The Work Before The Work.

Oh boy do I have trouble getting started in the morning on some days. Do any of you ever have that problem? I've ranted and raved about my sleeping routines a lot lately, but that's only because sufficient amounts of quality sleep is the nucleus to all that I hold sacred. Without it, everything falls to shit.

Now that I seem to have the discipline to put myself to bed on time and then get out of bed on time my next issue has to do with actually doing something once I'm awake. I've ranted and railed against the very idea of a job in these past few years, but I have to say that I'm more aware than ever of how important the role of "job" plays in a person's life. On the one hand I don't know how people with jobs can handle them, the stress, the time lost, dealing with assholes, but on the other hand I can see the benefits of being able to relax once you know where you're going, what you're doing, and how much money is gonna come in as a result of all that effort. Most jobs provide that kind of structured, reliable routine for people and if you can, "leave work at work," then a job sounds mighty nice. Otherwise isn't it all hardcore misery with dental insurance drizzled on top just to keep you somewhat happy?

Here is how my days go by being a self-employed creative person who makes no money at all as a result of his work. There are three distinct patterns to my day, (I've even come up with a nice alliterative gimmick in naming these patterns), and I never know which one I'm gonna get when I wake up in the morning. I tend to figure it out by about 1000.

FOCUS - On Focus days I wake up, hygiene, meditate while the coffee is brewing, and then I check email and read all the crap that has accumulated in my feed reader over the night/early morning. I then start working on a project that I have had planned for that day and in a few hours I'm either completely done with that project or I'm done working with that project for the day. I'll move onto another project and repeat the process or sometimes a project just fills up the entire day.

FROGGER - On Frogger days I begin my day exactly like the Focus days, (I begin all days the same way), and I try to start working on a project but I get distracted easily and I end up hopping back and forth between doing my work and fucking around with distracting crap. I tend to do this when I'm not having a very easy time with whatever it is I'm working with, and I take the easy way out by trying to entertain myself with other bullshit on the Internet like blogs, social media, etc. I tell myself that, "I'm keepin' it loose and maybe I'll stumble upon something that sparks my mind in a helpful way," and while that can happen, most of the time I'm just fucking around fruitlessly. I will finish whatever I'm working on but it will take me way too long. I spend much of the day telling myself to just grit my teeth and push through the hard shit, and that the longer I fuck around the longer it will take to finish what needs to be done. This almost never helps, but it also never helps to just give up.

FAILURE - On Failure days I give up almost immediately, but I don't admit that to myself until much later in the day. I usually need at least 8 hours to come up with a reasonable justification for why I'm not doing meaningful work. Once I do have meaningful justification for giving up then the rest of the day is generally much more pleasant. My usual justification method is to tell myself that I've been working really hard lately and therefore it's not a bad thing or a big deal to take an unplanned day off from work.

But is this true?

Not is it okay to take a day off, because that is okay, but is it true that I've been "working really hard lately?" The honest answer to that depends on when "lately" is and lately, (relative to now), I have been working hard but I also realize that it's easy to lie to yourself about how hard you've been working lately, how healthy you've been eating lately, how much or little you've been drinking/drugging lately, how many times you've exercised lately, etc, etc. You get the picture. I know that I often confuse the stress of worrying about doing work with actual hard work.

When I think about how hard the work of pushing myself to tolerate the struggling that is required just to get started with work that I oftentimes never actually start, that feels like the hardest work to me. It's the pushing myself that was and is hard, especially on days where nothing comes out of the pushing. The pushing myself is a whole different work; it's thankless, unglamorous, unpaid work that everybody should have to engage with on a steady schedule. On my FAILURE days, when I justify to myself that it's okay to take a day off because I've been working really hard lately, it's the work before the work that I'm thinking about, and I confuse the two quite a bit.

I really shouldn't refer to that last pattern of days as FAILURE DAYS because they aren't really failures. It's days like those that generally fuel the FOCUS DAYS, as well as the frenetic, un-focused, FROGGER days where I can't get myself directed into one project but rather I just splatter paint the walls of my room with sweat. Those FROGGER days are pretty liberating and often it is those days that produce the most pleasing work for me. Often when I look back over the mess of a FROGGER, I think to myself, "Well that was a fucking disaster, how the hell did I manage to come up with so much awesome shit today?" It makes me feel like a Viking to make it through a hectic day; rising above Chaos to get the job done.

