There is this town next to the one I grew up in called Orangevale. It’s come to symbolize everything I don’t want my life to lead up to. I remember as a kid just getting this choking feeling in my throat whenever I would visit friends there. I remember realizing “I’d rather put a gun in my mouth than end up living here.”

Not because it was poor–it wasn’t–but because it was just sad. You could just feel the toll that getting up everyday and working 40 hours a week as mediocre insurance salesman or secretary took on people. I drove through it a while back and from the cocoon of my car remember hearing those piercing screams of desperation rattling off chain link fences and dry, brown lawns. People just waiting for the weekend so they can sit and eat dinner on tv trays or yell at their kids. Alinsky called this “living in illusions of partial escape.”

I still feel that choking–that fear. I just cannot end up there. To work your whole life at the governmentally mandated limit for what? At something you’re ok at but would quit if you could get a few more dollars doing something else, for what? To have the white picket fence that needs so desperately to be repaired but you just don’t care enough to do it, for what? To be so angry, and confused, and wonder why your kids act out in violence, for what?

And for some reason, kids I went to college with are just counting the days before they graduate and move back. No wonder it’s all about indulgence, artifice, delusion and those “if I don’t travel abroad now, I’ll never get to do it again” trips they have the state pay for. It’s a last gasp before they voluntarily go under. Worse, most of my friends never even left.

That’s not me. I won’t let it be. I’d rather be dirt-fucking-poor and doing exactly what I want then take the sucker’s payoff of that life. Or, better yet, have both–the money that comes with rarity and value and the passion of a life of meaning. But you’ll hear a lot of excuses for why that’s not possible or not worth it or too hard–ask yourself, as I try to, “according to who?” And then you’ll see them as the tinny, self-serving rationalizations from people scared to death of life and effort that they are.

“Can I get a cup of water?”

“We don’t have water here.”

I was at a Pinkberry in LA earlier in the week overpaying for desert and I got thirsty and assumed they’d give me a drink for free. But they didn’t. And I guess I should have gotten mad–it’s pretty awful customer service–but I couldn’t. I respect the balls that that took. Somewhere along the line, someone made the conscious choice not to serve water. IKEA did it too. Someone said “Why do we pay to give everyone bags that they just throw away when they get home?” and they stopped doing it.

You can see countless examples of industries that have decided to die with whatever practices they were born with. The album, regardless of whatever musicians cry, is not a collective artistic statement. It’s just a packaging device designed to deal with fixed costs. Otherwise, iTunes would show that songs in “classic” albums were downloaded equally. Nope, 3 or 4 songs are almost always significantly more popular than others while others are almost actively disliked. But bands keep cranking out albums even though they could sell the songs online as they make them. Why isn’t the mail delivered on Sunday? Why do the newspapers still publish stock tables? Why do cars still have cigarette lighters instead of electrical outlets? And why does the penny even exist anymore?

Because no one has bothered to stop and questioned “the way things have always been.”

The United States Constitution of the isn’t a suicide-pact. Should anything else be? Things are changing at a phenomenal rate of speed. You cannot get in the habit of traditional or emulative thinking. If the data doesn’t support your position, you’re probably being generous when you call it a position. Business have at least some excuse: Bureaucracy. What excuse do we [people] have?

[*] I started taking Flaxseed oil (pills) everyday and a Vitamin Water. I feel more energetic and waking up in the morning hasn’t been the awful–I wish I was dead–experience that it always used to be.

[*]This Free Rice game is amazing. It’s like Puppy War but with an academic rationalization.

[*]Got this quote from someone.

“The first step — especially for young people with energy and drive and talent,

but not money — the first step to controlling your world is to control your

culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To

write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.” Chuck Palahniuk

[*]Have a TON of books I want to get into. This is the list.

[*] I mentioned the word “viral” in my in this post about marketing. I will never use the word again. I just heard someone use it to describe the paid distribution of fliers outside a concert. Officially, done.