Manic Monday – Volume IV

CRIPPITY CRAP, IT’S MANIC MONDAY!! That’s right, it’s the worst day of the week for most people so I enlighten the mood by telling you some of the crazy shit that went on in my head this week and actually remembered to write it down for your enjoyment! Buckle up you literate reader because chances are, even I have no idea what’s about to be published!!

First of all, the question was brought up to me this week, “What would you do with your life IF money were no object?” Now that’s a damn good question because there are so many possibilities and no wrong answers. MY answer was I would like to travel the world, writing and performing (acting, filming, stand-up, etc.) because I’m an entertainer at heart and also because I want to see the world. Not only do I want to see the world, but I want to find the little things. Not just go to the Eiffel Tower in France, but go around the corner to a little coffee shop not many people know about and enjoy a nice coffee then step outside and mime with the street mimes. THAT sounds like life to me. Do that while writing and performing, life couldn’t get any better. So my question to ask yourself: what would you do if money were no object? How do you start doing that now to make your life worth living?

Then again, would you take the chance to leave everything and start fresh? Even if it was crazy, like, I don’t know, live in a car bouncing around doing odd jobs for food and simple cash but you get to see it all for a while. Then you pick a place to settle down and start building up there. Would you do it? Now you’re thinking like a crazy person, good for you. It’s not a bad thing, don’t get me wrong, maybe it’s the right thing for you. You’ll never know until either A.) You do it, or B.) You die, or maybe even C.) You finally find true happiness doing something else. It’s your life, don’t let others tell you how to live it.

Moving right along, living in Colorado, anyone with a TV or radio or any sense of knowledge that knows what’s going on right now, the state of Colorado is basically underwater right now due to flooding. So I’m going to take a moment to ask you simply, when was the last time you went for a walk in the rain? Didn’t care about getting your phone wet (leave it home if you care that much!) or care about you getting wet or maybe even sick, just put on a hoody and left your house. Enjoyed the rain like you were a little kid again, instead of a grown ass adult thinking “Well we need the moisture”. It adds a sense of not only being young and free again, but just the fact that it brings happiness, PURE joy to your face and your heart. I don’t mean you have to go out in the downpour rain, just when the sky is spitting a little, just the rain that makes teenage girls want to get kissed in because they think it’s the cutest shit ever. Don’t go find someone to kiss, go for a walk: DITCH THEM AND BE A FREE AND HAPPY CHILD AGAIN!! Hell, skip down the road, who cares!! Muck some worms like Calvin and Hobbes!! You’re going to live longer and happier if you let your child out to play every now and then, so why not? What do you have to lose?

If you are obsessed with pleasing others though, is that a good thing or bad? I mean, to a degree of course. It’s obviously a good thing to do nice things, but if you are constantly going out of your way to PLEASE others (not just do nice things, but PLEASE them), when are you making time for yourself? I’m not talking about your job either, because maybe it’s your job to please others (especially if you work in customer service or hospitality or for someone as a secretary or something). In your personal life though, is it good to always try to please everyone else? When are you supposed to appease your needs/wants if you are always working for someone else? I agree that karma will bite you in the ass if you are always selfish, but sometimes you need to be selfish. Sometimes you need to worry about numero uno. I believe that most of the time you need to be the main focus because you are the one person you are stuck with for the rest of your life and if you don’t worry about getting your shit together, no one else is going to either.

Being selfish can go either way though. If you are too selfish, it comes across as a bad thing, but not being selfish enough always comes across as good to other people. But at the end of the day, you are going to be miserable because you didn’t focus on getting you done enough. Like I said, you are the one person you are stuck with from the day you are born until the day you die, everyone else comes and goes either as they please or as you want them to. You always need to make sure that you are happy with how your life is turning out, or all the help that did for others is going to be meaningless anyway. Yes, they will be appreciative of the assistance that they received, but at the same time, you are going to be miserable. The karma that you built up for the help you did, is nothing. So is being selfish a good thing? Have we been taught falsely our entire lives that we always need to worry about helping people, maybe we need to worry about us. Like the old saying goes “If I ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”

P.S.

Growing up, my life could be described as…different. I look at most people’s childhoods and think, “Wow, that’s what normality is”. They have parents that care all the time, supportive friends, a nice foundation for life. I had this, blob (as I would call it) that kind of sat there next to me, just toying with me as life threw crap at me saying, “Hey Eric!! Dodge this one!”

 

I remember specifically one year in second grade after I had been kidnapped for a week by three high school students from my elementary school playground, I returned to my school like nothing at all happened. Other children stared like I was the one eyed goat in the barn that ran in circles chasing my tail all day because I couldn’t ever find out why it followed me everywhere.

 

Anyway, I was sitting at my desk the day I came back to school as the final bell rang to say, “School is out BITCHES!!” and as I bent down to stuff my books into my backpack to take home, I noticed a note by my desk. Being the nosy little snot that I am, of course I am going to pick it up and read it. Then again, what second grader is going to get up and say, “Did someone drop his or her note? I don’t want to intrude on your personal life so I figured I would ask.” Not a single one, that’s who.

 

So as I unfolded the note, I noticed that it was for me anyway. The first line gave it away as it read, “Dear Eric,” and that was a dead give away. I knew right then and there it was mine and thoughts began racing through my mind.

