Operation Achieve Anything: Day Three-Hundred-Thirty-Seven, Dateline 12-3-2018
/
“Not what we have but what we enjoy constitutes our abundance.”
Good morning crickets. Welcome to day number three-hundred-thirty-seven of Operation Achieve Anything. I’m not entirely sure if I’m just going through another optimistic fling with my outlook on life or what, but I’m really starting to feel like all of my efforts to figure out a way to be my own boss, on my own terms may be within my grasps. Keeping in mind that my first benchmark is to replace my part-time job and nothing delusion like landing a six-figure income within months of monetizing my efforts.
Part of this boost in confidence comes from the fact that my site’s traffic has been continually doubling every couple of months since I stopped treating it like a hobby back when I started the My Saturday Night Life challenge. Though I always had plans to eventually flip the switch from blogging as a hobby to looking at my efforts more like a job, it wasn’t until about two months ago that I felt like my writing quality has improved enough to market. Granted, I will probably always miss many typos with my dyslexic head until I can afford to higher an assistant/editor, but at least now I feel like I catch enough eyesore errors to where I feel more comfortable promoting my own work.
This is why I waited so long to include ads to the site, and, for now, the ads on the page are more of an experiment than an actual run at generating an income. Last month, I almost averaged fifty-cents a day, up from the quarter a day average that I built to after starting out struggling to make a dime. Of course, it makes sense that my income would grow at a similar rate to my site's traffic increase, I don’t share this as a mystery but another sign that I might be on the right track, especially considering I’ve done next to nothing to market myself.
I know I point the fact that I don’t market myself all the time. This is as much of a reminder to myself that I’ve been intentionally holding off switching to more of a promoter role until I felt the site was ready to do. These signs of progress with very little change in my attempts to get my content out to the world are as much of a sign that I might be ready to make a move, more than the excuse as to why my numbers may be so low, which is why I used to focus on this fact in the past.
More than anything to do with stats and numbers, right now, I feel like I’m more on the right track than ever before. Ever since Thanksgiving, when I had a bit of a hallucinatory response to a crazy/legal homemade marijuana edible, I now feel like I sit down and write with intent instead of just hoping that my words will come to me. In the past, I did kind of feel like I just sat and reached up into the either to then document whatever I caught from the collective self-conscious while putting my quirky twist to customize the idea to make it more of my own.
I don’t know if I’d say this description of my approach is literal, but it’s definitely how I can feel. Even if the collective conscious I’m talking about doesn’t really exist in any either, and is more of a New Agey way to explain how I process any influential material. I’ve never claimed to see or hear others’ thoughts floating around in the air, but as someone who creates, when I look at others creations, I think I pick up on more than what’s just on the page than a casual consumer.
I think all creative types see more than just the end product and what it’s supposed to represent. Like when I hear a hilarious obscure joke, I don’t just appreciate what was said, I go back in my head to what it must have been like on the day that the funny person made the hilarious connection and how it might come about. This can inspire brand new ideas with me living in the same headspace, or it can lead me to find a silly secondary angle that the first person may have missed. I don’t just enjoy the entertainment and move on.
Literally, as I’ve been writing this post, I started to think that maybe this latest bit of isolation, where I’ve started to grow to hate everything that I used to love is my way of attempting to break free from being derivative without having to count so heavily on my influences to create my own original work. Again, this is more in reference to my original fictional work and not the reviews and challenges I do through this blog where I’m actively exploring my relationship with these influences, which is another thing that I just figured out.
All this time, I thought I was revisiting old works that I used to love just to enjoy it being that I struggle to be entertained by anything ever since I hit my late 30s and started feeling old. I’m now wondering how much I’ve been actively avoiding new content in an effort to avoid being as derivative as I used to be with my work. This is probably why I’ve been extra harsh on the newer cast members from Saturday Night Live who I feel switched gears to give in to PC culture seemingly overnight when maybe I should be thanking them for unintentionally helping me get to the point where I was really thinking for myself.
Again, this is coming to me as I type and not something I’ve been meditating on for a while, which I point out because there may be some flawed logic that I’m still working through. As I keep pointing out, it’s not that I’m holding on to wanting to be offensive, the thing that frustrates me is how many of the people who helped to influence the crassness that has become our new normal seem confused as to how we got to this place. Yes, they will often admit to their past that they’re not so proud of but at the same time seem offended and confused as to why others who were inspired by them, aren’t as quick to make the change.
