So here I am, jobless and squatting, using a friend's computer, and I've got my hands into more projects than in the last year combined. I'm writing a screenplay, I'm acting in a short film, I'm a coach for a speech and debate team, I'm reinventing my poetry slam career, and I'm breeding llamas with wolverines to equip the cavalry division of my new world-domination army.

It takes life to create life (a fact that billion-year evolutionists like to ignore), and so after going to some slams and poetry readings, I'm finally writing again! You see, people, this is why jobs suck. Unless you are doing something you love you are going to feel empty, and most of us work at something we couldn't care less about. The things I want to do for a career, the jobs I'd love to have, I don't have the means of acheiving. And so right now all I'm doing is screwing around with friends, loving my girlfriend, working on my first DM campaign, and thinking about the jobs I COULD have, and I'm really freak'in happy!

But, after the buzz dissipates I remember that my money will dissappear, and that I don't have what it take to be at the center of a new business, or the proper CONTACTS to get into the jobs that would mean something to me. And I realize that this economy blows! It's alll Nero's, I mean Bush's, fault!

All I'm left with is the belief that the vast majority of our heart's desires are nothing but fantasies and pipe dreams and we should resign ourselves to a life of grayscale mediocrity where we just try to get through each day without killing ourselves. Ok, maybe thats a bit harsh. But the so-called American Dream is still bullshit.

Now, I'm gonna go get naked and write poetry.

Sorry for being a loser and not posting or writing or anything else communicative. But I'm both revelling in being back around friends (and my Muse) and stressing over trying to get a good job as soon as possible. In fact, within the hour I will once again set out for the far away lands of Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers, and Bentonville with a resume in my hand and my pants around my ankles, all the while praying that my jeep will hold-off it's imminent collapse for a few more days.

It's better than wasting away in suburbia hell . . . i think.

The Eagle has landed . . . in Arkansas. Oh my God!!! He's being shot-at by rednecks! There are feathers and rusted pick-up trucks everywhere! They're trying to pluck him clean and hang him in a trophy case next to their velvet Elvis paintings! Oh the humanity!

Actually, I'm fine. Here in the pollen-encrusted south. My allergies have gone nuclear. And although I'm no Eagle, it would be nice to be able to fly away from people I don't like, or just poop on them.

I've often envisioned having an epiphany where I "felt" the passage of time. I imagined it would feel like when I put my hand in a brook or stream and feel the water rushing past it. Or perhaps it would feel more like riding a boat in that stream, or riding on a train and looking out at the passing buildings. Those buildings are the moments of your life, and once you have passed one, you will never see it again. You watch it grow smaller in the distance behind you, and you can try to remember what it looks like, but you will never truly see it again.

As depressing as that idea is, I've never "felt" it, like feeling a river. But, I think I've come pretty close. In fact, I come close often, though I didn't, at first, realize it. And having come close to it, I'm sure I really want it.

You see, I have felt the passage of time not in a tactile sense as I had sought-for, but in an emotional sense. This feeling hits you anywhere, anytime and rarely when you expect it. It is triggered by an unlikely source: our sense of smell. Yes, there is more power for recall in smell than in any other sensation. The autumn wind will cut through Arkansas and it will put me into a place long forgotton, perhaps not even a concrete memory, but it will have more power and gravity than any visual recall ever could, and I will know I've lost something.

For a smell to trigger a feeling of memory (or a memory of feeling) you must have a lot of emotion tied to the smell . . . or rather, you must have a lot of emotion tied to the people, places and things you associate with that smell. I've never really known a smell to trigger a memory of a negative emotion, or at least I've never embraced it when it does. Maybe that's just me; I'd rather embrace the memory of positive emotions, of joys, though it is horribly bittersweet. Because when that vague and powerful memory hits me, I long for something. I'll drive past a pond and from the smell I will know instantly that I have intimately known just such a pond somewhere in my past. I will know that I was once having a better time, that I was experiencing more joy, than I am now. I will walk out of Walmart and suddenly feel that I belong somewhere else, that I shouldn't be there, that life is going on somewhere out there and I'm missing it! I feel this because I know that behind me, in my past, there is a good time, a powerful positive emotion, that I cannot have back. This wind, this smell, is incomplete without the full experience, and so I feel incomplete, and it breaks my heart, and I feel the passage of time, and I hate it!

And so I want to get out of this damned town! Even if I must go to Butthole, Arkansas, I need to live in joy. I must run to where-ever I can tie more and more joys to every smell I can find! And I never want to stop, so that when the powerful recall in the wind finds me again, I can just give it a nod and a wink and turn my attention back to the joys I'm currently experiencing.
And if you understand God and his gifts of love and redemption, as I believe I do, you will know that joy is found in people! I don't mean that it is found in every person and every circumstance, but speaking generally, I promise you, your joy will be found in people.

And so I want to stay as far from that epiphany as possible. Because if that sense of longing inside me that the wind brings were to become truly tactile, it would kill me.