Look Up At The Stars & Analyze The Skies

Full of hate and stifling self-paralysis half the damned time, like moving through thick southern humidity except mentally. Feels like I've turned a corner, but then again feels like I've turned the same corner 38 times already and I just keep running around the same damned piece of shit plot of land while the grass grows taller around the edges of everything, making it harder to see an actual escape. We are in some trifling assed times, but not really at the same time. I'm not in a shanty. My kids don't have flies on their eyeballs. Sitting full-bellied on food stamps, which gives me a complex (but the radio noise the other day was all like, "1 in 9 Americans clocking their food stamp grip so Congress blah blah blahzay blahzay..." through another day, riding around in a truck that's three months late on payments between jobs that run too long because fuck man, how'd I get here? Someone point out like three forks in the road I took that I could swerve the other way and make it less a fucking frustration to hear the alarm clock boop at me in the goddamned morning.
But really, just keep going. Honestly, no victim talk or anything, but shit man, I'm not equipped to understand how to navigate this world. Grew up in a shit assed place with a shit assed education where it was coastable easy to be big fish in a small pond, and didn't have the foundation to respect the extras to learn how to succeed. If anything, I was taught from an early age that there's some twisted nobility in poverty, that success breeds betrayal to your true self, which of course is just someone else's bullshit that got slipped into my cerebrum. But seriously, it's hard for me to navigate this world, especially the financial aspect of it that gets so heavy lately. Not much old work out there, not much new work out there, not much switching of jobs to be doing either. That's just how it is right now, hold pat with the shitty hand, wait for the dealer to dole out a few more cards, and hope to break even by the time they kick me off the table.
And at the same time, all that's such bullshit. Full grown men should take full grown responsbility. Even if the fucking work sucks and is slow and tedious and soul-crushing and unable to make the ends meet, I should've pecked 20,000 words out today by supper, and then revised 10,000 from yesterday tonight while watching another crappy movie distract me from another wasted night before they finally figure out the date behind the dash on my inevitable grave marker. I went to where my dad and uncle are buried the other week because I was in the area. My dad's grave has a chainsaw on it, no shit, and actually has "Tuna" on it as well, which always impresses me. Nicknames don't often become so overbearing in life to make it on the grave. The chainsaw's on there because he worked small engines most of his life. (In fact, the motherfucking place he worked at, formerly a family business of my second cousin, has had my goddamned riding mower for like two months now, trying to fix some simple shit that I was afraid I was gonna just bend into place half-assedly, which apparently, I should've done, being I fixed my push mower on my own so I could push that slow ass thing around the two acres and keep from losing the baby.) My uncle has a drag car doing a burnout, and like you'd expect with such an image, he died young. I often times condemn myself wondering what'd be the token life image on mine. A 5-in-1, for all the years begrudgingly spent painting? A fucking computer box?
I don't know. A man shouldn't wrestle so hard with mortality, but that's what we do when we feel the coolness of a rock against our back and see the hard place closing in faster than we'd like. Just keep going. Things need to be done, and they occupy the body hard enough to distract the mind, and you end up feeling much better than having it distracted by another crappy movie where the body doesn't move and all the stress and frustration digs into your stomach and lungs and builds up around where your umbilical cord first tugged you out into this mess. Stick and move. Wednesday is Mr. Mom day with the kids, so we'll probably go hiking at the natural area in the morning, build another quartz statue for whatever reason, let the girls soak their feet in the creek, come home, and slug at it all a little more, hopefully a little fresher. Motherfuckers everywhere are struggling, and far worse than me or mine, but it feels like a pile-on at times. I can sit here and wish this or that about not having been equipped with the proper navigational tools to chart my way through the life storms, but fuck it man. I've got stars overhead, ground underneath that's as mine as a regular man can actually own land in this country, and I've got a solid family in this house. There's a world in my head I want to toss at the world outside like throwing knives and cold beers (or a bowl of rice), and it would rather cloud and confuse and delude me against such a notion. I need to move to embrace the perseverance of the demented wandered who, no matter how much they lock the doors and try to keep them contained, just stares at the gate, waiting for no one to pay attention. I need to sludge through the shitty days, dust down my lungs, fumes up my nose, silica through my skin, and let it all percolate up top inside, and stare at the gate, wait for everyone to go to sleep, no one paying attention, and run like a motherfucker, six or seven hours. Sleep is the cousin of death. So is sitting on the couch or in a chair staring at screens.