It’s 5:41 A.M, the sun has already risen over the East, and I’m not too tired. The cold pours in through the windows, my mind is settling. I’m not looking forward to the morning. My finger is bleeding, I have to make sure it doesn’t drip onto my keyboard or my table.

There is moisture in the air, although it will be warm later on. There is no one around, and this morning reminds me of every other morning, all the other mornings where I am the first to arrive in the office, the first to start working, the first to complain as well. I’m the unsung corporate hero of independent, small companies.

As easy as I come in and change things up, I am fired, let go, laid off, or callously removed as a cancer to the overall vision of the company.

But this post isn’t about that.

I don’t think you understand…I remember saying that on many occasions to people that simply didn’t understand. It didn’t matter, perception is everything sometimes.

The mornings like these remind me of the days when I went on tour with my record label. On the road, in the middle of nowhere, pumping gas into the vans, water bottles falling out of the touring nightmare, the mornings are so fresh, the dew so light, the existence euphoric by design, and it all begins to fade as I struggle to maintain that memory.

I personify so much, and I look back so fondly on the hardships of owning a record label, or riding my bike to prayer meetings at five thirty in the morning; to no glory. To no major praise, and my flesh crawls sometimes, because I invested so much time in being so perfect, and it gave me very little in return at times.

I remember riding my bicycle about 12 miles to this girls house once, the ultimate desperate move on my behalf, only to find out she didn’t like me, but the morning, it was hazy, the dew felt the same…would I change it?

I’m not sure.

I was in Arizona one morning. It was snowing, I wasn’t used to snow, I had brand new dickies on, they were two sizes to big, but the length was perfect, I still own those pants; The morning felt the same though, the mist gave way to clarity, the clarity to heat, the heat to sweat and there I was, alone in my purpose. The band didn’t even care for the tour anymore, as the supplies were running low and the glory of a touring band passed away. We were a ministry…we fooled ourselves into thinking that a higher purpose called us.

We were all under age.

We were brave.

We were stupid.

We were living life.

We were still alive.

Now what are we? We are separated, we are not friends. I don’t even know where they are, outside of my guesses that they are all in California still. No one is touring though, and few are making music. It’s so easy to settle for being a worship band player at a local church, with fake plants aligning the rooms, rented for the purpose of setting up shop for a short period time, the pastor dreaming for a bigger congregation and the notoriety that comes with talking about the numbers and the sheer amount of souls saved…what a waste of a vision.

I too wish all would believe, but I can not take pride in conversions. I rarely take any credit for sales, which by in large is my comparison to the gospel in the light of past mistakes, and ventures into the world of settling…the sound of settling relies on quality musicians denying that their gifts and reasons can create music that has not been written by someone else and tagged with the label “worship”.

It was cold that morning I sold my bass guitar. I was going to move anyways, and well, I needed the money.

I never looked back.

I was in a hotel room, I could feel the city’s mist seeping into the room via the windows. I opened the curtains, the light wasn’t filled with warm rays of the sun, there’s too many buildings for that…I thought to myself. I was on the fifth floor, the world was my oyster, the joy was absent though, because I knew that I was no longer a child.

I resent not being told that when I would become an adult, I would abandon hope so easily, in exchange for these walls, so warm, so cold, so blistering, so opposite, it confines me…my creativity…it’s vapid.

So vapid.

I create things that are 100% for the sole purpose of getting you to buy something, and my success is measured by the sheer fact that you buy it or don’t. If you do not buy what I am selling, I have failed. But I get paid to do it, and that’s all that matters to the outside world.

What do you do for a living?

The question makes me sick. My stomach hurts thinking about it.

I am a web developer.

Oh really?

What is that?

Well, I write mark up language.

What’s that?

I work with computers.

Oh?

You build computers?

I’m a glorified marketing agent, but no matter how hard I push against the wind, and no matter how much I tear the label of “marketing” away from me, it finds a way to fashion itself to my skin.

I went to art school.

