huffy heavy sigh

when you watch TV as much as I have been lately, you start to fail to connect with reality. You start to see things as the television would will you to and feel worse and worse about the state of your own life. especially when it comes to commercials. commercials never show you the ugliness. commericals show you the benefit of how great your life could be "if only." If only you would buy a house, if only you would lease this car, if only you would take this drug...all commercials are selling you something, something that for the first 20 seconds makes you wish your life were better. Then magically by the end of the 30 seconds you have finally found this thingamawhachit that is going to make it all better. What they don't show you is how this thing is going to serve to make your life only more miserable in the end. Its only going to force you to spend more years tied to that desk at work so that you can afford to pay for those things that you so desperately need to make it all worthwhile.

they never show you that life. the life that is just filled with work and stuff...let's pile it on...more and more stuff...now we need overtime to make ends meet. Too much stuff..let's get a second job...

i'm fat with stuff...
I have a chair in my house I never sit in...
Why do I have this chair. It cost me 250 bucks at Target to sit peacefully in a corner and make me feel bad that I don't read as much as I should. and my dining room table...sure it's only a two-seater and only costs 175$, but it sits there as no more than an ironing board..which I only use when I'm running early and dont just pick the least wrinkled shirt from the ground.
I put on my crappy clothes and mutter to myself that the next time I get paid I need to be sure to spend money on some new outfits because people at work tell me I need to look better than I do...I am, after all, a supervisor..and people need to look up to me...i need to appear different...better....weathier...smarter...happier...

otherwise how will those people look up to me enough to work harder for me?

Then I buy a chin-up bar to accompany my new work out series because I'm fat...And fat people command no respect or attention. forget the fact that I bought cookies and icecream on the same ticket. 80$ later I have another thing that I have to find space for in my over-priced-rented-it-because-It-was-close-to-work-and-resigned-the-lease-because-i-dont-have-any-friends-willing-to-help-me-move-to-a-cheaper-apartment apartment.

I'm spending all this money to precipitate change so that someday this day to day that I live can be constituted as a life. Maybe if I buy this I'll change..maybe if I eat this I'll feel better, maybe if I have this to hang in that blank space on my wall people will come visit.

but the bottom line is...
no matter how much I buy, no matter how well I eat, no matter how nice my awesomely-cool-i-can-sleep-in-it-if-i-had-to car is...Misery makes no attempt to leave me alone.


I'm reading stupid Donald Miller's through painted deserts...and its making me angry. I'm angry that my life has become this mind-numbing effort to eek some eternal meaning out of leading other people to work harder at a job I think none of us truly cares about. The only effort we all put in is to make ourselves look better for boss, so we can get that next promotion or raise so that we can...Lord help us...BUY MORE CRAP...

I used to live on 11$ an hour. I had a fine life...lived with a roommate that i only sometimes drove to the brink of insanity, but we had fun as much as two completely different people could have sharing a space. Life was cheap and easy and I had just enough to cover the bills and fix my paid for car when it was broken... Now, somehow, making considerably more than that has left me with even less money, even less of a social life and even less passion about this place in which I've positioned myself.

The only hope I have from day to day is that the other people who work with me wouldnt have pissed off a customer so much that they feel the need to cry "SUPERVISOR" and chew my ears of while recounting the dramatic details of their misfortune.

in short...
with all I have...
I have nothing.


the sheer boredom of my life to this point has left me destroying others and myself at vain attempts toward adventure. The only adventures that captivate me are the sinful ones, because those are the only ones I can get to while still in my cocoon of supposed security...and yet, what have I truly secured myself from? Only that which I now desire so greatly that I could drop it all and with a big PISS OFF never to return again.

I can't be trusted in suburbia...there are too many things to tempt me...to many things that start to gurgle and boil inside of me that I find it hard to contain. And this prison in which i have lived for so long now serves to make me wonder what at all God has intended for me here on this earth.

I sit in the mornings, when I should be making myself presentable and stare into the faces of the hungry children in africa as kind white hands extend bowls of what I could only think to call gruel to fill their tiny distended bellies..and I think to myself, "I should be those kind white hands."

Instead I placate myself with playing music in church because I consider it "using my gifts" but really, in the end, all I am serving to do is lead other people as hopelessly trapped as myself into quiet lulls of agreement at very powerful ideas that God DIED so that I could be here. If I took the stage thinking about this...I would burst into loud tearful choruses that couldnt be stopped by a clock on the wall or by any man's common sense and comfort. I would overflow with the desire to give away everything that I have that I dont use that grows dust and rots in my apartment for the chance to crest the hills of prairie lands as the sun breaks from its slumber. I watch the clock longing for the end of everything...the end of the day, the end of the week, the end of the program, the end of the waiting...But what end am I truly hurrying? To what end am I so desperately trying to get? everyday rolls over again and I've now spent 1 year 3 months and 20 days in charlotte with little more to so for my times investment than a pee stained rug and thread-bear clothes.

