Regression

Here is what I just told myself after I drank a cup of coffee today:

"All you have to do in order to motivate yourself to work hard to find the right JOB that you really like is to remember what it was like when you were stuck in THAT PLACE, making a living but profoundly unhappy and disgusted with yourself, feeling older every minute and lamenting every opportunity that flung out of your grasp like sparks being driven forward by your slow drag into the future."

Because you know what? I woke up really early today, 530 in the morning, because Anna gets up at that time every day, and I chose not to go back to sleep today because I was feeling pretty good about being piled under the huge orange and yellow afgan and the army surplus wool blanket in the half light of the morning, it felt a lot like I was on a little boat on which by way of accepting my persistent invitations Francis P. McMuffin joined me, stretching out his lithe little body like an arctic seal while I fidgeted with the space between his toes. And last night I was reading this old book I got when I was in junior high, a fantasy novel about magic and dragons, because that's pretty much all I read back then, and eventually I turned on the light and picked it up again. I was reading this book, starting somewhere in the middle and moving around alot a little bit at a time feeling pretty good, perfectly content with my escapism until I realized that what i was doing was regressing, guiding my psyche to settle back into the mentality of a 13 year old boy again that found so much pleasure in pretending that he was in a faraway place with all the comforts of the imagination, which can be good in the sense that a lively imagination is important to a youthful outlook on life, something which I sometimes fear is losing its battle against the cynicism I get from reading the news every day, but I think we grow up for a reason and even if I don't know what that reason really is I get hints of it when as I'm reading this book I'm catching bits of extremely bad writing, and as much as I skim around to what I vaguely remember to be my favorite parts the annoyance starts to stack and I become less and less able to just let some of these pretty serious writing offenses slide, like overuse of one-sentence paragraphs and clumsy scene descriptions and poorly hidden, ham-handedly delivered exposition, which to a certain extent needs to be forgiven when you are talking about fantasy or sci fi storytelling, because alot of sweet real-estate in a book needs to be sacrificed for setting to be established, but still. And it's that at least that makes me go *phew*, at least I'm not still that little boy and indeed I have grown up. And so I got to thinking that the problem is that maybe what just I and possibly many others, because at this point there are so many people out there, meaning alive on this planet, that the odds of someone else sharing your exact personality flaw are pretty good, but maybe what I was doing is forcing my self into a spiritual comfort that due to the fact that it is borrowed from my youth is really just complacency, and I was about to say unproductive complacency, and I was about to say that that would be redundant, but if you think about it, and you are me, the idea of being unproductive is pretty complex, which is to say that it would be a long and tedious endeavor for me to make a comprehensive list of what i would and would not consider to be a productive use of my time, which is to say that there would be a lot of qualifiers and examples of certain things that might not actually be intuitive, and even trying not to go into it I'm already rambling so suffice to say (sts) I think I always know when the hell I am wasting my time and when the hell I'm not, even if I don't (am not motivated to) act on the information, and the primary direct and indirect cause of my self-loathing depression versus my self-congratulatory complacency is the degree to which my actions contribute to or detract from my self respect, and the key is to find something that falls somewhere in between, which in my case would be overlapping, ongoing projects of a creative nature.