Daily Stoic Day 5: Who Am I And What Do I Stand For?

 Well holy hot shit on toast as my lovely wife might say. That's not a heavy question at all. Not a bit.

So let's pick it apart shall we.

Who am I?

What roles do I have? Son, citizen, father, brother, husband, soldier, employee, boss, friend, colleague, enemy, and a myriad of others that are not coming to me right now. 

Son was the one I got first. It came with the conception. Did I do a good job of it? That's a War and Peace sized book answer in and of itself. So let's go with, "it depends on who you ask". 

Which I think would be the answer to that question for all of the other roles as well. Which sounds like one giant cop out. To a point it probably is. On the other hand, it is most certainly true. I suppose what I'm getting at is it is really a fools errand to try and get at who any person really is in a blog post that I'm trying to write in a half hour session before I go to bed tonight. I'm a man, who in his life has filled many roles, has done well at times, has royally fucked them up at others, but has always tried to at least make things right in the end. 

Now the things I stand for, these are easy to come up with...at least I thought they were until I started to think about them for a minute. Most people can think of the things that they hope they stand for. Honesty, integrity, freedom, fairness, hard work, insert whatever positive attribute or outcome you can think of and its easy to say you stand for that. Now try to think of a time you have stood for that. Now after you've done that try to think of a time that you've stood for that on your own....

This is what I'm struggling with. As I'm thinking especially now with all this BLM and Antifa bullshit going on with all these people running around basically cowing people into doing things have I actually stood up in any real way? Nope. I've written a few inconsequential words on the internet. Maybe posted a humorous meme or a clever picture on social media, but I haven't actually done anything about what is going on in the world and this country today. I'll admit, I live a fairly insulated life in a fairly out of the way place that won't get a lot of attention from anyone. So I probably won't ever be confronted with these situations, but could I go there? Sure. Will I? I sincerely doubt it. Should I? I don't know. Would there be any real point to it? 

But the question remains, can I name a time when I stood up for something that I believed in on my own? With no support, when something I knew was right was challenged, was I able to stand up to the mob, and like Captain America said, NO. YOU MOVE. 

Mighty Mighty Bosstone's Lyrics keep running through my head, "I'm not a coward, I've just never been tested. I'd like to think that if I was I would pass."

Daily Stoic Day 4: Am I Seeing Clearly, Acting Generously, Accepting What I Can't Change?

 I'd certainly like to think so. But if I'm being completely honest the answer has got to be no. At least in part. I mean to a point I am seeing things clearly. But completely clearly, I don't know. I couldn't be sure. I don't think I'll ever be sure. Can we ever be sure that we are seeing things 100% clearly? 

Acting generously. That's one where I think its safe to say that I fall short. I'm not particularly generous with anyone. If we're talking about money or time I'm pretty stingy with mine. I like to keep as much of it as I can. Or at least use it for selfish purposes as much as I possibly can. There's some room for improvement there.

Accepting the things I can't change? Lately, I've been giving a lot more space to people since I have been able to actually realize that I can't control them. Regardless of how badly I want to. So my biggest hiccup on that front is trying to control other people, which is a fools errand. However, I've been able to keep that fact in the forefront of my mind and keep myself from getting wrapped up in trying to control them when I can't.

Daily Stoic Day 3: What Can I Say No To So I Can Say Yes To What Really Matters.

 This is probably a never ending question. Right off the bat, I think I need to say no to the things that I have been doing in my life that haven't been working for me thus far. And that list is long and distinguished....yeah and so is my Johnson. Couldn't resist. Forgive me.

Biggest thing on my list is this hermit thing I've been doing. I've basically sequestered myself into my apartment and hid out for about a year now. Sure there's the COVID and to a point that has limited the amount of things I can do but I've used it as an excuse to not do anything. I need to say no to that. I need to get up every day and no matter what get my ass out of the house and go do something, anything. Find shit to do, interact with other humans. Build a social circle. Make some friends here. Build some kind of life. Say no to the hermit.

What's next? I'm gonna try to keep this manageable today. My mood, I'm in a bad mood most days. I don't show it to most people I do interact with but I am. I don't really have a lot of happy go lucky time in my life. Which would be nice, but I think its something that I could say no to every now and then. Fuck being in a bad mood. Say no to Mr. Moody.

Last one for today. Laziness, I imagine this just is a natural outgrowth of the other two. If you're just sitting at home doing nothing, in a bad mood, why on earth would you be working hard at it? I mean it isn't really that tough to sit at home and be pissed off. As a matter of fact, its pretty easy. I mean yes being angry is exhausting but it doesn't take a whole lot of effort to sit in your apartment and marinate in your own pissed offedness. But I don't work out, I've just started writing again, 3 out of the last 4 days, I don't do much other than work. I do enough laundry not to offend my coworkers but other than that its pretty well sitting on my chair watching Netflix or YouTube. Which if I imagine myself on my death bed is a pretty pathetic way to have spent my time. 

