Operation Achieve Anything: Day Two-Hundred-Twenty, Dateline 8-8-2018
/
“Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air - explode softly - and send thousands, millions of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth - boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn’t go cheap either - not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with sharpeners built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination. ”
Good morning crickets. Welcome to day number two-hundred-twenty of Operation Achieve Anything. Here we go with another day where the oppressive heat continues to make life feel exponentially cyclical and mundane. Where when it's cold outside, I'm able to casually get through my day with ease as I comfortably sit in a hoodie and shorts focused on the task at hand, and not constantly plotting pool breaks to get relief from the oven that is my windowless garage/room.
These heat inspired side thoughts probably explain why, while it's summer, I struggle to grasp the true state of my mood. Whether I'm feeling positive or not, the constant cooking creates a disconnect between my emotions and my energy. Like how on Sunday, I felt rundown because I was a bit hungover but that led me to sleep most of the day away so that I'm Monday I woke with a mind ready to face the day, at least until the sun burned away the clouds, creating conditions that killed the mood.
That said, I did end up having a lot of fun later in the day when I watched the movie Kung Pow: Enter The Fist with my little nephew. This movie has the perfect blend of action and comedy that blew the little guy's mind. He was laughing so hard at some of the scenes that I found it hard to believe that he actually knew what was going on. The best part was when the neighbor kids came over to play and I heard him explain what he was watching.
He was so excited that his descriptions went all over the place in ways that I could imagine the other kids catching either the concepts of context to his tale but they just joined right in and started to laugh with enthusiasm as well. This reminded me of not so long ago before my midlife meltdown, when I used to have this same energy as an adult.
Though I blame my nonstop giggling, from this time, on my anxiety, looking back, I preferred that coping technique over avoiding interaction, in general, to not have to deal with conflicting outlooks on life. I never had the drive in me to chase traditional goals and created a world where it was perfectly fine for me to avoid becoming normal at all cost.
This worked fine in my twenties and early thirties, but there came a time when I became the final holdout but my peers kept pushing for me to come along. I tried at first, but in the process, the whole world just stopped being fun. Our hang out sessions went from being late nights filled with debaucherous talk while just having fun, to feel more structured with everyone cutting out early because of the adult jobs.
I get it and even got it then. I never expected anyone to join me in my never grow up approach to existing, that I'm aware is a coping mechanism of its own, but I was surprised to find just how much of an outsider I felt like the more everyone else started to settle in. The hardest thing to grasp was how the more everyone started to normalize the more they seemed to deny ever having a wild side or that it was any fun.
This was around the same time where the world started to get offended by everything, which made being the funny dumb guy more of a liability than an advantage to win over friends which is why I started to shut up. Because of my abandonment issues, I've always felt a bit detached in the first place, so once I stopped being a character that everybody loved I lost all interest in the role.
All of this actually leads to the topic of today's assignment where I was supposed to explore the quote how the reluctance to put away childish things may be a requirement for genius. That's not to say that I think that I'm super smart, this is just the tale of what led me to put away my childish things even though, to this day, I'm reluctant to keep them locked up.
Part of me feels like this is why I'm stuck in the practicing portion of my writing career. Though I'm proud of the content I currently create as for as the improvements I've made in the technical quality, I feel that a lot of the playfulness was thrown out with both the baby and the bathwater.
For example, I feel like my SNL reviews are fine because they're safe in a way that could potentially build a broader audience than my Southland Tales reviews that may have been much sloppier but were more fun because I wasn't censoring myself. I'm hoping that by the end of this ten-year blogging challenge that I'll be able to find a better balance to my writing style.
I'm pretty sure the above fulfills yesterday's task so I will now introduce the task for today where I'm supposed to imagine a world where instead of weapons of destruction, we were to create Crayola bombs. Not that the Achieve Anything... book suggest anything like this could ever happen, it's just suggesting that I try not to suppress hippie thoughts like this, that may have you labeled a childish daydream who should just give in to the harsh reality of the real world.
I actually think about this a lot but, you'll have to wait for tomorrow to read what I have to say on the subject. Until then, it's now time to wrap this thing up 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.
