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Once in a Lifetime
We got this soulful stab of dog-metaphor-filled, alliterative wisdom from the inimitable Trurl9 after today's show on quarter life crises:
Many involved in this conversation have done time as prairie dogs self-incarcerated in cube farms. Heads pop up over cube walls to hear wildly unprofessional conversations occurring a few cubes away.
A warning bark makes us look up and see pointy-haired predator boss circling menacingly o'erhead. Cold fluorescent sunshine casts down the shadow of this angel of living death onto a whirring laser copier.
We did our time on the corporate chain gang. We were used, abused, ridden hard, and put away wet. The bearded one in shiny white robes promised, "We will use you up unless you learn to say no." One pointy-haired predator drone coldly intoned, "It's my way or the highway."
The highway is fascinating. Scary. I'd always planned to be ongoingly successful, rising through the ranks, and finding my bliss as a cherished elder amongst my prairie dog brethren. But life is what occurred after I finished sketching plans on the backs of soiled napkins who preferred being trees.
Windsurfing, snowboarding, traveling, a career counselor, several self help books, and the encroaching knowledge that there is more to life than kissing someone else's butt snatched me abruptly from the dream of nursing on my corporate teat.
Sirens called forth this Boy of Summer singing: be where the sun and warmth are. Eschew cold clammy climes crawling with corpulent corporate corpses.
Summer Boy's days spin uncertainly with sharp moments of clarity and understanding. A perpetual quarter-life, mid-life, full-life crisis, fully embraced. The world decays and renews with an accelerating pace. Water dissolves and water removes. There is water at the bottom of the ocean. So much of this is illusion and suffering while some of it is meaningful and exalting.
Find the real and true and gently let the rest go with a parting kiss.
