Get a fucking job.

Out at Barrio last night in Mpls. 

The topic arose of job stability vs self-actualization. When is it worth staying on the grind of a soul-sucking, well-paying job and when is does the grind become an absurd distraction from life's true meaning? When is freedom from obligation actually a good thing and when does it turn into its own form of obligation? Does productivity matter? I mean, we all die anyways.

This is America! When is freedom free? (I heard it costs $1.23)

Barrio is a downtown tequila bar in Mpls. Cuban hip hop and southside graffiti art give it a woozy cool. You can feel time stand still in places like that, enough to give you a start when it snaps quickly back into motion. And then it's already Monday. 

But we all know there aint nothing wrong

with a little bump and grind. 

right?

Otherwise how would things get done? How would people have any kind of appreciation for the woozy cool of overpriced, time-capturing bars?

I don't really know what to do with unstructured time anymore. I don't have any of it, and when I do, it breaks me to pieces. I sit in my apartment and write pointless blogs. Usually I fill that time with marathons or grad-school applications, but every so often I'm confronted with that inevitable, humbling horror: Free time. Isn't the real freedom in routine, the joy in repetition (another great song)? Doing what you want to do shouldn't mean drifting with the wind. It probably should mean that being chained to things that are important, and remaining chained for the right reasons. 

I guess that's the old lesson from the myth of Sisyphus: To be the conscious master of one's burden is to be free. 

So what does that tell me about employment? Be cool, I guess.  

Does it add any insight to consider that these thoughts were flushed out in conversations with someone gainfully employed in narcotics? 

The Best Man

My Grandpa had a falling out with the best man from his wedding. 

Stan was the president of the Chi fraternity at Albion. 

He and my Grandpa became chummy. My Grandpa was from inner city Toledo and felt strongly about civil rights. The Chi fraternity was unique--even in Michigan--for allowing black and Jewish pledges. My Grandpa, a dorm monitor, overlooked the alcohol related infractions of Chi members under his supervision. "Well, I guess I wouldn't turn them in or something," he says. Stan appreciated the gesture and the two became close. 

The photo is as typical of the 1950s as I can imagine a photo being. Stan looks small and shifty next to my grandpa's confident gaze. They looked like mobsters, white jackets and baggy black pants, Stan being the clumsier Sonny, and my grandpa the dapper, simmering Michael Corleone. Or something like that. 

"I thought the friendship was more than it was," My Grandpa explains. Promptly, he falls asleep. 

Two pillars have defined My Grandpa as I have known him. He has always been a fanatic supporter of racial equality. He has been an equally raging opponent of alcohol; until he began to soften in old age beer was banned from family gatherings, the only exceptions coming in the presence of my uncle who is Black and thus eligible for a type of immunity--as race and alcohol are the pillars, my Grandpa seems willing to ignore infractions against the latter if he feels he is fighting for the former. 

What happened? Did Stan lower himself to depravity on a liquor soaked summer night on frat row? Did he insult my Grandpa? Was it an angry confrontation based around stron personality and principle? But in 1952 my Grandpa was nearly done with Seminary. Stan and he would soon be parted. Was Stan too cool? Was it simply that he slighted my grandpa with some form of social exclusion? It's hard to imagine, looking at my steely grandfather. He looks like someone who would piss you off, but not require your sympathy. The mystery lives on. I'll ask him when he wakes up. 

In need of energy.

I'm not sure where one crosses the line between contentment and malaise. The two feed off each other.

Everyone in this world is looking for edginess. The conglomeration of thoughts and ideas that our age has produced makes originality so unnecessarily difficult. There has never been anything new under the sun, but now everything under the sun can talk to everything else. That must be why irony is so important to people like me; plagiarism loses its bite amidst cloying self-awareness.

Don't everybody love the smell of gasoline?
Well burn, motherfucker, burn American Dreams.
No one can fucking steal from me.

A kid tried to steal my ipod today. He lied to my face, and it was obvious. He's malicious but weak. I brought him to tears.

I felt sorry for him, because I know what it's like to have trouble lying.

It was my fault he was lying.