So gonna start with no's to those three. No to laziness. No to the hermit. And no to Mr. Moody.

Let's see how that goes. 

Daily Stoic Day 2: What Am I Learning And Studying For?

 Someone really smart once said that an unexamined life wasn't worth living. This is my feeble attempt to examine my life. I've made more than a few lifetimes worth of mistakes and I want to examine them. Not only for my own sake, but for anyone who might end up reading this in the future. Its also been said that if you can read about others mistakes and not make them then you're ahead of the game. Then this is also my attempt to get you, dear reader ahead of the game, because if something that I write can get you even a couple of steps ahead of the game then all my mistakes were not in vain.

So many people walk through this life without really thinking about it. Or examining it. What they do, why they do it. Where they are going. What their purpose is. I don't want to live that way. I want to know myself. I want to know who I am. I want to know why I was. I want to know why I did what I did. Why I thought what I thought. Why I felt how I felt. If I can pass on a few nuggets to my offspring or to someone who might stumble across my writing all the better. 

The study is simple, the education is how you dig. If you look at your soul as a hole then your education is the shovel. The more education you get the more passes you make with that shovel. The more earth you clear from that hole. The more of that hole you clear of earth the more of your soul you can see clearly. So take your education seriously. Take your studying seriously. Do not read just to "get the gist of it" read deeply. Try to feel what the author wants you to feel, and if you can't, try to feel what the author felt while writing it.

Do not leave your days unexamined. Think about your day. Think about what you did, said, thought and felt. Think about why you did, felt, thought and said those things. If you want to change those things, try to figure out how to do so. If you hurt someone along the way, did they deserve it? If they did deserve it, was it necessary? Did you hurt them for their own good or for yours? If you did something good, did you do it for its own sake, or did you do it for recognition? Find the actual why behind your actions.

Did you try to control things that were beyond your control? I'll bet you did. I know I did. Every day in almost every way I can find myself trying to control events and people who are beyond my control. Its easily my biggest problem. Not realizing at the time that what I am doing, saying, thinking or feeling is designed to attempt to control something that is outside of my full and complete control is without a doubt my numero uno short coming.

Make a concerted effort to read things that you know ahead of time you won't agree with, and read them with an open mind. An excessively open mind. A deliberately open mind. Do not confine yourself to an echo chamber, which is so very easy to do in this day and age. Politically, all you have to do to temper your opinion on matters is try to imagine any situation with the other side as the target or the beneficiary of the circumstances you are discussing and from that you should be able to deduce whether or not it is a fair situation.

Learning is a cradle to the grave pursuit and studying is a large part of that learning. It ends when you die. After that, if I have the means, I'll let you know...

Daily Stoic Day 1: What Things Are Truly In My Control?

 Truly in my control? Next to shit is truly in my control. If you really sit down and think about it. Next to nothing is actually in your control. You can't control your kids, you can't control your family, you can't control your house, you can't control your pets, you can't control much of anything except of course for yourself...and then there's a whole lot about yourself that you can't control.

Can you control the color of your skin? Nope, not really, I mean you can hit a tanning booth and control it to a point, or go all C. Thomas Howell in Soul Man on us, and control it that way, but you really can't control it. Can you control the color of your hair? Not without chemical intervention you can't. You can't control the color of your eyes. 

I can't control these god damned fruit flies that seem to keep getting in to my bathroom no matter what I do. You can't control what Donald Trump is gonna tweet next, and would you really want to? I mean, you'd ruin all the fun. You can't control what Joe Biden is going to say next, and who would want to stop that senile old bastard from talking, its too funny.

The fact of the matter is that you can't control much. The only things that you can control is what you do. What you say. What you think and how you feel. That's it. That's all you get to control. Doesn't matter who you are. I suppose if you work your way into some position of power you get to control some things. If you're an army general sure you can bark some orders and some troops will move around a board, but that doesn't mean that any of them have any real respect for you. Its simply a rank has its privileges thing. All you've really got is what you say, what you think, what you feel and what you do. That's as far as your control extends. After that, it ends. Rather abruptly.

Now I don't know how your typical army general would feel about that fact, but I kinda think its pretty liberating. Makes things a lot easier to sort out. If you can actually separate the two. The things you control from the things you don't. That's the tough part. I'm a boss at work. There's a lot of times I tell someone to do something and for whatever reason it doesn't get done when I want it done and I get my panties in a twist. Now, I told them to do it. Which I control. They didn't do it. Which much to my annoyance, I don't control. But I want to believe I do so I get pissy. Which is the exact wrong answer. I don't control what they do. I can't, unless I hold their hands through every minute of their day, which would defeat the purpose of having staff in the first place. I have to give up that control.

