Started on Friday for Monday Morning

[degringolade]

Since this is Friday, I am just doing the setup for the writing over the weekend and choosing the subject.  This is harder than it seems on Friday, because the toils of the week are fresh and the rock is close to being to the top of the hill.  The weekend is when it rolls down and I can get some rest while trudging down the hill to start pushing again.

I have been reading Camus lately.  Never, ever a bad thing to do.  As Michael says, his work about Sisyphus is one of the best pep talks ever given.  A pep talk that works and tells you what I have always known in my heart of hearts, that the whole deal is fucking absurd and, while you gotta bust ass, there is no reason to get stupid about it.

So much of life is chasing shit so that others will envy you.  That is one of "the rules of Girard".  Folks everywhere seem dead set on the idea that life isn't good unless someone else tells them it is good, that what they have isn't valuable unless someone else covets it.  This get one onto a roller coaster of acquisition and response that makes everyone involved crazy.

Trying to break away from this kind of nonsense is fantastically difficult.  It's lures are seductive. There is a huge, sophisticated, and intelligent community of talented, hard working people constantly trying to pull you back in.  Trying to generate a life of less means consciously giving up things that you own and worked for.

Even harder is finding something to fill up the gaps left by these prior sales of pieces of your soul.