Dackness July 16, 2008

There’s a scene is this new movie The Wackness where the kid and his girl are on the beach and she tells him “I see the dopeness, you only see the wackness.” The film itself was pretty hilarious but I’ve been thinking my life is this constant yin and yang of the dopeness and the wackness and not really much in the way of middle ground.

When I was at university, there was a general if/then theorem for doing simultaneously great and shit at two of the major functions of life:

1) If work was the dopeness, then schoolwork was the wackness.
2) If schoolwork was the dopeness, then girls were the wackness.
3) If girls were the dopeness, then work was the wackness.

It’s a pretty sound theorem and always held mathematically true, for better or for worse. At least life was never boring. However, now, with a ’9 to 5′ and no formal ongoing education to speak of, the theorem is useless.

In a general sense, life has become the new schoolwork. You’re constantly learning new things all of the time and having new experiences and this is not enforced by professors but instead by the unrelenting threat of persistent monotony, which I have realised is even worse than that semester of Special Topics in Native American Anthropology. On top of all of this, if you’re actually interested in your work (which I am), the lines between life (learning) and work become terribly blurred. Highs you would associate with life are all of the sudden caused as a result of work and vice versa, while a situation of intolerable wackness on the job front is almost assuredly not going to set off dopeness when it comes to life and ladies.

It’s all definitely a learning curve. One new rule that I have definitely established is that the more tied down you are to a place in your day to day life, the more attractive life on the road becomes. In the past year that I’ve been in the traditional workplace, I have at least managed to cross the continent by land in search of adventure and spend a week in Sweden at its coldest and harshest time of year. But every minute I am not actually on the road I have been dreaming of it, reading books about folks who lived in Kiribati, watching films about all the weirdos that moved to Antarctica and tv specials about motorcycle trips from Scotland to South Africa, listening to music from Mali and Germany and Norway and Nigeria and… Alpena. I am greedy, enthusiastic and raring to go. And it all means I couldn’t possibly be less motivated to get out of bed every morning and face 25 minutes on the A train.

I do wonder whether it’s the scenery. New York is brilliant but so far in a year I’ve worked with success but not phenomenal success, I’ve lived but I’ve not been overly satisfied with life, and I’ve met dozens of attractive women but very few of whom I found particularly interesting. This all seems terribly obvious but I guess more than anything it’s just good right now to sit back, take stock after a year and realise that in the words of James Dean Bradfield, there’s still a long way to go. And hopefully a bit of dopeness too.