What to write......what to write.......
I have a strenuous February ahead of me. At the end of the month I got to go and bartend in LA. Which sounds like fun but may in reality be a bear of a time. Evryone in NYC says the same thing - LA sucks. Well you know what? I don't want to hear it. I haven't been there. I haven't breathed the smog, been in the traffic, talked to the people, etc. I want to decide I hate it for myself. Which is exactly what I want to do. I think that it is rare when I am persuaded or dissuaded to do something I have already made up my mind about. Which is strange, because I think I give due crredence to what people say about certaing things. Obviously, I place greater trust in the opinions of people I care about or respect, but sometimes complete strangers can have an insight that your everyday friends may have had missing from your life.
Which is what brings me to what I think about the choices we make in life and the direction we decide we are going to move in. I don' think that I am the kind of person who has ever sat down and decided wha the hell he was going to do for the next year, five years, ten years, etc. Is this poor planning? Does actual planning ever happen in life? We make our choices and then deal with the consequences. There were few times in my life when I actually thought "you know what - I have these two opportunities and if I choose one the other will disappear." I have always just sort of been buoyed by the choices I make. Mind you, this isn't any sort of deterministic cop-out. This is just a feeling that I ma moving in the right direction and that eventually I will end up in the place I am supposed to be. It should be noted that the things that I place value in are already situated in my life. I have my health, a job, a roof over my head, good friends,a great family....There is little I could want for. MAybe every once in a while a piece of ass might cheer me up, but even that could be sacrificed in face of the greater good that I feel that my life has. Am I giving back? I don't know. I guess not. I think we all like to believe that we have an impact on the people in our lives, but do we really? I think we do. Maybe it isn't some great ovr-arching catalyst in the vein of someone like Gandhi, but maybe that little bit is all we need to keep each other afloat. Fucked up shit happens. I'm not dismissing that. But we have support systems and even if we didn't we have other people to lean on.
As for deciding for ourselves which choices we should make on an ethical or moral basis I think that we all have the faculties to decide what is right and what is wrong at any given moment. In our heart of hearts we know what the right answer is, unfortunately we have the ability to stop ourselves from making the right choice. I know that there are anomalies - the Nazis, sociopathy and the like. But on a day to day basis - we all know the difference between making the right and wrong decision barring some strange psychosis. And we convince ourselves a million different ways to do whatever we like. Because more often than not, the right thing is not the easiest. So then what lies at the heart of the million little wrongs we do each other everyday? Is it just a perverse sense of laziness? Of course not, it is a combination of a million different emotions and motivations - greed, envy, laziness, etc.
Woah - when did this get all Christian?
Anyway - the high moral ground is often the loneliest. And no one is without sin. But I have always felt that the certain evils we do to each other have more to do with intention than anything else. I think that depending upon your intention you are ultimately forgiveable. So many things occur that are beyond our abilty to control or understand that we can only hold onto our hopes and best intentions and jump headlong into the fire.