I've got no plans. I've got no impact. I've got no outreach. I've got no soul in the game.

I just listen to the distant ticking of the clock that I got free because I went to the annual kick off at work. I'm surprised the damn thing still works since I did little more than take it out of the box and leave it on the counter. stuff.

i have no moments where i feel God's breath against my face because I'm so close to Him and doing something so perfectly designed for myself that no other living person could do it with the passion and conviction i have.

instead I stare into a glowing box and watch four made up old women live adventure after adventure as my dog sleeps in the corner wistfully dreaming of the kinds of things he was bred for...lying tired in the sun after a long day of chasing rabbits into holes and smelling the gun powder in the air. He sits everyday waiting for me to realize this...waiting for me to pick up my rifle and declare.."its hunting season!!" then i feel bad for him...bad that instead of that, life he eats shoes and sleeps in a bathroom surrounded by the torn up toilet paper he so perfectly destroyed.

My life is like Donald Miller's descent into the grand canyon...it took me a while to get down here...so much strength was mustered and wasted to reach such depths that I don't know if I have the heart or strength to climb out.

I imagine to myself what it would take to make a drastic and real change...I'd post a note at the mailboxes "Apartment sale, everything must go" and I'd escort people through my house showing them all of my stuff neatly arranged with price tags and secretly mumble, "its just a suggestion, make me an offer." Until everything in my house was gone except one change of clothes, my guitar, my dog, his leash and a backpack full of "necessities." I estimate all of my earthly possessions would catch a good $3,000. then I would just skip town...Don't tell the apartment complex I'm leaving, just leave the keys at the door and say "no known forwarding address." I'd sell my nice car that is now "right-side up" in payments to the bank...i wouldnt make any money on it's sale, but I would be freed from the payment. Then I would find a buddy with the same heart as mine..and we'd chip in and buy a van that was big enough to sleep in, new enough to run well, and old enough to be cheap...

We'd head out on the road, having only brought our most cherished music, and enough money to last a few months. We'd head out using only a coin to decide our direction. We would head out on an adventure, not knowing where we were going, how we would get there or what we intended to do. We'd travel for months...sleeping the van, eating from cans, talking with strangers, bartering for cigarettes, preaching God's message to vagabonds and hippies...We'd see the whole country end to end and coast to coast...and when our traveling was done, we'd stop...by that time we would have seen enough of america to know where our souls breathed most freely, and there we would settle.

i guess its a stupid daydream. there are parts of me that know it wouldn't be as wonderful as I imagine. the van would break. Our cycles would start lining up and we'd be unbearable bitches for days on end. We'd get taken advantage of by some wayfaring stranger and lose more of ourselves than we'd want to. We'd get lonely from only seeing each other. Hell, we'd probably go insane by the end of it.

But there is a place in me that breathes for that. I don't know why its there, or what exactly God's intentions were when he dreamed me up in my mother's womb, but there it sits...boiling brooding and raising up every so often to make me a perfect, discontented mess of a person...And I sometimes hate this side of me. I hate fighting off the bad feelings and sense of urgency...It makes my humdrum so much more difficult to deal with.

this is certainly not what I was meant to do...this life is not mine...This life is the culmination of unhealed heartache that wasn't dealt with in proper time. This life is the result of challenges met with unnatural fear as failures from long ago gurgle to the surface. This life is what happens when you reach a point at which you are afraid to live...This life is no life at all.

there. I said it. the root of it all...somewhere over the last 10 years I died. I died with no swelling music, no fanfare. I died a wakeless death, no mourners, no recollection of fond memories of me. I had no funeral, no obituary. But I died just the same. Even in living I carried death along side of me...rubbing it on people as I passed. Instead of breathing life and hope into people as I came to know them, I would leave them with a sour outlook of hopelessness and regret. I was walking, living death. I would spit dreams out with bitterness, speaking as a 90 year old woman who missed opportunities to live, as though I had no hope to ever see them realized. "You're still so young," they would say. But I wasn't. I was old and crackling with complacency and excuses as to why my life would never amount to what it should.

Maybe I had to spend some time here. Maybe this season of my life, though lasting longer than intended, was to bring the sense of urgency that, right now, I feel towards living. Maybe what I've done is more natural a thing that I feel it is. Maybe everyone goes through a time like this. Maybe not. Maybe God has been sitting next to me this whole time, at random intervals whispering these quiet dreams into my ear, desperate for my heart to hear them and know they were from Him. Passionately yearning for my ass to leave the couch and my feet to walk forward with intention.

either way...this is where I am. And you have worked very hard to work through the jumbled cluster of the sticky plaque that has formed in my mind. If only I could resolve this post like the commercials on TV...Feeling down? Take this pill, or buy this boat!!

sorry...I'm not made for TV.