Yeah, this starts with a fucking superhero movie trailer.  Hear me out...you'll have your chance to feel uncomfortable.

Imagine a myriad of conflicting emotions, past fears, and wishful triumphant moments.  When I first watched this trailer, I was overwhelmed.  A story of a childhood anti-hero, being taken advantage of and destroying all previous beings of shelter and safe harboring.  While focusing upon death's doors, a chance arises to rectify the grossness.  As a mentor.  The passing of knowledge and ability.  The ultimate humble act.  Unselfishly divulging so that others may advance.

Met with Johnny Cash's "Hurt."

Fuck....I remember dissecting this song in my High School junior year English class.  Don't believe I was the one to present it...but you try at that age to break down every bit of meaning interwoven into this piece.  I think that's where I started my stride.  I love looking for meaning beyond the meat.  I remember distinctly discussing heroin without really knowing what it was.  I had read about it.  That's about it.  If I recall correctly, a few people in there had experienced more.  Life always has a way of hitting you with harsher retrospective realities relevant to others.  You don't know you're hungry until you are.  That unknown isn't scary, because you didn't expect to ever see it.  Knowing that unknown exists is worst.  You know it's there, you just don't know when it'll find you.

I remember blissfully hunting ant-lions in delicate inverted patches of dirt.  Recognized via television, noticed by innocent child-like walkabouts.  Empires of dirt, I will make you hurt.

Look, sometimes blankets are assholes.  I get it though, really.  Despite their neediness, they get the shit end of the stick far too often.  They have to be constantly adjusted.  Societal norms dictate them being conformed to the shape of the bed every morning; essentially it's their job to look comforting throughout the day before becoming all disheveled and shit at a whims notice.  A 1950's housewife comes to mind.  Only one side of them is preferred and pampered by affection, body heat and the occasional hidden fart.  The other is left out to the elements, with zero fucks given by the covered.  They have tags that inevitably end up tickling your face - surely only in jest, but it's a dickhead move blanket.  You gave the same sensation as a spider walking on my face; inciting primal DNA triggers that let me know I'm in danger and to wake the fuck up from whatever pleasant rest you thought you had.  You want to play those games? I'll drag a needle across you mother fucker.  See how quickly the threads of your universe appear to unravel.  I wouldn't though, because we're in this together.  Inevitably, we will both go through one too many washing cycles; tumbling through the machine until we're worn out and void of the purpose we may have once had.  Every kid knows though, the worth of an old blanket.

Routine, while comforting, ultimately leads to complacent delusions of grandeur.  The more comfortable we are with something, the more we believe to be all-knowing with it.  Like mold on a good cheese, the ego will slowly start to envelop around you and your environment.  I've learned you just gotta' switch shit up from time to time, or risk being outdated on a personal level.  Nothing wrong with slicing off the mold and making use of what you got, but sometimes you gotta' go out and find yourself some new cheddar.  And if you end up not liking it?  Well, just be happy for the fresh neurons in that noggin of yours assembled to understand the shit wasn't your half-full cup of tea.

It's funny the shit we allow to influence us.  My girlfriend was busy and asked if I could open her bottle of wine.  Instant flash back to work where I feel comfortable with pretty much every facet of the front of house, minus opening bottles of wine.  I know.  Talk about a bitch ass Achilles heel.  I'll sell the fuck out of those screw top bottles that my monkey ass can open all day long, let me tell ya.  The other ones though?  Might as well have a chastity belt protecting that bottle.  Anyways, long story short I figured it out thanks to her bottle opener being much better than the one at work.  I'll probably end up just buying one and leaving it at work anyways, because what's a few dollars in regards to preserving the ego.  Ya feel me?  I'll admit though.  That immediate sense of rigamortis panic when we don't know something is just so amusing in hindsight.  Like a caveman trying to make sense of a fax machine.  Yeesh.

Look, life is fucking hard.  The majority of us are automatically born onto what seems like the Titanic.  Starts off with a party - if you're lucky - and transitions into a big fucking impact with a cold, uncaring brick of ice kicking you square in the dick.  And again, that's if you're lucky.  Some people are born straight into the part where the door kicks open to a deluge of freezing death looking to fill every livable square molecule of space in your lungs.  Rearrange those chairs all you want, the final chords are playing.  Either way, you end up scrambling for a cheesy cinematic ending of you clinging to a prop.  Hoping for a little recognition in the credits.

A lot of us ain't dropping sapphires into the ocean though.  We look to acquire jewels of knowledge that translate into glimmers of a different reality.  Playing chicken while burning and yearning for more murderous dreams of a better present.  Present.  Today.  Nonsense influenced by a flick of the wrist when it comes to inconsequential shit.  That didn't make sense...

Life, look...

Step into whatever spotlight you fathomed, and stop.  I'm just trying, with every typing, to rob your attention and leave you with a mental wallet full of a different currency.  Shit is rough, hit you with a murderous care hoping I touch an influential nerve. 

Hey, hey, hey... allow me to redirect us onto an alternative route of bullshit.  I'm like a GPS system on acid drawing it's own roads as it goes, while being narrated by the RZA reading passages straight out of a Dead Sea fortune cookie.

I think the best thing an individual can do is to practice self evaluation nearly to the point of being self detrimental.  Just try to call bull-shit on yourself, on the regular.  Mentally it's one of the easiest-hardest thing you can do.  Physically, it's one of the hardest-easiest things possible.  It's a discipline in and of itself.  Rewarding beyond anything else.  Assuming anything else you're doing doesn't also involve eating a pile of shit and smiling for it.  Yeah.  You know, nice.  Ahhhh...