23/52 - Easy Street Still Needs a Street Sweeper (Paved with Gold and Tagged in Green)

"Hard knuckles on the second hands of working class watches
Skyscrapers is colossus, the cost of living is preposterous
Stay alive, you play or die, no options
No Batman and Robin
Can't tell between the cops and the robbers
They both partners, they all heartless with no conscience
Back streets stay darkened
Where unbeliever hearts stay hardened
My eagle talons stay sharpened, like city lights stay throbbing
You either make a way or stay sobbin'"

-Mos Def (Respiration by Black Star) 

Dear Internauts,

I've been here long enough to wonder why or at very least long enough to eat some local Chinese take-out. Not much for fate or fortunes, but my latest cookie dropped this bit of vagueness, "A new venture will be a success."

That's right, folks; week twenty-three and I've already resorted to fortune cookies for thematic decision-making.

Did you know that success used to describe any outcome, good or ill? While I could perspire over the linguistic/anthropological reasons for why it may have changed to specify the positive (or y'know just look it up), I'd put my chips on the existential sense of wholeness. A venture often doesn't feel complete unless it's completed in the way we'd wish. We've come to expect happy endings in our media and often in our lives as well.

Nothing ever really ends, though, does it? Or is that just me being optimistic?

Whether or not my success is successful of course depends on my goals and aims. It's possible and in fact likely that what I wish and hope for—no matter how clearly I may delineate its terms—will be perceived as inadequate by those with even a slight variance in values.

Success for me may look like loss to you. Success for you may look trivial or irrelevant to others.

Plus, there's the ambiguity of when exactly to take stock of our lives. Sure, it's easy enough to look back at the lives of the dead and subjectively objectify, but I'd guess that most folks reading this now aren't already dead (at least on the outside). While there's still time to make a move or two, is it really fair or even useful to judge a person's existence as a state of success or failure?

I generally suck at math, but I'd guess the likelihood of the exact outcome I hope for every time I make a choice is bound to be in an extreme minority to the possibilities of anything else happening. That makes me wonder if we place higher value on rare success. The greater the unlikelihood of something awesome happening, the better it feels when it happens. I think this is true often enough to make us miss the times when we can be proud of our more ordinary successes.

What we really mean by SUCCESS is a happily ever after, though, isn't it? This state of future settled bliss where the ordinary would appear extraordinary to our present selves.

For some that's a happy home of familial and material wealth. Not necessarily excessive but with more than enough to pay the bills and provide a safe, comfortable environment for the last forty to fifty years of your own life and at least the first eighteen of your hypothetical kids. More love than debt and enough time for friends and hobbies while still working enough to feel like a productive member of society. 

For others, having a clean well less than two miles away, a chicken in the yard, and a healthy minimum of parasitic worms is the height of luxury.

For me, I'd take somewhere to sleep and enough to eat so long as I can spend my time making art. It's not some kinda ascetic aesthetic I'm after or a holier-than-thou minimalism. Really, it's just a longing not to be messed with. The objects I cherish the most are the things I make and the tools I use to make them. I have nothing against this standard of working hard to have a comfortable house and family and salary and all that, but I've all too often been in a position where my inability to really grasp that desire means I'm seen as useless or lazy.

Yeah, I know I shouldn't care so much about what other people think of me, but other people are kinda terrifying. Unlike in high school when I worried if people didn't like my clothes or my hair or my sense of humor, now I'm mostly just worried that the person in front of me in line is gonna pull out a knife or try to strangle me.

The thing about paranoia is it's a lot like racism—it only takes one act of violence to make an entire group look bad in the eyes of the close-minded.

Success, therefore, isn't just a matter of place and possessions but a state of mind. Wouldn't it be nice to have what I want, to live where I want, to be free to do what I want? Wouldn't it be even nicer to be able to think about myself and the world the way I want?

My success won't look like yours. Nor will yours likely look anything like mine. Our goals are different, after all.

If I get a strike but it's in someone else's lane, I don't get to call it a successful bowl. I can try, though, and—to stretch this metaphor out a few frames—I'd say many of us do. It's like buying a car based on city mileage then taking it off-roading. It's like being an expert in arachnology called in to consult on peach farming because fuzzy.

It's like using the priorities and historical context of one generation to make general statements about what a separate generation should be thinking and doing, based solely on what life was like back when you were that age. Sure, I can relate to some of what Nick Carraway is feeling setting out on his own in a new town with new friends, but even an Old Sport like me might have some trouble using The Great Gatsby to find my way around Long Island.

The sleepless dream a lot while the dreamless sleep so silent.

Who knows where I'll be this time next week or the next, but if I decide it's any of your gosh darn bidness, you can be sure it'll be found right here.

Thanks for reading,
Odist

p.s. - Just heard the newest mix of my new single, Painkiller, to come out this summer. Been a long and windy road, but this is still about the music, ain't it?