Anyway, I like all three of those patterns. Today, and the last few have felt like failures, but I take it in stride and I know that I'll always return to pushing forward again. Just look around you, we can't complain much around here.

Keith.

Even with very consistent bed times and out of bed times I wake up with varying degrees of energy and different levels of how well rested I feel. Some days, like today, I wake up very slowly and in my mind this is a problem. But is it? Should this be a problem or should I realize that taking a while to get going in the morning is completely natural and should not be seen as a weakness or a problem that needs to be dealt with?

You gotta warm the motor up before you pull out of the driveway so to speak, so I like to take as much time as needed to get up to speed in the morning. This is why I dread having a fucking job again. Jobs get in the way of life's rhythms by telling you that the only rhythm that matters is putting your name tag on straight and selling crap to idiots. Fuck jobs in their asses. My body doesn't give a rat's ass about your rules and schedules. Still my trained brain is trying to remind me of this bad teaching from my past. My trained brain is saying, "Keith, you gotta hit the ground running, you gotta wake up bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to attack and kill the day like a soldier."

I'm taking back control of my mornings from this needlessly hard-assed drill instructor that lives in my head and wants to try and lie to me and force me to agree that everything should run with military precision and discipline. We Americans love to militarize everything. We've been crammed full of this myth of military superiority our whole lives and everything is made better when you associate it with soldiers and armies and wars.

All the best exercise equipment and training programs are made by former Navy Seals, don't you know that? Everyone who gets cancer is a "brave warrior doing battle with their disease," and all of our sports stars are warriors as well. Americans love nothing more than discipline and looking like they are the most disciplined. Just look at all the things that we are told to hate and why we are supposed to hate them. Obesity, poverty, lack of morality, lawlessness, laziness, lack of ambition, video games, junk food, smoking, etc. All of those things are due to lack of discipline and/or willpower and you can move away from all of those things by increasing discipline and/or willpower.

Discipline is necessary if you want to get ahead, beat the enemy and be the champion. We're crazy about this shit. It all starts right at the beginning of the day. You have to get up early, earlier is always better, even if you have no reason to get up early. Getting up early is a way of saying, "I want it, I'm willing to work for it and I'm gonna work harder than everybody else so I can be a winner." All you're really gonna do is ignore your body and mind and kill yourself with these needless contests. We've made waking up from sleep into a highly technical battle to the death. Gosh we're fucking stupid. Relax people, we're all gonna be dead soon anyway, just try to enjoy the ride until we get there.

Keith.

It's popular to take on a very military like disciplinarian attitude towards sleeping and waking and especially our early morning behaviors. Where does this fascination with waking up early and being energetic, chipper, and moving at full speed come from? Why do we want to take on these military practices so often? After all, members of the military are being trained to kill and many of them will be killed, so I don't see need to militarize my behaviors because I am not training myself to kill nor do I wish to be killed. I blame it all on our overly competitive society. Here in America we love to militarize everything because the military, and military like behavior, is our greatest symbol of strength.

Listen to how we talk about anything here in America, from sports to school to jobs to our health, there is rampant overuse of words like "warrior" and "battle". For fucksakes man you're just a insurance salesman, why do you talk about what you do like General Patton is sitting in the next cubicle?

Mighty Awful Poison.

I've noticed a big change in my life recently that I'd like to share with all of you now. This big change is no doubt traceable to a few fairly significant lifestyle modifications I've made in the past several weeks. The biggest one is that I have very consistent sleep habits now. I go to bed at roughly midnight and I get out of bed at roughly 0800. I do this everyday and I haven't strayed from that schedule for over a month now. This is really helpful to me in another area that has been trouble for me, eating and nutrition.

I've consumed mountains of junk food in my life, many of these mountains of junk food have been consumed in single sittings too. Not only is this terribly unhealthy for your body in terms of fucking up how your body is supposed to operate, but it has dramatic affects on how your body looks too. Sometimes I feel like I look like a mound of mashed potatoes or maybe a well-stuffed burrito. Sometimes I look in the mirror and I DO look like a well-stuffed burrito. Unfortunately, I don't think women or anybody, look at me and say, "He looks delicious; I’d really like a burrito in my mouth right now." I wouldn't be surprised if this is what is said about me based on my appearance, "Someone should put some plastic down or maybe some butcher paper, if that guy pops open there's gonna be a mess all over the place." Who wants that?