Can you control your spouse. Ask someone who's been cheated on. The answer is a resounding no. Hell no, even. Not a chance in holy hell can you control another person. Ask any parent of toddlers and/or teenagers. You don't control those lunatics, you can only hope to contain them. So what the hell do you do with this utter lack of control?

Love it. Relish it. Embrace it.

Its one of the greatest gifts you could ever be given. Its perfect freedom. The freedom to say, all I can do is what I can do and what happens after that is what it is and is beyond my control. Its the ability to honestly look at a situation and if you can say, I have done, said, thought and felt all I could do, say, think and feel, and what will be, will be and it will be what it will be.

What I can control I have. What I can't control can kiss my ass...is a beautiful way to look at life.

We Had The Blue & The Gray, Now We've Got The Red & The Blue...

Maybe I'm nuts, okay, I am. But maybe I'm reading this situation entirely wrong but we've got political upheaval throughout the country. We have a six block section of a major city that has been taken over by armed fucking hippies and all the cops have been pushed out.

We have shootings, riots, looting and protests galore and there's a pandemic going on to boot. This is the most fun we've had in years!

I'm not going to lie, I really do wish I lived back home in Chicago right now, because I would've found a way to insert myself into this melee by now. I'll admit it probably wouldn't have worked out well for me and anyone else in the immediate vicinity, but so it goes.

But that brings me to my current thoughts. No one is in any mood to compromise at all. I mean not even a little bit. One side wants the police and pretty much every other institution of the United States to be defunded and/or dismantled and something much more...shall we say "socially aware" in its place. While the other side wants the US military to be loosed upon the citizens of this country, weapons free. 

The lines are pretty well drawn folks. Republicans on one side, Democrats on the other. Will this end up tearing our country apart? I don't think so. I don't really think they've got the energy or the staying power required to pull something like that off. But for the sake of argument let's say that they did how does something like that look?

How do you divide the US? Into to dirty hippies and gun nuts?

Here's a link to a blog that came up with some really stupid maps (in my estimation)

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/us-red-blue-partition-plan?rebelltitem=6#rebelltitem6

I think you'd have to do some relocation, whether anyone likes it or not. You'd have to pick a side. Do you want to be red or blue you'd have to pick and in order to make it so that neither side would have a monopoly on good weather or bad we're going to split it going north and south so each side gets a coast and each side gets a Disney. But either way, pick one and you're moving.

Just eyeballing the map it looks to me like the border would be just west of Louisiana in Texas straight up through Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota. The NFL would be divvied up into East and West and the Superbowl would be played in each countries respective capital in alternating years.

This is just what I've spit out in a stream of thought session. I'm actually going to put some thought into this and come back to this.

I Only Kneel For God, And I'm Not 100% On That Yet...

So much craziness, so much fun in the last few weeks. The entire world has lost its ever loving mind. And don't for one minute think I haven't loved the cacophony of it all. Its been fun. I've even been watching the news for goodness sake.

Protests, riots and looting oh my. The fabric of our society is falling down around us. BLM is demanding that the police departments be dismantled and holy jumping fucking shit balls some of these spineless politicians are actually listening.

Antifa is running rampant through the streets pulling down statues and vandalizing every monument they come across.

And then there's the knee thing. The take a knee thing. The kneel with us thing. The prostrate yourself for the sins of whoever the fuck thing. 

I can deal with all of it, right up to there. As much shit as I get from most people on my side of the political spectrum I can understand why black people are pissed about a lot of this stuff. Cops can be dicks. Lots of times they reserve a lot of that fuckery for black people. The slave thing, the segregation thing, the racism thing, I can see how that would have put them behind the 8 ball from the jump. Kinda like starting a 100 meter race from 200 meters away with a 100 pound weight around your neck. I can wrap my brain around that.

Police accountability for their actions? Easy one, anyone who is actually against that can no longer be taken seriously and most likely should be given a pacifier and put in a diaper.

These 4 who were involved in the George Floyd murder. Let the trial do what its supposed to do and give these guys the chance to explain to the court and everyone else exactly what the fuck happened and let the jury decide who is and isn't guilty of what, and when they do don't break anything because you don't like what they decided. That's called being an adult.

Now back to the knee thing. Fuck all of you and your take a knee. I won't kneel for you or anyone else. Unless you are holy and almighty blessed and coming down here to start the rapture or some shit I am not, nor will I ever kneel to you or any fucking body else. I don't care what you think it means, or what you think it accomplishes or what you think at all for that matter. To be as utterly American and cliche as I possibly can, if you really want me to kneel you better come heavy because I came into this world naked, bloody and screaming and I sure as shit do not mind going out that way too.