wow

it has been a seriously long passage of time since i have pasted up any words on this thing. a lot has happened; details are unimportant and unwarranted; more of a telephone thing anyway. so, what has been on my mind of late?

how long has it been since you have taken a lengthy, analytical and prognostic look at your life? are we settling for the concerns that we have now, which become so overwhelming and eclipse the backgrounds behind them? i feel relatively complacent of late, which always pings as a red-flag status for me once i realize that it has been going on. it's summertime, and the living is easy...money that was made is now spent. weekends, so longed for and anticipated, are shrunken in a haze of relaxation and sloth instead of being charted with intriguing mental cartography. all is fine, i am young...but i am beginning to feel the pangs of frivolity, the lament for lack of accomplishment and distinction.

i am at a loss for how to describe my job; it is good and i feel fortified, insulated by it. at the same time, i feel like it thieves forty hours a week from me - more counting transit - that could be the blankets and backpacks of a genuine pioneering. it isn't that it takes all my time...a large chunk to be sure, but not all of it. but i feel drawn toward vivacity, towards the city, being young and ever-awake. i feel like maintaining friendships is absolutely essential, and rewarding, and that such a thing should not be abandoned for lofty artistic dreams...yet in the mathematical set i am working with, job + friends + sleep = matt at 26. wedging more in has proven difficult.

i have also come to acknowledge that relaxation is essential. this plays into the idea of friendships, because a good friendship is stress-relieving instead of stress-inducing. my job creates stresses; hell, just being inside my mind creates stresses of its own. decompression is a must, if i don't want to end up a crazy person, aimlessly wandering the alleys of Portland. if the equation is as simple as it seems (probably not the case), then what i need readjustment in is my work. do i try to find something else; something incorruptibly-fulfilling and which broadens my horizons as an artist? do i just need something as simple as to pare down my hours, such that i have more time to commit to personal projects and still stay afloat financially? finances are an argh. i see now how adults become progressively more preoccupied with such concerns, and how it has the ability to rob you of so much potential. i have some degree of scorn for our current incarnation of the capitalist system based upon this, but here is probably not the time or place to complain about how you can't stay afloat by scribbling away your days in coffee shops and mountaintops, even if it were for the advancement of the human spirit and all that riff-raff.

so, for the summertime being, i am currently stunned into inaction against this front. it marches over my mind with its full strength, and i plan to observe and characterize it before moving my own armada against its dark and foreboding will. i just need to find a way to set reminders for myself, little mementos that disarm my fear of its structuring ways since i know another, more ideal life, rooted somewhere in the deeper portions of my thought. i have faith at least in myself, as long as i am successful in keeping myself the same self. the people we naturally evolve into have different sets of strengths and weaknesses, different centers of gravity based on their abacus-arrangements and allotments.