PopcornJackTerry

My router finally died the other night. It had been on its last legs for quite some time so this came as nothing of a shock, except it chose to die right before I had two days worth of writing assignments to do. Much like dishwashers and beer coolers at restaurants that never break at two o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon but instead wait until 6:00 o’clock on Friday, machines seem to get maximum enjoyment by choosing the most inconvenient time to die on us. So Friday morning I dutifully walked myself down to Radio Shack, bought my router and came home and installed it.

By the time I was done I rationalized that I didn’t have enough time to start my assignments so I would instead use that time to mindlessly surf the internet. It probably would have taken most semi-normal people much less time to install the router, but I have seen the movie War Games one too many times and live in constant fear and paranoia that if I do just one wrong thing with a computer all hell will break loose around the world. Seeing as how Geo-politically things these days aren’t too stable, I opted to be safe and not sorry.

After exhausting all that was fun on Facebook and still with time to kill, I ventured back to one of the funniest websites I know. It’s called The Oatmeal, and it’s wickedly brilliant. I’m not sure what drugs the guy is taking, or perhaps it’s the ones he isn’t taking, but I think he’s a genius. There is an option to look at the most popular comics but also one to let the website and all of its algorithms pick one for you. I did that a few times, silently laughing my ass off as to not wake my room mate, and then it brought me to this one. I will warn you, it is a six parter, but it is worth it because not only is it funny as hell it is very insightful. (The guy is as brilliant as he is funny. You should read the one he wrote about Nikolas Tesla. I have never heard the word douchebag used so many times, and it will blow your mind when you discover who he is referencing with it every single time he uses it.) I read through it and I got to part six to read this:

“I have always considered the question to be ‘Why am I alive? Why am I here? What is the point of me? And to that I say WHO CARES? Forget the why. You are in a raging forest full of beauty and agony and magical grapey beverages and lightning storms and demon bees. This is better than the WHY.”

You’ll have to read the whole thing to understand the magical grapey beverages, and you should even though I’m gonna give you a little cliff note version of what the whole thing is about. He’s talking about a run he took in Japan, and he talks about why he runs and he talks about his Blerch.

I read the whole thing and for a hot minute I was inspired to follow his lead. “I’m going to take up running like he did because running is a metaphor for fixing all that is wrong with my life.” And you know something? Six months ago I would have. Six months ago I would have been all sound and fury, making wild proclamations about how I was going to change my life and I would then go and do it.

For a week, maybe if I was lucky. More likely only for a few days. But it isn’t six months ago. It’s now, and a few realizations set in:

1) Like I said, I wasn’t going to really do it anyway, because

2) I didn’t really want to do it, because

3) My blerch isn’t his blerch, and

4) Running from my blerch isn’t going to work for me.

I’ve used the word four times so I might as well explain it, as best I can. He calls his fears and his complacency his blerch. It is what drags him down and what holds him back. It is his doubts and his questions, and it is ultimately what will stand in his way if he lets it. He knows that he can never get rid of it, that it is as much a part of him as anything else, but he can control it, he can overcome it and he can not let it make his decisions for him. To counter his blerch, he runs.

We all have a blerch of our own, we all have that voice that gets in our way whenever we let it, and we all have to find our own ways to counter it. There are things I know that I can do to overcome my own blerch and it isn’t running. It is something as simple as this, sitting back down and writing for myself again. It is making the decision to do what I need to do to fuel my creativity. And it means going back to the novel (which I haven’t done in a much longer time than write here) and cut out over ten percent of what I wrote and pretend that it never happened. And I hate doing that, but you know what? Until I do, my blerch is running my life.

I think back to what I would have done six months ago, and that blind intensity. The fear that I’ve always had when it came to taking medications for the three ring circus that is my head is that I would inevitably be losing part of who I was. Obviously part of that part would be the part I wanted to lose, but also part of it would be what made me who I was. The only thing was I couldn’t name exactly what it was. To steal from the French the best I could say is that I was afraid I’d be losing my panache. But the fear of living the rest of my the life the way I was finally overcame that and so I began.

After a while I described it to my therapist that, if before my emotions ran on a scale from a -10 to a +10, now they felt like the scale was -5 to a +8. Yes I was giving up a little on the top, but that was more than offset by what was coming off the bottom. I could live like this I thought. Thing is, though I felt like the scale was closing down on both ends, eventually coming to a place where there was no scale and I’d be this neutral level, not sad not happy just blah. That’s when I figured out what I was afraid of losing. It was the ability to be intense, to openly embrace opportunity and to be excited about life. This frightened me.

You hear stories about people becoming zombies on the medication that they are taking, and I felt like I was slipping into that position. I found myself wanting to spend all day in bed still and no longer being bothered by it. Surely this can’t be a good thing, I thought. If these are my choices, maybe I would be better off than before. But I funny thing happened on my way to becoming a cast member of The Walking Dead.

That scale that had shifted down to basically being -1 to +1? It didn’t get any wider but it did move. I began to be able to measure it as 0 to +2, and then +1 to +3. You get the picture. I don’t even expect it to be +8 to +10 (and frankly I don’t think I could sustain that sort of life) but it seems to be hovering nicely around +5, and I can take that all the way to the bank.

And, according to The Oatmeal, I can also last 1.7 seconds on the surface of the sun.

(Seriously if you haven’t already, click here and read his comic about running. So worth it. And I apologize now for introducing you to your newest time-suck website. But it is awesome.)