Having my sleep in order has helped me eat healthier foods, and most importantly, it's helped me plan portion sizes that work for me and my weight training/cycling activity to lose a bunch of weight, almost all of which is body fat. Not only do I look better but I feel better. The feeling better is dramatic and it is only helping me stay on track when I may start to get a tiny bit sloppy with going to bed maybe 15 minutes later than I need to be or when I have cravings and get frustrated with what, how, and how much I'm eating.

By far one of the biggest physical changes in the past month has been the dramatic drop in my intestinal gas. I'm not farting as much, people, and when I do fart it's just very tiny amounts. In technical jargon, we professionals call this "tooting" and it is not as great as it may sound. I used to have enormous farting ability and pretty disgusting smelling farts too. Now I have these tiny, dainty little toots, but these toots smell so bad they could choke skunks to death, man.

It's scary to think about and you know your gas is bad when you "toot" and then you're mad at yourself. "Come on, Keith, that fuckin' stinks you asshole, that's not funny, dude. I'm about to puke."(but then I do think it's funny because I did just actually get mad at myself and say that in my head, or sometimes out loud! OOH, what a crazy, kooky couple I am.)

This makes me think that my personal potency is increasing at an alarming rate, not only in my fart production skills, but all other areas as well. Overall, I'm just becoming a more potent person. A little bit of me goes a long way. I don't know if this is a good thing, a great thing, or a horrible thing. I'll keep you all advised. 

Keith.

Welcome back to, "Bullshitting America in the Morning."

This being a presidential election year, you'd think there would be an election wouldn't you? PSYCHE! They got us again, not me though; I gave up on this voting/election bullshit and invested all my energy into my cynicism years ago. There will be no regularly scheduled election this year. There will however be lots of media coverage of political theater as is always done. Daddy Media Baron needs to pay off that 6th beach house somehow. There will be yet another round of "Election Theater with Wolf Blitzer," but this year we aren't even getting treated to our normal show.

There will be no viable contest in this year's presidential election like we're used to getting but the news media will report on one anyway, and in some small way their efforts will actually give Mitt Romney a "snowball's chance in Hell," simply by putting their cameras on him so much. No more than that though, let's not get crazy, dude is a fuckin' Mormon.

That's what the news media does in our modern era; they actually PRODUCE NEWS, not report on the news. Don't make it sound as if the media tells us about the news like Marty Stouffer told us about bald eagles, the media creates the news it then reports, otherwise they'd all be taking a vacation from this "election" bullshit because there's nothing more to say.

There's the guy that's gonna get elected and the other guy who is there simply so the media has someone else to report on so it looks as if there is a reason to tally the votes. Also, holograms, how are they gonna use holograms unless there is a staged election for the fairy tale democracy? Holograms are too intense and badass to use for the lesser tabloid ventures like the boring economy or stupid weather or anything that takes place outside of the USA and affects only a primarily brown-skinned people. That shit is standard graphics only.

The national news media has decided everything for us ahead of time so we can all focus on the important work, like updating our blogs, reading our friend's blogs, taking bad photos, eating, telling other people how much we hate their hats, you know, "the important work." The media has also decided that we need to know what Mitt Romney, who was America's favorite TV dad from the 50's, is doing every day from 18 months ago until this November. I never really thought I cared about what the Beav's dad would think about stuff if he was pushed into a time machine and transported to our era, and he was a multimillionaire, but I don't think things all the way through, man. That's why I pay Don Lemon to do that for me.

It just sucks that this year there is no election. I'm embarrassed for all the failed actors and models on the TV who have to act out this sad, shitty, way-too-long play with the unbelievably dull characters. It's self-indulgent on the part of the media, but what can they do? They are all just a bunch of photo-shopped bimbos with big car payments and they gotta keep paying that high dollar groomer to take care of their pure bred salukis somehow, man. Pay to Play, motherfucker. Do or Die.

Keith.