Morticians Assistant, Public Defender, Soda Jock

My dreams are really getting on my nerves.

As an adult, I feel I have found that perfect middle ground of focus and fear - allow me to explain.

From what I can deduce, most folks keep their everyday lives rolling by-way of a combination of focus and fear. To make things easier, we can refer to "focus" as professional and "fear" as human.

OK.


Now, the struggle of the salaried adult is to find a balance between being professional in the work place while not forfeiting the most casual of human instincts and reactions.

Empathy is usually the first to go. Hunter S. Thompson once mused that there was "safety in speed." This I'm not sure of. Blazing through one's day can often lead to overseen tragedies along the way. If eleven o'clock rolls around and you are scheduled for a fifteen minute break, you are probably going to take advantage. But consider this: you return to the work place from your fifteen minutes of bliss to discover a co-worker in your area at the break of madness from over-work; you left for you break as soon as responsibility decided to make a call.

Alright. Do you feel bad about this? Or do you say, "Meh--shit happens?"

What I do is admit that there's nothing that can be done; so put your foot in the dirt and kick off with some steam-powered wrecking spirit! I'm as far from hung up as a teenage girl's cell phone. And I can understand, and respect, others' inclination to be square. But those folks are swimming circles in the human end of the pool. They really need to understand that "adult swim" means 'Go nuts. The whole of the pool is at your disposal...because you're an adult human being with advanced higher brain function. Enjoy it.'

On the other hand, to ignore the trespass of selfishness altogether is far too professional. Once the company has you betraying your own self-preservation for the good of the company, you might as well keep your twelve o'clock open every day for feeding; because they'll tie you up to a post with a bag of oats the first chance they get.

But having the good enough grace to remained focused in the abasing work place while maintaining your humanity - that takes skill, I guess. Because I haven't come across too many people that can do it (myself excluded - not to be a pretentious shit, but I'm sort of my own standard of excellence. Call it narcissism, but I prefer to think of myself as a text-book case of "Only Child Syndrome"), and I'll be goddamned if Ronald Reagan and Saddam Hussein are the only cats that go down in the books as being superlative multi-taskers.

More to come later...