Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Getting Your Shit Together

I was rapping to a worker as we drove to a job moving heavy furniture and he looked up to me as a wise old gypsy and I said, "It's a bad time not to have your shit together."



I say a lot of dumb things but that one stuck with me and I wanted to write an essay exploring that notion until today a guy who rides a tall tall bike and grows algae was saying that he needs to get his shit together. And so it was the second time that I heard it. What does it all mean? I'm not sure. Does having your shit together mean conforming to the mini-mansion suburb with Mexican service workers scraping the dirt from under your toe nails while an automatic sprinkler system forces grass to grow in the desert so you can pay a Mexican to come and cut it? That's totally socially acceptable but I'd say it's utter insanity. But driving in your 1969 van with Mozart Piano violin duet blasting on your way to a seminar on algae growing and permaculture while rapping with a guy you just met who is wearing nothing but pastel women's overalls and makes a strong case for building a garden platform on the van and a worm garden and collecting rain and solar panels to run a giant DC powered fan. No drugs are involved, which is funny because we're all talking about applying to be pharmacy lab rats for $9800 in one month to save money to build earth ships in the caves of Guatemala, having moments earlier worked on a failing RV for a tattoo artist...So, a bunch of sober artists are selling their blood to a pharmacy to test possibly harmful drugs to build a utopia in Guatemala. It's madness but I'd say I don't have my shit together. Having your shit together means you move forward in the direction that you intent and you can halfway remember the direction you came from. Things add up. Mostly, this applies to the business world and people try to make money. That's destroying the world, but it's recognized as legitimate.
My motto for June is "Get My Shit Together". This is not easy to do in a city where no one has their shit together but I'm going to try. A few jobs have returned my call and I found work in a psychology research test that I'll talk about later once I fully recover. I found an enchanted forest of artists who weld metal together for bicycles and have art gardens and dumpster dive for red bell peppers but are all advanced computer engineers who reject the federal reserve and anything that has its stamp. There are optimists here and they even celebrate Eeyore's birthday because the pessimistic donkey needs to be cheered up. It's rife with contradictions and fast storms. The desert shows no mercy and the salamanders live in sheltered crevasses in the cold spring water. Will I last? I'm not sure. I do need money to finish editing my wolf quest video but I don't want to wander a warehouse picking up boxes for retail consumption with shrink wrap machines and pallet jacks in a mechanized nightmare. I know that is not my path but starvation is at the door so I can't be too picky. It's a bad time not to have your shit together.

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.