I have a portfolio of physical elements, but no one cares.

The morning, it is the same again.

The same morning that I was escorted out of the building, no one believing that I did not steal anything. The same morning that I failed that class that I didn’t really learn anything in, and the same morning that I woke up to after my car accident. The glass still cold in my mouth, the blood running warmly down my forehead. The sirens were coming, I was cold, my mom’s going to kill me….

The label is gone.

It’s nearly 10 years removed.

I never paid back the investors.

I’m sorry guys.

Financially they lost, but emotionally, physically, and mentally; I lost it all.

It’s six o’clock in the morning.

Rewind 10 years and I was riding my bmx through the cold mornings to a small church gathering of three people. Sometimes it was just me and my pastor’s mother in law. We would pray, we were silent for forty five minutes, and loud for fifteen. I never gave into charisma, I just talked to God outloud, because I felt so deeply that I had lost my way…in some ways I did, in others, I was just beginning to crawl.

I have to walk today. I walk to work everyday. I have to be alone with my thoughts for at least an hour a day, and sometimes I hate it. In my head goes so many thoughts, ideas, plans, visions, dreams, and circumstances. In my head I am a revolutionary, like Che Guevara. In my head I have my fist raised in anger, and I’m over throwing the tables and computers of my work, I am pummeling someone in the face, as if that is the answer to my dilemmas. I am yelling at those that are idiots, that refuse to learn with what they have, and I am the Punisher at the same time.

I am a saint in my head, so holy, so undying, so righteous in my devotion to Christ. I am not a sinner. I’m perfect. I have God in me, I’m the greatest.

I am a heathen in my head, so evil, so disaster stricken, to badly drawn, an animation of what I used to be, so callous, so cold, so bad.

I am also a deviant. So full of porn, so full of fantasized sexual activities, so perverse.

Then the doors open, and I’m a Manager. I am the reluctant hero, the one that does not want to be a hero, but has to be one for the sake of the company…the one that is going to take the fall when the funding collapses. The first one fired when it’s all said and done.

As I sit down, the dew still fresh on my arms, all those things that I thought I was, fade away. I am not an individual, I am a clone. I am a robot, I do the same thing everyday. Sometimes I make a quarter for doing it, and sometimes I make a lot of money…but it all goes back to pay Sallie Mae…she gave me the educational funding.

I reflect on so much, these mornings that I speak of, and these mornings fuel my desire to have so much less…at least less in the terms of sad mornings, filled with the reality that no matter what I do, no matter how much I learn, it is all for not…I am chasing the wind, I am grasping for it, I want to collect it, like a trophy, a triumph, but alas…I am not that big.

I am small.

I am nobody.

I am like this blog in many ways…so easily forgotten, so easily depressed.

But at my weakest, my words are the strongest, and somehow, somewhere there is someone out there that feels just like me, and hopefully they find me, and we help each other. Not in a sexual way, and not in a courtship of love, or desire. I’m married, I don’t need that, I mean as a human being…dare I say…a friend.

I have none.

I have one.

Maybe two.

One I see daily, and one I can never see while I am alive.

Is that enough?

I guess in many ways, it has to be.

I’m not complaining.

This morning is cold. The dew is settling on the grass, the windows are fog, the warm air is trying to escape. I snap the wings off my little butterfly, I collected it when I was outside this morning. It’s alive in my head though, dead in reality, sometimes that is just an example of pictures that I never really paint, draw or create.

I lament.

My whole understanding is based on lamentations at times.

The show is over.

Seriously.

It is truly over.

A return to form is coming, but it will be sandwiched between the reviews, the views, the emotional ties that bind through escapism.

All I do, all we do, is escape. Escapism fills the void, not joy, not peace, not love, not anything else…they are cloaked in a big cape called escape. Escape when pain arrives, escape when work is here, escape when responsibility takes over, and escape when boredom moves in and takes its place as our adulthood.

It is true what they say, in the end all they sold us was boredom, it is so true, it is all true. Trust me…you don’t understand.