You Be You

Life is a fight between who you are, who you were and who you want to be.

In other words, Dickens had the right idea. Except who you are spends too much time appeasing who you were in the age of twitter, Instagram and online ruminations. Put otherwise, the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is waging a losing battle.

Maybe life is a losing battle. Everyday we hope, we do and we repeat. At the end of very few days are we happy with the result.

Why?

We suck.

Kinda True.

Said better, we project yesterday into tomorrow and the results are terrible. We should care about the future, but we too often care about now soothing our before.

We appease our present selves, in opposition to what our future selves want.

We suck.

We suck time from our future and use it to soothe our past and present.

We ruminate. We regurgitate. We replay.

We plan poorly. We execute worse.

I don't really have a point.

We suck.

Let's try and suck less.

Let's try and be who we want to be, while being who we are and honouring who we were.

Life is a complex game of remembering and forgetting. Let's remember what we need to, forget what hurts too bad and play with possibilities of tomorrow.

Or, let's just drink and forget. Either works in the moment.

But, as I've hinted at, moments are both the answer and a trap.

You be you, today, yesterday and tomorrow.

Please.

New Year, New ???

The combination of booze, timing and nostalgia makes everything seem important.

It's a new year. I'm feeling tipsy and sentimental.

I don't know what to say, or who to say it to, so I'm gonna freestyle.

(My apologies for not being Black Thought).

I love you.

If you are reading this and you know me that is almost certainly true.

If you are reading this and you don't know me that is mostly true in the abstract.

I love the world. I love the people in it.

I love the freaks and geeks and nerds and boring ass working class mother fuckers.

I love you.

I love my Mom.

I love my sisters (even the one who is struggling to be herself away from us).

I love my in-laws. They are my people too.

I love my other family too - Andre, Kate, and the lads. Michelle, Sean and the boys. I love Christian and Charlie and Deb and Jordan and all of the offspring I have and haven't met and people they hold close to their hearts.

I love Tamy (and Devin) and Holly (and what's his name).

I love Kelly and Jackie and Jim and Natasha.

I love everyone I work with each and every day.

I love Mickey (seriously, he is an interesting fucking dude). I love his boy Tanner (or is it Trevor - fuck it, I love him too).

I love Bill.

I love Mike, and Brenten, and Heath and Rob and Sandy (even if she is a fucking traitor) and Darcie.

I love everyone I met in South Africa and Cuba and the handful of other places I've traveled.

I love there and here. I love where I am and what I do.

I love my students, good, bad and indifferent. I love the students figuring out who they are. I love the students working through what they thought they were. I love all the students who give a fuck about knowing themselves.

That is a list too big too shorten but I hope you know. (And I think you do).

I love you all.

Mostly, I love  my Poohead Shawna. I love Sid and Hector and Maclean. They are the centre of everything.

But the rest of you I like a lot too.

Untitled

One day I tried.

I decided against giving up, and tried.

It was too hard.