So Crates

     A wise man once said, "The unexamined life is not worth living."  I have always believed this, but I have also, always, misread this to mean what it doesn't mean.
     Hear me out.
     For a long time I thought that when you examined your life you would have to critique every minute instance that had led you to this absolute moment.  Somehow I have graduated college and landed a pretty good first job out of college.  Fair enough.  How I got here, well, it's a long story.  And if I was still misreading that quote then I would rattle off the story of how I went from A. to B. and tell you that life is a highway.
     That would be a mistake.
     It would be a good history.  Parts exaggerated.  Parts true.  A functional tall-tale.  A coming of age romp and it would be entertaining and informative and perhaps even inspirational.  But the truth is that it is not what is meant by, "unexamined life."
     Listen.
     Some people have visions of the world and they go out and they make those visions come true.  People who believe in the impossibility of following a dream, damn the consequences, damn the naysayers.
     "The unexamined life" is another way of saying, take a good hard look in the mirror and if what you see you can be proud of then you're fine, but if you disagree with what you see in your skinny reflection then you've got to set your mind to something that's going to set you free.
     You see, I've been thinking for all the wrong reasons that the thing to do is to move up in the world, believing in some half-cocked theory of mobility in the workplace, mobility in the social structure, thinking to myself, with my knees cramped into my chest somewhere over Wyoming, that I will, some day, fly first class; Thinking, someday I will have a corner office.
     But you see.  I don't need a corner office.  I don't want a corner office.
     I want something else.
     Which brings me to my examined life.
     All my life I've been obsessed with being creative.  As a kid, I'd spend hours putting together elaborate cowboy and Indian and pirate and Ninja Turtle scenes in my basement, I put on these plays in the backyard, a romp through Oz complete with a working, flying monkey, courtesy of a coat hanger and a little cray paper.  I would read and I would write and invent ghost stories and pretend because it was fun and I was good at it and as I got older I found myself doing more of the same thing, inventing stories, playing with words and inventing situations and acting in short films and drawing cartoons all over the damn place, so much so, that finally I've realized that what I want to do as a creative person is what I fear most.
     The old adage rears its evil head and says, "The Arts is no place to make a living."
     But, the truth is, because I'm creative it opens myself up to other creative people and the notion that I will have to be competitive.  But that was never my fear as a child.  If anything my greatest hope was for collaboration;  Someone to play with.  And an audience; Someone to watch me play.
     I look around the world and see that business rules everything.
     Want money?  Go into business.
     But business without product is zilch.  You have to have something to trade, something interesting, something new, something people will want to buy.
     Right now, people are obsessively in love with high-tech, hand-held, wi-fi capable, instant communication without really thinking of what the end result looks like.
     What will the future be?
     What's the next best thing?
     Does it download Movies?  Games?  Music?  Apps?  Does it make me sexy?
     Look.
     It doesn't matter.
     It will be something, but it's not going to just pop out of thin air.  It is going to come from someone, an idea will be born, something will happen, a need will be met.
     We will have flying cars and rockets to Neptune.  But if you don't have someone who can inspire it, then it won't happen.
     If you have nobody making history then why are you out selling old history books?
     In any case, in a recently examined life I've realized that I'm selling myself short and I'm not in the right place, but that I needed to be here to figure that out.
     But from here, I can examine my life I can look into the wobbled bulbously transparent-like, mirror-like, crystal-like, ball-like thing that is tomorrow and I can deduce what will make me better, by knowing what has made me bad and going onward.
     From here, I can go anywhere.
     As it stands, being weird is the only chance I have of succeeding in a life I can admit to loving.

After The Boys of Summer Have Gone

     What have I learned from living without power for 4 days?  Electricity is loud and a vital ingredient to hot showers, but I can't complain.  Our forefathers lived full lives without electricity.  More people have lived their entire lives without a smartphone or internet or an automobile or MTV and CNN and endless reruns of Yes, Dear than you can shake a stick at.  Literally.
     The things you tend to notice is how much of our lives is made up of answering one question, "What do you want to do?" which is another way of saying, "How can I be entertained and not bored because life is pretty empty sometimes?"  Which isn't a bad thing, because, after all, life itself is pretty tedious.  We fill it up with the events that make our lives worthwhile.  We surround ourselves with people who are fun and interesting.  We live in communities because we like having people around, because loneliness sucks.  So we look to each other for cheap entertainment, because we are pretty cheap creatures, always looking for the best deal, like allowing Eversave and Group-On to fill up our inbox with countless emails for deals on massages and golf trips because we desire to be entertained, to escape the dullness of life, even with electricity.
     For the most part life without electricity is pretty lame.  You wake up when the sun comes up and get pretty tired when the sun goes down.  Walking around Boston and thinking about how much of my life depends on electricity I started thinking, "what would my job be like without electricity, what purpose would I serve?"  The answer is pretty limited.  It would be different.  I could not work the way I work without the technology reliant on electricity, no emails, no computers period.  Telephones might get dicey.  So it inevitably begs the question, "What did we do before electricity?"  The answer is, we worked from sun up to sun down, getting food, because we get fucking hungry and we need to eat.  If we have oil lamps we light them in the dark to go to the bathroom.  If you are loaded you might have a lot of them working at once while you read a book, not a Kindle or Nook, a libro del papel.  Old school.  Escuela Abuelo.  Grandfather school.
     It's not a bad way to look at the world.  For the most part I felt like when I was going to work I was being ferried into a land of wonders because Boston still had electricity while going home it was like standing in some dark Dosteovskian epoch where all the action is done in the night.
     On my runs around town you could hear the whurr of the generators going from everyone's backyards, powering their refrigerators and maybe a lamp or TV if the generator was strong enough.  Restaurants that had power have had a bit of a surprise end-of-summer boom, while most people are usually exiting town for the Labor Day/ Back to School time, the town has relied heavily on the places who can cook them a meal.
     So the summer is over, but I'm fighting it in the usual way.  I'm taking a trip.  Because routine is dull and needs to be broken and an untraveled life is a wasted life.
     Oh and the cheap entertainment while living in the dark was playing cards with my father by a flashlight lantern.  It felt just like old times.