“Best friend, my wellspring in the wilderness!”

— George Eliot

Good morning crickets. Welcome to day number two-hundred-fifty-five of Operation Achieve Anything. It’s now been about a week since I’ve started to work on a graveyard schedule, and though I still love how it allows me to do more with my time, I still need to tweak the order in which I attempt to get things done. Up until tonight, I’ve been starting at midnight but pacing back and forth across my room to fit in my ten-thousand Fitbit steps. I currently have an ankle injury, so this pace can take a few hours.

This was perfect at first considering that I’m not allowed to start my day job until it is at least two o’clock in the AM. This was precisely how long it would take me to fit in my walking, but at the same time, I would end up so sore from not breaking down my steps into more manageable chunks that would allow my ankle to heal. I’ve had this gung-ho approach to my walking since I started this health-kick of an experiment.

Over the weekend, when I didn’t have paid work, I split up my walking throughout the day, and though this made it feel like a never-ending nuisance, my ankle was feeling better by the end of the day. For the last two nights I went back to the endless pacing until done, and now I can barely walk. Well, there’s no way that I can walk for that long, forcing me to switch to the small chunk approach to my walks.

We’ll see if that helps because I desperately need to stick to this to become healthy once again which would require losing a whole bunch of weight. I think now is the time because I don’t feel like I’m walking because I have to, in order to get my life under control, this new health kick was initiated when I started to become genuinely optimistic toward my latest efforts to take control of my professional life.

Thinking that I’ve now got a realistic goal to earn enough funds to be able to quit my part-time day job by focusing on my own interest instead of just earning a check, I would like to actually enjoy the process, instead of constantly feeling sick. Maybe, if I stick to this long enough to where I start to feel better about my looks, I might ease up on my dreams of becoming a legitimate shut-in and reach out to make a few friends.

However, at this time, I’m not in a place where I’m ready to put in the appropriate amount of work needed to have other’s any more than passively in my life. I am genuinely okay with this at this time because I do feel like I’m making progress that I might not if others were monopolizing my time. This might sound harsh but, I think in the past, it was my attempts to force friendships to cope with boredom and loneliness over making genuine connections, may have been my biggest mistakes.

That’s not to say that the people in question weren’t important to me, and the friendships weren’t real, they just could have been better, if I wasn’t too afraid of being abandoned to really put in the work. Well, at least the work that the others might have needed to see. I always felt that I was doing my best because I’ve spent so much time with everyone that I’ve ever cared about while using them as the inspiration to help me work through writing out the stories that I had locked in my head, making the failure to ever feel genuinely connected harder to understand.

Since I do see that I am a work in progress, who at this point, just isn’t ready for friends, I’m finding it hard to fulfill these friendship themed tasks from the Achieve Anything… book. Yesterday, I was supposed to write a poem or a song for my friends. I’m kind of cheating here by recycling some old content, and also by not keeping it light and fun, but I’m not always one to follow the rules, so here is my rebellious response to the task. This is a song that I wrote when I was twenty-years-old and squatting in a garage at the party house that I called home.

Bottles On My Floor

by:

Bunker

There are no parties up the street
and TV is a bore.
Alone in my bedroom
with bottles on my floor.
Only one person drinking,
but the piles are galore.
Alone in my bedroom
with bottles on my floor.
My liver is so swollen,
yet still, I will drink more.
Alone in my bedroom,
with bottles on my floor.
Up all night without it,
but with it I do snore.
Alone in my bedroom,
with bottles on my floor.
I never have a visitor,
yet every night I score.
Alone in my bedroom,
with bottles on my floor.
I ran out of words to rhyme,
and cannot write no more.
Alone in my bedroom,
with bottles on my floor.

It turns out that I’ve always been way more emo than I’d like to admit. Now, let's get to introducing to day’s friendship themed task where I’m supposed to pretty much do what I just did and break down my views on friendships. I’m sure I might be able to come up with something that might clarify this post that was written with a sleep-deprived head. We’ll see how things go but until then, it’s now time for me to wrap this one up as usual and sign off by saying, good day and good luck to you and all or 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.