I'm writing this with the buzz of Formula One practice audible in the distance, like a bunch of bees on steroids. It's a familiar sound these days, not just from this year but from many years past also.
Otherwise it's cool and rain threatens. It's weather that suits my mood just now. I'm feeling a tad dark and broody. How much is due to a late night - 4am bedtime - or other things I'm not totally sure. I suspect it's more other things.
I feel a bit mentally weary from having been so busy trying things, doing things, from acively and incessantly thinking about angles and the best way to exploit them. It is tiring, and right now it feels pretty futile also. That's not a good vibe.
I've almost committed to writing the day off and having a lazy one. Maybe that's what I need. There's no shame in that, I've earned a break - but at the same time I don't really want to succumb to this lethargic disinterest. It's a killer I think. If you're not careful you turn into a slug.
At the back of my mind is the inevitable cycle. Right now I'm at the low point. That may continue another day or two. At some point I'll bounce. I'll get all angry and belligerent and fuck this and in very typical fashion muscle my way out of it. The upward swing will continue until once more I'll be focussed and hard at it, as determined as anyone on two feet, the eye of the tiger returned.
It's perhaps symptomatic of how I feel right now that I feel pretty cynical about all that. I'm sort of sick of it, like an old movie I've watched too many times. Enough already I think. I oughtn't complain - it could be much worse. And ultimately it's nature isn't it? It's how I'm made - what point complaining about it?
That's an interesting question I'm often pondering. I caught a bit of Bruce Almighty on the TV the other week, and the part where Bruce basically prostrates himself before God and says you know better, I'm sorry. Being an agnostic cum atheist that sat badly with me even though it was a comedy and God was the very acceptable Morgan Freeman. I thought about it for days.
I actually wondered if I should be more humble. If I should accept my place in the world. Maybe it would be easier if I settled for somerthing less. Maybe I should accept I'm just another dude. In a way I felt as if my attitude to life set me up for trouble. Why want so much? Why strive? Isn't that hubris, arrogance? Why want more?
It was actually tempting - it's exhausting sometimes to be always on the make. It is what it is though. It's my nature and I may be damned in the afterlife for not being as humble as I could have been, for wanting more than my fair share, but so be it. I can't squash myself into a box. Nor should I. This is the road, and I'm on it.
So here I am today a tad singed.
It's perilous though too, and when I think about it, pretty scary also. You gamble a lot taking this road and you either win big or fail. I sort of like the extemes of that, yet there are times I want to curl up and dream of easier times. Easier times are smaller aspirations though, and I just don't have those in me.
So, as I said, it is what it is.
In the meantime things develop regardless of me. I've done enough that there is a momentum that continues even when I curl up in a ball. So far not a terribly productive momentum, though things are happening, jobs being offered. I want my own thing though - there, that pig-headedness. Maybe I'll do something for someone else, but not forever. I want to own my stuff. And do my stuff.
Right now the jobs being offered me are project management, as if that's the sum of a very interesting and diverse CV. It's not my favourite role. It's like being the conductor of an orchestra, which sounds okay I guess, and is better than playing somewhere in the string section - though doubtless that has some charm. Not enough for me though. I don't want to be playing the music or even conducting it; I want to write the music.
