Don't Forget

I will light the match this morning, so I won't be alone 
Watch as she lies silent , for soon night will be gone 
I will stand arms outstretched , pretend I'm free to roam 
I will make my way through one more day in hell 
How much difference does it make? 

I will hold the candle 'til it burns up my arm 
I'll keep taking punches until their will grows tired 
I will stare the sun down until my eyes go blind 
I won't change direction and I won't change my mind 
How much difference does it make? 

I'll swallow poison until I grow immune 
I will scream my lungs out 'til it fills this room 
How much difference does it make?             -Pearl Jam "Indifference"

How much difference does it make?  None.  Sometimes when it seems like no one is listening, it's because they aren't.  

As an adult, I'd like to lead by example.  Am I?  Am I living my best life?  No.  Am I good parent?  Maybe.  Am I a good teacher?  I think so.  I would like to go on record as saying that I wouldn't change anything about my life, but it's simply not true.  I want to rock out in front of a stadium of screaming fans.  I want to publish a best selling novel that I then adapt as a screenplay.  I want to be madly in love with my best friend.  I want to live in a house that doesn't systematically leak air from every seam.  I want to be at peace.  I literally have no idea how to do any of those things.  

When my car is broken, I take it to the mechanic.  When my light bulbs burn out, I replace the bulbs.  When a rip a hole in my jeans, I sew them back together.  
I don't' know what to do with this fucking mess I've made.  All on me. All my choices.  

When Kurt Cobain died, Andy Rooney said that Kurt Cobain's suicide made him angry:
"A lot of people would like to have the years left that he threw away," Rooney said.  "What's all this nonsense about how terrible life is?" he asked, adding rhetorically to a young woman you had wept at the suicide, "I'd love to relieve the pain you're going through by switching my age for yours."  In addition, he asked, "What would all these young people be doing if they had real problems like a Depression, World War II or Vietnam?"  and commented that, "If he applied the same brain to his music that he applied to his drug-infested life, it's reasonable to think that his music may not have made much sense either."

 ... Dick.

I think that most adults secretly think this way.  We descend into thinking that life is something to "deal with" and "accept" rather than to seek out and experience and enjoy and change.  Life, by nature, needs to be modified in order to be successful.  Hunkering down and passively accepting that which has become ordinary is not the ideal.  No one lives through their younger years hoping that eventually they will end up on a dead-end street of work and drudgery.  They just don't.  So why are adults so happy to accept any version of life as long as it doesn't suck?  And even if it doesn't suck, we accept things which a younger version of ourselves would never have thought was okay.

I need to spend even just a small part of every day trying to be the other version of myself that I have in my imagination.  The version of me in my head is so much cooler than the one I see in the mirror every morning.  I want to get there, and I'm going to do it.  My drug-infested life might not have a Vietnam or a WWII, but it has the viscosity of a disaster ready to rise from the ashes.  And while my ideals might not make sense to anyone but me ... I. Am.  And that's all that matters.