Incite Full

I’m not sure if it’s the worry about my parents, stress at work, being incredibly busy as of late, or something completely different but weird things have been happening to me lately. I’ll go to sleep and dream very random, yet realistic dreams. The thing is, when I wake up, they are so real and undreamlike it is difficult for me to know if those things really happened or if they did not. I’ve been asking the people involved in my dreams if it’s really happened or not, and I’m getting some odd looks.

Now, I have been working on dream recall. It’s the first step to experience lucid dreaming, something which has been an interest of mine for a while, i’ve simply not applied myself to it. I’m working on recall and dream recognition in tandem, and if this is it working it’s actuall rather frightening to get used to at first. I really do feel like i’m losing part of my mind.

The dreams are about work, or friends, or both and they are very real conversations, perhaps bits and pieces of my waking life mingling and conversing with my unconscious. Not much unlike the Raw Shark Texts. Whatever it is, it has my stomach in knots during the day, and somewhat excited for my dreams at night. Not because they are great, but because it’s kind of weird not knowing what’s real and what is not. I guess I’m living my real own Tyler Durden. Could I wake up as someone else? Would that be such a bad thing?

As will happen when I’m writing, I got distracted by a hockey game and completely lost the train of thought… I’ll just end it here.

“If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.”

The past few weeks of my life have looked more like a beginners attempt at pogosticks than a finely tuned (german) automobile. Which is to say I’ve been goofing off and not taking much of anything seriously. As a kid I still have this luxury- no one depends on me aside from people at work and I’m fairly professional there. As professional as one can be wearing an ironic T-shirt, shorts, and shaving more times than socks I wear on a weekly basis. And I hate shaving.

My father, unfortunately, does not have that luxury. For 45 some odd years of his working life, he’s been in control of his future. He decided to work here or there, buy this or that, and take vacations to where and when he wanted. All that has changed, and it’s been a struggle for him.  Hell it’d be a struggle for anyone, but I think he’s taking it in stride very well- better than I believe I could.

But it’s hard watching the ones you love grow worried and think themselves into a corner. I wish I could say something to him to make it all better, to make him worry less. When I was applying to colleges early in my junior year of high school, he saw me slacking and, afraid I was throwing away my potential, took me aside and showed what could only be called tough love. And it worked, I got off my ass and got to school and did well from there on. My point is, I wish I could do something to have such a profound effect on the man’s life. He’s given me so much and I can’t give anything back except for a listening ear and what little wisdom I have in comparison to his.

Here’s hoping it’ll do the trick, and if not… at least take his mind off of things for a while.

I knew better than to ask the question; I asked anyways, didn’t I?

I don’t know what makes me happy.

And it’s that which makes me wonder about the next 70 years of my life.

A friend of mine said yesterday that he felt bad for me. That everyone was expecting different things from me, and I couldn’t make all of them happy. Hell I couldn’t make any of them happy; I couldn’t even make myself happy. That was the worst part of it all, coming to (yet another) realization that I’m living for other people.

You know when you’re good friends with a person, and they have another real close friend that you don’t know so well? You know them well enough to make pleasantries, but that’s about it.  Now i’m sure tehre has been a time where you’ve had to spend a long amount of time with that other friend- about 20 minutes before your mutual friend arrives, or a short car ride, something, anything. It’s awkward as hell, isn’t it? You’re not sure what to say, and you realize you don’t really know this person at all.

That’s how i feel about myself right now. I feel like i’m waiting for the guy i know to arrive, and I’m having a real hard time spending time with this other guy in front of me. “the one i see in the mirror,” only I don’t spout out the entire four and a half minute speech Edward Norton does about hating everyone in ney york, I only keep thinking the last few words- Fuck you Mike Gangl.

And it’s not in an angry way, it’s in the “what the hell are you doing?” kind of way. I feel like Tyler Durden, what do you do after school- you get a job, what do you do after you get a job? You get married, etc etc. I’ve got the plans there, the scaffolding, but the concrete and the steel beams are fucking non-existent. Patrick Bateman said it best, “I simply am not there.”

Truth hurts.

To set a lighter note, I’ve decided that there is a special place in hell for people who leave their laundry in the washer or dryer for more than 5 hours. That’s fucked up.

I have a tendency to get down about things, but never show it. It just makes my head a little darker place than you’d imagine. Not like, pee wee’s fun house on acid, but it’s not the polyphonic spree. Anyways, I’m walking around old town today and there is a “fine art fair,” which is kind of funny; they’d call it fine art as opposed to just art. So I’m walking around and I don’t really care for any of it. It looks like the internet basically ate up a bunch of shit and vomited out a ton of memes and twits. I began to criticize silently, thinking what were these people doing?

Then it clicked. They are not doing this for me. They are not trying to make my eyes happy, or speak to my soul. They are not even speaking to anyone. They are simply speaking,  speaking through brushes, pens, pottery, jewelry, photographs… everything.  And damn do I admire that. It’s not that I hate my job or think it sucks, but there are a million other things I’d love to do. “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”  These guys do that every day. I’m sure they  fight about things with people, they have days where the ask themselves “is it worth it?” and always say “Fuck yeah, it is.”

I wish I knew myself well enough to know what makes me really happy, happy enough to give it all up and do it. Happy enough to know what I want, when and how to get it, everything. I’m not a royal mess or anything, but it’s hard. Fuck if the Taj Mahal took 12 years to make, it takes a hell of a lot longer to build a man.