 

“Oh my gosh, maybe someone actually wants to be my friend!” and “Wow, other kids actually know my name!” were just a few of the thoughts. So I continued reading. Basically the note was terrible to say the least. I wont go into great detail, but to say the least it said that they wanted to kill me then murder my whole family.

 

Right now, you’re thinking, “Eric, how the hell is this funny?”

 

Well at the bottom of the note, it had a “P.S.” and being a second grader, this peaked my curious mind. I jumped into detective mode and it immediately became clear. Since we had only went over basic English principles in class, I had no clue what the hell “P.S.” stood for. I did however know that we had a kid in my class with those initials.

 

IT HAD TO BE THAT KID!! So I took matters into my own hand. I went to his bus, I confronted him, and I told him that I was going to kill him right there on that bus then murder his whole family. He cried and never returned to that school.

 

Needless to say, that kid didn’t write that note. I never found out who did, and quite frankly, I still don’t have friends.

The White Picket Fence

The American Dream used to be something. It used to be about having a family, having freedom, having something outside of materialistic property, something outside of the “ordinary”. Nowadays, there is no American dream, the dream is dead and very few people dream at all. Everything is on a rapid decline because society says you can’t do anything and laughs and spits in the face of the believer until they give up and quit on themselves.

 

Everybody these days just wants the money. They want to be able to go out and buy things. We live by this rule of “Don’t touch my shit, I won’t take your shit either”. We hoard little things because we believe happiness is bought in a box at a store. IT’S NOT.

 

Studies have shown that experiences will make you happier than materialistic goods, yet people would rather sit on their couches on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram and talk about their boring lives and read about the lives of other people. WHO CARES ABOUT WHAT ARE PEOPLE ARE DOING?! You are your own person. Get out and do something with your life. Ask yourself, what is something I have always wanted to do? Go do it. How can I better myself? Go do it. Even if it is a work in progress, a slow transition, just start. At least you are one person who is actually doing something with your life or even with your day.

 

The American population is becoming a sad, depressing, STUPID race because everyone sits inside rotting on our smartphones and watching TV, sitting online, not using our brains anymore. We scroll through useless information about what other people ate for lunch, how much their day sucks, why they hate the government, how much they love their family, or look at 9,000,000,000,000,000,000 pictures of the same person doing the same pose in the same place and we don’t even care about (and we all know they posted it because their confidence is in the shit hole, they just want to hear how fucking beautiful they look for reassurance and everyone keeps liking it anyway).

 

We as a country, and only together, can actually become a country with a dream again. We can better ourselves together. We can rise up, get out of this debt and actually live and be HAPPY once again. We can be FREE and actually mean it when we say it.

 

It all starts simply with believing in each other. Supporting each other. Then getting off our asses and doing something about it. Yes, spend some time online still, give yourself some relaxation, but not all day. Go outside, go for a walk, go randomly watch a little league game and cheer some kids on because they are the future and it means the world to them. Go build a house with Habitat for Humanity. Go paint your house. Walk your dog. Take your family to the park., just take your life back before your gone.

 

Take the American dream back. Bring it back before we erase it for good.

Growing Up vs Growing Old

As another birthday comes closer and closer, I begin to think, “Shit, I’m going to die soon.” Yes, to most I may still be a youngling, but hey, I don’t have “good genes” or “ideal health”. I look around and see the elderly taking the leap into the unknown, and yet, I am not afraid. I do not personally think there is a reason to fear death. Even if my personal death comes painful, it all has to come to end sometime. In the book “Tough Sh*t” by my long time hero, Kevin Smith, he wrote, “…even good men die screaming…” and I must say, that one sentence changed my life forever.

Now I’m not saying to live a life where you raise total hell and take no prisoners in a bad perspective. What I am saying is don’t just live life but LIVE life, aka, the difference between growing UP and growing OLD.

I don’t mind my metabolism going to hell and getting a belly that goes over my belt, or my hair falling out, or my skin wrinkling around the wrist, or not being able to wear boxers with shorts in fear of indecent exposure because my genitals hang too low (like the scene from jackass). It’s perfectly fine taking pills 19 times a day and having to sit down in a shower because “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”

But I’ll be damned the day I walk by a vacant swing set and don’t sit my fat, bald, wrinkly ass down and enjoy the view come and go as I go up and down on one of the sweetest childhood memories EVERYONE has. I’ll be damned the day a little girl walks up to me and I’m “too old” to “answer a ringing toy phone” she hands me. I’ll be damned the day I grab the Cheerios for “heart health” instead of grabbing the box of Fruity Pebbles cause they just taste good. I’ll be damned the day I skip through the cartoon section of the TV guide. And you bet your sweet ass that I’ll be damned the day that I say, “No thanks, I’ve had enough Cheetos”.

Life is not all about the big picture. In the long run, yes because it is about the career and family and what have you, but when is the last time you thought about today? Just enjoyed the little things? Keep the little kid inside of you and never let it go. You have to grow up to a certain extent of course, you have to get a job and so on to survive this world, but who said you can’t still stick some chips in your PBJ at lunch? If someone says anything, just feel bad for them, because they are already dead inside fighting to stay alive.