…makes Jack a very dull boy.

I work harder than anyone I’ve ever met, but since 90% of everything I’ve ever accomplished is locked away in my mind, nobody can tell. Since nobody can tell, they more often than not don’t think I’m up to much of anything with my life. I can live with that, but then sometimes even I question whether I’m actually doing anything real and meaningful. If I look at myself in a purely objective sense I see the same thing everyone else sees… me fucking off doing a bunch of shit that doesn’t really get me anywhere. Fortunately, I’m the one person who can see inside my head so I stay the course, but it’s not without having to run the entire gauntlet of second guessing my own decisions.

I have no choice. I’m building a model inside my head that is literally built from my thoughts. It’s a model of the whole showing how everything within that whole works on its own and in relation to everything around it. It’s a monumental effort that nobody ever sees because I’m not out to sell books or become famous, I want to know how things work so I can do something in and with this world. My ONLY redemption is the completion of my work, or I truly have done nothing with my time here on Earth.

This has never been a “normal” pursuit, by normal I mean the faster you go the quicker you get to your goal in life. The goal in this case seems to be patience, translated that means hurry up and wait if you get too gung ho in your pursuit of the prize. I don’t know if it’s to teach patience, but you certainly have to exercise it. You need the patience with yourself to stay the course when everyone around you believes it’s the wrong one.

I could do all this better when I was a kid. I mean the shamanic stuff, my natural given abilities. At that age I didn’t need any drugs or special tricks to get into any state I wanted to be in, but I also didn’t have all the bullshit of the modern world banging around in my head. When doing any kind of work in your own mind you want to think you could do it better or faster by going Polly Purebody and eliminating every vice within yourself, but all of the evidence I’ve gathered seems to suggest otherwise.

I’m trying to accurately represent the whole within myself. If you look around, that’s not the way we do things. Like it or not, we’re a bit of a mess, rather uncoordinated, and lacking in a number of social graces. The world IS like me… more often than not we’ve got dirt under our fingernails and stains on our clothes from whatever we’re working on. We could clean up pretty well with some qualified help, but what’s the point until the job is done?

Speaking in a shamanic sense there are two roads I can go by… forcibly trying to turn my people into Polly Purebody, or representing them as they truly are and believing in them. In simpler terms, I can take everything away to balance things out (which leaves nothing) or add a few more things to the mix to achieve a similar but far less boring outcome. Plus, it seems to be the best way I’ve found to fuck off and work your ass off at the same time.

Jack would rather be dead than dull 🙂