No Te Preocupes

I’m juggling 1,000 plates riding a unicycle on a high wire. In other words, I’m feeling a bit  Syd Barrett-ish at the moment. This is to say that I perceive creativity with a touch of madcap. Take a listen. This is my brain on writing…(be careful because it’s not a song)

I can’t make it stop.  Words pour out of me, but they have little to do with reality. The typing continues as more thoughts spill into my current favorite coffee mug with a little fox face on the front. How does one find oneself in such a state? No, it’s not due to “…cellophane flowers of yellow and green towering over your head” inducements. I’m currently sipping some soup.

It’s work. It’s always work. It’s not the teaching work.  I LOVE that. It’s all of the rest of it.  That “new busy” work that drones on and on.  Those of us who educate see this as “the new normal”: more work, harder, longer, faster, and for less pay.  It causes Jane to feel like a very dull girl and a bit like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. This represents the ruin of the human being because the being is be-ing no longer. The being merely puts one foot in front of the other in bipedal mode and continues in the mouse wheel circus of life.  This is “coming unglued“, my friends.  Watch the drama in a TV series coming soon…

Oh, sure.  Fun and spontaneity come along once in a while.  Once in a very long while I catch a ray of sun at work (again, not the teaching part…that is the BEST), but I mean in the other work which is to say the work aimed at keeping one busy in a data dump of madness. The very same things that are set up to make tasks easier have the precipitous challenge of constant upgrade. In my chosen field of work, this has become quite easy to manage as digital media changes annually and one must keep abreast of these things. For my colleagues who live life in books, paper, lead pencil Scantron tests, and other such places of what is quickly becoming known as “antiquity”, this DATA management and assessment causes a heap of grief.  Constant “Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes.”

Lately, I go up and down at the drop of a pin in a sad state of a broken world that succumbs to an avalanche of wealth that is not mine.  I am fortunate enough to own an expensive connection to the media so that I can watch it from the sidelines.  I earn pennies mientras que los pesos pesados ganan más.  Woof.

Howl at the moon. Run up and down the beach. Contemplate the waves, the freedom, the gust of wind, the salt air on the tongue, the feeling of walking on the edge of a continent. Here is where one discovers real force, power, puissance, might, energy, potentiality. Why didn’t I do this hours ago while I was drowning in the River Styx. I jump in the sand and repeat a quote I read recently:  “Todo en este vida es temporal asi que si las cosas van bien, disfrutalas porque no duraran siempre. Y si las cosas van mal, no te preocupes, no van a durar para siempre tampoco.”  Translation for those neither bilingual en Espanol nor hip to Google Translate: “Everything in life is temporary so if things go well, enjoy them because they do not last forever. And if things go wrong, do not worry, they will not last forever either. ” (repeat)

1742 – Thomas Gray’s poem Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College reveals 3 words often repeated in America:  “…ignorance is bliss,”