I heard something like this from an Oprah video, “Significance and service equal success…” but in a more Oprah way and to inspiring instrumentals. The word significance grabbed me. I heard that word again, maybe the same day or perhaps the next, on a George Carlin interview. He was talking about when he started to find his voice in stand-up, he said that the times around him were changing, that they were significant. “You could feel it, you could feel it…” he said.
I went down many Youtube, “whats my life purpose?” rabbit holes while avoiding work for a three-week intensive summer session graduate class on public policy, I decided to get out of the way while unemployed. Focusing can be difficult. In the most desperate moment of distraction and self-deliberation, I watched a 45-minute interview with personal finance psycho, Robert Kiyosaki. Even now while writing, I am Youtube-ing #vanlife stories and seething with jealousy over a slim woman who lives in her self- refurbished motor home with her cats… cats! Two of them!
That class- the mountain of reading, weekly discussion board posts and papers was in a way a distraction itself from the commitment I made to sit here and write each day. Getting back to it is hard, discipline has been diffused. I cannot sit still my mind, age 2, severely underdeveloped.
For our final class project we had to create a policy brief- a two page document outlining a policy proposal. A brief is used to educate an official who might be voting on a policy but has likely not read it in its entirety. I took the creative vigilante angle and created a policy that would pay the rents and mortgages of people who live below the medium income through next year and the impending recession. It was originally titled 2020/2021 Zombie Apocalypse Prevention Act but in my class pitch, my professor said I should call it the WAR on something because invoking the word WAR is a strategy that gives unlimited power and spending, I mean its WAR for heavens sake!
This was the train that dropped me off at George Carlin; he appeared magically in the results when I searched, war on homelessness. “You never hear about a WAR of homelessness do you?” he asks. “That’s because there is no money in that problem… a home is an abstract idea… these people need are houses, physical, tangible structures.” So I called my policy, WAR on Houselessness and I posed a choice to imaginary officials- pay rents and mortgages or send millions into the streets and homeless shelters. This is also a political strategy, you give a sense that there are only two options and you make the one you want seem like the only acceptable one. I learned a lot in this class, almost too much. The subjectivity and value-driven nature of policies and the politics that come out of them, it turns out are rules, rather than exceptions. That knowledge, against the backdrop of a childhood in the system, and the fresh, fresh experience of the unemployment system was then in the last week, catalyzed by the most tragic of system failures- policy brutality and the murder of George Floyd.
I vacillate between youtube videos of political commentary and comedy, podcasts, series, audio books, social media outcries, any and all media to educate myself and also fantasies about living in a RV with my cats. My mind is on a stretcher; the thoughts I have are larger than my ability to hold them. I’ve taken to Ukulele, for real this time and, well now I have done this. Im still flirting with the idea of recommitting to a daily writing practice.
I am circling around the idea that in looking for a life of significance, the opposite occurs. There is nothing significant in looking for significance. Significance seems to exit independent of intention or wanting or even work, though all those things may bring you to its door step, it doesn’t permit entry. Significance is a momentary thing, like a warm blast of air on the river. You enter into it by chance and pass through. Love seems like to be that too, unable to be held… on the outside anyways.
I woke up 6:30am (by alarm) today, thinking last night, “I’ll wake up at sunrise and I’ll be a writer. It’s been a cloudy cold morning, my IBS is acting up and my long distance lover has disconnected. So all I have actually have done is watch John Stewart and John Oliver videos, eaten waffles and had a self-righteous slight weep, to Billie Eilish. Do writers take baths before noon?