and screw politeness (not to be confused with manners). I am. I will be.  Any words to be added to those sentences will come from me and me alone.

Atlas

Shrugged

140 views, only 10 responses (some by GD)

What do you think of this essay? I know it’s long and scary, but it had to evoke something.

GD, now that I know what Atlas Shrugged means, I think you may be onto something.

At the risk of getting scorned…
I understand the concept, think it is very thought provoking- but do not relate, at all.
I am doing what I love to do, I love my husband and family, I don’t watch read or listen to things because everyone else is doing it and I do not feel oppressed or violent about my life or percieved “constraints”. 
The perspective seems a bit like a teenage rant to me.

I agree wholeheartedly with the atlas shrugged philosophy, but did not see the parallel… explain maybe i will.
Just my take.

Also at the risk of being scorned:
It seems a bit self-serving.  I read this as an essay devoted to justifying how one chooses to live thier life (complete with well chosen quotes).  Why the need to justify? 

I have not read Atlas Shrugged so I can’t comment on that correlation.

Twitching did not have the impact on my wife that it did on me. From the way my wife described the quotes it was the writing style of the author that affected her or did not affect her take on Twitching.

It would be interesting to know if being a man or woman would have any difference on the interpretation and impact that Twitching was meant to have…...

My reaction to it was based on the fact that I, too, love my life and the people in it. But I have made a habit of allowing peripheral people and things to distract and detract from that. I expended so much energy worrying about pleasing others and, in the process, subverted my own needs and desires. This negatively effected everyone in my life, especially those I care about and who care about me. This article caught me at an unusual time in my life, as I was at a point of reassessing the importance of some of my standard behaviors. The tone spoke to me, because it echoed my recent thoughts with regard to shutting out the b.s. expectations of others. I know this sounds a bit beligerent. But a dose of beligerence is exactly what I’ve been needing. I am not unhappy, because I have no reason to be. And my past choices that allowed anyone to change that were grave errors. I am not disgruntled. For the first time in years, I am living my life, being really present in it without the self-inflicted obligation of keeping everyone else (that is people for whom I’m not responsible) happy. The list I gave in my prior post are the people who really matter to me. I may add or subtract from that list, but no one else will ever be allowed to do so again. I told my husband recently that I have had an epiphany of sorts. I don’t know if everyone will like the new me, but that’s not my problem. This is a boldy unusual statement for me to be making. I’m charting new waters here but so far it has been a freeing experience. And while I can’t credit this article for the change, it did speak to me.

Not having read Atlas Shrugged, I can only go by the condensed version which was given to me. The parallel I drew was the desire of dedicated individuals to throw off the oppression of expectation and incorrect thinking. That is what I am trying to do.