Monday Musings: I am not good at anything, and in the long run that doesn’t matter.

My son was crying tonight.  Not an unusual occurrence, he’s not quite two yet: crying is kind of his thing.  I’ve had enough though.  I went in, grabbed his binky, and shut the door.  No more milk, no more binky, no more coddling him when he’s crying in bed.  He has a bedtime, he will sleep during that bedtime, or he will learn to enjoy the peace, quiet, and dark that we give him to work with.  Is that a good thing for me to do?  Who knows.  In time it could turn him into a neurotic pot of crazy with phobias of the dark and being alone.  It could turn him into the next Alfred Nobel.  Who knows.  I’m not a very good parent.

Flew to Atlanta last week, starting on Tuesday.  Promptly lost my parking validation.  Upon my arrival Saturday, had to pay an extra day of parking, and go through an enormous amount of hassle with a man who clearly doesn’t speak English well, and resented the shit out of me forcing him to do more for his job than just stand in a booth and validate parking tickets.  My flight was cancelled, I refused to rent a car so I took public transportation everywhere, and I ended up getting zero writing done during my entire trip.  I’m not very good at traveling.

I’ve played MOBA’s since their invention in the early aughts.  I’ve played through thick and thin, and quite honestly my love of them has cost me more than once.  It spikes my blood pressure, and makes me feel like a complete and utter failure.  I get angry, I over-react to simple stimuli, I yell a lot, I curse my existence, I rave at the sky.  I should probably stop playing.  I make the wife nervous with how upset it makes me.  Yet I know for a fact that if I uninstalled League of Legends, it would be back in a week, or a month, or a year.  No matter how bad I play, I keep coming back for more.  I’m not very good at quitting while I’m ahead. 

My editor got my most recent attempt at writing a story back to me.  It’s actually a story this time, which is a nice change of pace.  Is it a good story?  Ehhh….  Is it an entertaining story?  Well… kinda?  It involves stuff happening, and things occur.  So I guess it gets a solid ‘meh’.  I have delusions of making thousands of dollars off my work.  I won’t.  If I make five bucks, I’ll be heartily surprised.  I’m not going to have a career in writing anytime soon.  I’m not very good at telling stories.

So why do I keep doing all this?  Why do I go in, day in, day out, editing and writing and working and failing?  Because I don’t have any other choice.  Unless I’m willing to put a gun in my mouth and exit stage left (which I almost did, but realize then and now that I don’t want to), then I have to do something.  I could sit here and waste away, whiling the hours on reading and playing video games.  I could divorce the wife, live in a tiny apartment, make my child payments, and die forgotten and alone.  That’s an option.  It’s a terrible one, and something I don’t actually want to do, but it’s still there.  I don’t wanna, though.  I don’t want to back down.  I don’t want to give up.  I don’t want to lay down in the dirt and leave my soul behind.  I’m not very good at quitting, and that’s why it’ll all work out okay in the end.