Bills

The table in the other room is illuminated by a single hanging light. I keep it dark so I don't have to stare at the pile of bills waiting to take a piece of me. Somewhere in that pile of corporate paper lies my life, but I couldn't tell you how to find it. I hired someone to do that for me, once, but now that's just another bill. Ironic.

Envelopes and slips of color have an interesting way of stealing your life. The lifelessness of the sheets with ink spread about by a computer can trap you inside a box of pressure and doubt. We answer to something that has no life, no breath, no self. It raises anger and other unfortunate emotions that trap us even further in a spiral of self destruction. Anger feeds desire for an escape, desire for an escape feeds purchase, purchase feeds bills, bills feed anger. And on and on and on...

Money is the root of all kinds of evil. It's sad. Money can only buy brief periods of time where we are slightly more happy, before ultimately taking back whatever joy it brought and replacing it with strife. Although, to be fair, money provide means of communication otherwise unattainable, which is perhaps its best use.

Another bills piles atop Mt. Neverrest. An endless climb up a path that only leads down. An endless business that keeps envelope opener companies afloat...These bills, a true version of mind control...And sadly, in some cases, soul control, which means utter sadness and destruction.

Getting the mail should never lead to resentment.

She's Electric

She's electric, so I guess that makes me rubber.
Incompatible, but forced into coexistence.
Today I could have said I love her.
A tragic coincidence.

A hunk of rubber, I am unflappable in the wind.
I do not not blow from side to side.
An unwavering hope of a love I might find.
Waiting to see what God decides.

Positivity is draining work.
A system built with a mandatory default am I.
Every day plowing through the grime and the murk.
Waking up on a mission to stare into despair's eye.

A hunk of rubber, I do not break down in the waves.
Blocking the shore from siege, I fear no storm.
Giving those behind this wall of me time to run to the caves.
I accept this pain as necessary, as it is not for me I mourn.

I pray for those who balance on the wire.
I know not their worries, their pains, the blows they're suffering of.
I pray they avoid entrapment in the mire.
I pray in hopes that they'll always know that it's them that I love.

A hunk of rubber, I melt in the fire.
Of different form, I am, changed, I am not.
I am a puddle of myself, but I see this not as dire,
For I am not broken, hope I still have, love I've still got.

A hunk of rubber, cooled off in the dirt and ash.
My shape is different, my stature is lost in history.
But along I keep going, slowly, life isn't a dash.
A hunk of rubber, searching for wisdom, and finding mystery.

The Nature of Ideas

I've been thinking about ideas a lot. Just what makes them good or bad, or more specifically, what makes them successful or unsuccessful. I've been able to make money with my ideas by selling slogans to t-shirt companies, but I don't know how I got so lucky to do that, and why that appears to be a special talent.

On the main site I use to create slogans (Threadless, under Interesting Places) there is a large gap between those who are successful with slogans and those who aren't, or those who 'get it' and those who can't. Part of this is due to the amount of exposure you get within the site, but a lot of it is from apparently just not getting what a funny idea is made out of. I'm not really sure of what works myself, I still have failures, but do better on average than most. Maybe this is just having a sense of irony, but if that were true, I'd think more people would achieve success the way I have. So it must be deeper.
Why is my brain (and some brains in general) hardwired to understand funny? More interesting, perhaps, is that I'm not really sure why I can be funny. It just flows out in my reactions (how is there a divide between situational comedy and written comedy, a topic for another time), rarely am I funny consciously. I'm terrible with telling jokes, and I don't really spend time thinking about a slogan, I'm either inspired in pieces and fill in the rest, or the whole phrase comes to me. How can I be successful and have almost no insight into how I got there? It's a near out of body question, one I'm obviously not prepared to answer.
I posed this question to my dad the other day, "Do you think I'll be able to live off my ideas?" It's the question that's gotten me to thinking about ideas in general, and just what they are and the power they hold. How can an idea I have be any more powerful than someone else's? Or why can mine hold more substance, and most importantly, how can I tap into that?
I want to make a difference with my ideas. I don't want to change the world, necessary, but I want to think about the world and get paid for it, while making others think about the world and ideas. That is the goal, but how do you reach it? Can you wait for inspiration or is it possible to dig into your own brain and pull out an idea, and create a function and system to put it into motion...That is what I want to know: How far can you go with the idea of ideas, just how much of an idea tangible and how much you need to build around it. How far down does the rabbit hole go...