Take former cast-member Sarah Silverman for example, I go back and forth with how I enjoy her evolution. At times, I hate how she can come across preachy about what is and is not offensive while acting as if she’s doesn’t carry a lot of weight into how we ended up so crass. It was Sarah Silverman who got even my female friends to open up to the crudeness that was typically reserved for dudes. Sure, she's changed her ways, and is partially to credit for my change as well, which is excellent, but there’s still a bit of an arrogance towards those who are hanging on to her own former brand of humor. I even get that though, because I see the same rolling of the eyes when I no longer laugh at something the old me would see as a hilarious joke.
I also like how she’s reaching out to try to understand “the other side,” but even that kind of bugs me because I can’t stand this whole “sides” aspect that’s developed in this country where affiliation now seems more important than the message. The show is sweet, but it has a Gorilla’s In The Myst feel to it where she’s learning to accept some of the animals who are tricked into accepting her as one of their own for her novel observation. It all seems so impressive until you break it down and hear her interviewed where there is clearly still an air of inclusion while still using terms like us and them.
I think, more than anything, it just bums me out because, before this whole Trump thing, it really seemed like we were on a path toward acceptance. Yes, Trump hasn’t done anything to help the cause, which is why I would have never voted for him in the first place. That said, I also do think the backlash towards anyone who doesn’t wholeheartedly with the one marketed viable alternate option, plays just as big of a part in this new run of extreme intolerance towards anyone who doesn’t one-hundred-percent agree is splitting us even more than the traditional intolerances from our past.
In a weird way, I’m more afraid of the people who I used, and still mostly agree with who now see me as evil for wanting the exact same things but not liking the leadership’s response. If I would have seen a real step toward getting past our dependency on fossil fuels, an effort to end any of the wars, instead of starting more, nailing down the rights of the individual as opposed to giving away Habeas Corpus, real affordable health care for all, substantial rulings on gay rights, ending the profitable prison system or and fully legalized marijuana, I’d still have a default party to vote for and not feel like a man without a country, because I’d rather vote third party or not at all when there’s no one that represents what I want even if the civilian side of the party think that their leadership is leaning that way.
This is how I was thinking just a couple of weeks ago but thanks to my psychedelic Thanksgiving, I’m starting to see things in a new way to where I do feel as much need for others to be one-hundred-percent on the same page as me as well. Most of my frustration comes from wanting to feel more grounded, which became extremely difficult when a such large chunk of the people who I once admired all seemed to change their tune overnight. Up until the election, I was fine hanging back and incorporating the changes that I agreed with, on there path to becoming acceptable. Then came Trump, who also seemed to come with instant judgment from people who know me well, and used to think I was fun, only to change their stance just because I felt we were given two shitty options to choose from while I was still waiting to see the benefits of voting for hope.
Now I’m back to feeling a bit like Popeye, “I am who I am, and that’s all that I am, and I don’t have to worry about what my heroes may think of me. I also don’t have to worry about my heroes choices or whatever direction they decide to go. I am not as close to these people as individuals, the way I may fantasize in my head after spending so much time with them on my computer and TV. I was just always worried that if my work were to land on anyone’s radar that there would be less chance of being accepted because of the way that they’ve changed as if they’ve been following my progress in the same way. Not in a way that I literally think anyone is even close to actively following my work, but in the way that fantasy works in general where you can visualize what many others may think of one’s work from faking it until making it for so long.
From here on out, I’m just going to focus on my creative ventures however I want, while lessening my dependence on needing to feel that the sensibility of my content needs to sync up with the sensibilities of those who helped me develop my humor, while they were figuring out their own sensibilities in front of the world on various illuminated screens. Hopefully, this will allow me to silence my inner censor while I write, but even more importantly, I hope that it will help me get back to a point where I can enjoy other’s work without keeping an eye out for hypocrisy, which I feel is the worst trend that I picked up from this newly oversensitive world. Since the recent rise in PC culture, I now seem to find, as much fun, if not more, in hunting for instances where others break their own rules over anything to do with the content, which actually isn’t that fun at all.
Sorry for the rambling post but, rambling is one of my favorite past times so, all of what’s above actually fulfills yesterday’s task where I was just supposed to have fun. With that, it’s now time to introduce the assignment for today, where I’m now supposed to explore the things in life that bring me joy, and what a life of abundance means to me. Of course, you’ll have to wait for tomorrow’s update to see what I manage to come up with. Until then, it’s now that time for me to sign off as usual by saying, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.
Talk to you soon.
Sincerely,
The Wicker Breaker
P.S. Below are links to my novel, which I plan to promote as part of Operation Achieve Anything, as well as a link to where you can buy the book that is providing the structure to this project in case you would like to purchase it in order to play along.
