First Flashes of Lightning

By Pauly
Los Angeles, CA

The weekend was a blur.

I'm not going to lie -- I got schwasted. I did some writing, but none of it was what I would consider work as I embarked upon a holiday mentality when I realized that the weekend might be my last leisurely weekend to rage solo until the end of the summer. Instead of piling on work, I eased off the pedal sunk into the couch and immersed myself in sports. I'm on the cusp of getting the show on the road again. I won't spend more than a couple of weeks in one place until the end of the summer -- and even my future post-summer is up in the air.

Yeah, all I wanted to do was park my ass and let time erode away and enjoy the fact that I could do nothing and not feel guilty about it, which is rare because I'm always someone who hates wasting my time and I need a good reason for me to do something because I'm so over-extended that I have lists about lists of things to do. Sometimes when I look at everything on my plate, I get a bit freaked out, but that's a good thing because it focuses me to hunker down and triage everything. At this point, I have about a day before I ship out so anything that gets done is a huge priority, where as everything else gets bumped to when I return from South America.

I have one deadline to finish before I can do anything. I had been putting it off for a week, but could never get myself motivated to write -- which is rare -- but I have to assume that I wasn't ready to write about that specific topic because I certainly spent plenty of other time writing about a multitude of other topics. I had a week so I didn't force the situation because I know it wouldn't have been as good it could have been if it flowed out of me organically instead of me squeezing my head like a sponge until the words fell onto the page.

I prefer short deadlines because I work better under pressure than when I'm given an unspecified time line. Every morning over the last four or five days, I woke up with every intention of doing that particular assignment, but I noticed that I worked around that item on my To Do list and on a couple of days, I managed to cross everything off my list with the exception of the article. Then on a few other instances (er, this weekend), I completely ignored the To Do list and did my own thing. It became my NOT To Do list. That's why I was sorta bummed out when I woke up today and realized I completely slacked off which means today and tomorrow morning are going to be hectic.

But then again, you can't put a price on alone time, in which you get to block out the external world for hours on end to let the mind wander, unwind and think.

I slashed through a pile of books that I acquired over the last few weeks. I got into a bad habit and began new books before I finished old one, but since I never finished any of them, I'm in the middle of five or six when I really should only be alternating between two or three at the most. I set aside two books to read on flights to/from Peru. I'm assuming that I won't sleep much on the way down and I doubt there will be any movies to my liking, so I'm gonna immerse myself into zombie and dystopian fiction. I've been reading a slew of financial blogs and books, so I'm excited to escape the non-fiction world for a little bit of fantasy.

I kinda wished that baseball season didn't start for another week or so because it really killed my productivity and the amount that I read. Baseball games are anywhere from 3 to 4 hours in length and by the end of one game, I'm spent and the last thing I want to do is sit down and read conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve, so I've been numbing myself with -- more baseball and other random sports.

It's also a natural reaction away from the sober reality of some of the fear mongering subjects I've been brushing up on. I've had a few instances in the last couple of months when I got uncharacteristically depressed, rather I had been afflicted with a bout of hopelessness, which is a better word to describe what I was feeling after learning the truths (or in some case the ambiguity) of many aspects of our society. I've usually been the one to pose a question to my friends and let them come to their own conclusions, but most recently, I've been too bummed out to even ask the questions because if certain situations have gotten so dire, then what's the point of me even telling people to be on alert when it's simply too late? Why make my friends depressed? I've never one to want others to share in my misery.

Now, you know why I've been drinking more. For a while I had delusions of grandeur and thought that I could actually change the world, or at least alter my friends perception of the world by pointing out the warning signs, but after glimpsing behind the curtain and seeing how things really work, do I even want to upset them by cluing them in on the truth? Instead, I keep it to myself and let it marinate in a nice bath of rum. In the meantime, I've turned into a rum junkie. Maybe if I write more about some of these haunting topics, then I'd drink less? Of course, that means everyone else might get depressed and they might drink more.

The more I think about it, I spent 2010 trying to prepare for the storm that's coming, but when I realized that there's nothing I can do about it, I decided to kick back, get wasted, and wait for the first flashes of lightning.