This summer has been weird. Why it is weird is complicated, too complicated for me to explain sufficiently at this late hour. I suppose that it is a culmination of many things: my job, my mood, the mounds of crap piling up in the corners of my house, the myriad things that haven't been getting done around here, the state of the country, the state of the world, and the mediocrity of my recent running performances. It is time for it all to end, and it is up to me to shake things up a little, or a lot.
Much of it depends upon my ability to regroup. I hate the word "acceptance," and I refuse to use it to describe what I must do to get out of this predicament. But it has been necessary for me to acknowledge some things, first and foremost that much of what I have attempted during the past several years has failed, and I must abandon them, remove them from my calendar and my agenda, and go back to square one. I've gotten cocky, and I'm not the guy that I thought I was.
That might sound harsh and ugly, and in the beginning it was intended to be so. I have a habit of self-deprecation, one that I have depended upon for years to motivate me, and when it became obvious to me just how screwed up things were, I natually fell back on it. Things were not going right for me because I am a stupid-ass bumpkin who got in over my head in thinking that I had anything meaningful to offer the world.
Don't get me wrong: it may well be true that I am a failure. But if it is, it is not true for the reasons that I believed it was true. It is true simply because I have failed to accept -- excuse me, to acknowledge -- reality. for example, I am proud of my education, hard-earned as it was through endless hours of solitary research, writing, and rewriting during nights with no sleep and days surrounded by leisure-seeking clods who now earn much more money than I take home in my paltry bimonthly paycheck. I have spent years harboring contempt for those people, but I must acknowledge that the market favors them, and has very little respect for what I have accomplished. Therefore, if I am ever to break out of this rut I am in, I must retrain myself in a manner that will allow me to be more competitive in this environment, even if it involves immersing myself in bullshit.
That's the cynical side of me coming out again. I'm glad it's still there, but I've gotta suppress it for a while. It's time to start over, to clean house, to build a base, in life and -- as I have not yet discussed here -- in running.
I'll talk about running next time, for it's late, and I don't want to squander the base of sleep that I built over the holidays.
