jeremyh

Kids... don't shoot for the stars, you'll only fuck up your life.

I had a really shitty life growing - worst than most without suffering you the details.

When I got out of highschool I had the ghetto aspiration complex. I wanted to go to college... make tons of money, the whole lot. I started to go school for anthropology (I was going to write as I traveled around the world) but, I got sick with that. I was in limbo for a while after that and in that time considered medicine, law, criminal justice, and journalism. Writing was always a constant though, so I eventually settled on comparitive literature. I thought I would get my degree, get a publishing job until I sold my first novel(s)... etc. Then, I move back home and open up that restuarant I always wanted to. Bullshit. All Bullshit.

Greed is a terrible thing. I haven't been content with any of it.

I was a cook before I went off to school. I was head chef at this steak joint in my home town making 14 bucks an hour, working 60 hours a week and I loved it. I decided to go to school though, and not cullineary school, and fuck myself over. Now I'm twenty -two and I hate getting up everymorning and going to class for a degree to legitimize a writing career in which, given my scholastic obligations, don't even have the time to develop.

So now what? If I don't finish my degree, what the fuck does that say? Four years wasted perpetually fucking things up that lead to......... nothing. Thousands of dollars that lead to ........ nothing.

On top of everything my living situation sucks. You spend years developing this base of friends, then some fuck themselves with drugs and leave... others fuck themselves with alcohol and leave. A few among the previous stay but whom it's better not to associate with. A couple say this place isn't for them and transfer, a couple get married and move, a couple get caught up with depression and move back with their family, a couple graduate, and the final few can't hack it and drop out. I knew all this before coming back this semester... so the fact that I'm alone here is my fault- we'll it's all my fault - yet it was for the "dream". So I come back here, my only motivation being school and finishing what I started... and I find out the Comp Lit program went to shit. Before I was physically in the program I guess it was wittled away, yet it took a huge blow during the summer. The cooridnator, the chair, were lost. My advisor was lost. Nothing against the non-senior profs, yet it devasted the program. In fact, the all the power shifted to the foriegn languages of Italian, and French that also exist within the department. The whole focus shifted. I sick of talking about it, anywho basically the foundation of what I was coming back for was lost.

It really made me reconsider what I was coming back for in the first place. I would like to say I'm confused, but I'm not. I'm just disappointed with myself. I wake up every morning wanting to through my guts out, and it's the same everynight before I go to bed.

You know every once in a while you'll see me write something inspirational in my journal, or as a comment... and don't get me wrong I believe in all of it - though I'm a fucking hypocrite. I just wanted to say that. The fact of the matter is, I've made every mistake in the book and have experienced every tragedy imaginable ... and now I feel like I'm sixty and it should be over... but it's never over.

I don't know if you ever seen this movie "Leon" there's this part where Leon sees Matilda, this little girl after her father just beat the crap out of her. She's smoking a cigarette sitting on the edge of a stairwell in an apartment building. She's asks Leon with a purple lip, "Is life always this bad, or only when you're a kid."

Seeing the tears in eyes Leon says, " Always like this... always like this."

It's so fucking true. I knew it a long time ago, so I developed this idea for myself that you don't have to be happy to be content; explicated by a personal motto," Tragedy inspires the soul." The important thing was that you were being truthful with yourself and were doing things that was conducive with some purpose. It took me four years to figure out that, not only was this vision convoluted, but that I had no fucking purpose. And that what makes me sick. I fancy myself a pretty perceptive person and for me just to figure this out is ridiculous. Worse is, I'm stuck with living in a farce for at least a little while more: I have to finish it up. Why? I tell you why. It's one of the most fundemental concepts of existance.

Responsibility, it's hard to swallow, though you need it. To abandon it is life ending. Without it you can't have a job, a carreer, get an education, have a child, have a family, have an apartment, or have a business. Without this commitment you can't have a relationship, or friends, or really do anything at all. Involved in my mistake bound by my responsiblilities: a lease, a degree, loans, and much much more.

So I find myself in a trap where I know what I'm doing is wrong for me, but I can't do anything about it. The most sickening thing is - it's really not that I'm doing the wrong thing, it's that I am so aware of it.

What do you do then? Ride it out, Bite the bullet... bullshit proverbs. But that's what you do. And/or you find outlets to tide you over. Like the social environment that created my ignornace to my folly to begin with, that now has disappeared here in Milwaukee, like boxing that I gave up a year ago.

So what am I going to do? 1. I'm going to start beating the crap out of people again. 2. I'm going to get my transcript ready so I can transfer to a college back home where there still is a stong social environment in all the friends that I have there. And that's all I can really do. It's sucks realizing our mistakes some time and I'm really having a hard time with this one that I've been totally oblivious to for four years.

I'm still going to write though, because that's what I love... and I'm still going to get published. But I don't have to be making 300G's while I'm doing it, I don't have to make 150, or 100, or 75, or 50. I don't need my MA from NYU or my 3.5GPA. I wish I was back in Green Bay making 14 at Gregory's cooking a three dollar lobster tail that a pretensious rich guy will pay 25 bucks for. After work work being able to call up your buddies, kick back a Crown's Neat, or PBR's, or High life's. On the weekend having enough to go out, maybe find that girl that you wish you spent a little more attention to and rekindle old flames... start a family. That's all I want now. Fuck all the rest. Fuck all the rest. I'm old now it seems to really know this... and even reading this, most of you won't really know what I'm talking about.

What could be better than knowing oneself?