serious about what you do; you notice the things you are dishing out your monies for are not for silly trinkets to bling in, shiny expensive pieces of metal to drive around in, or out of your league costly to dress and carry on your shoulder to be impressive in anymore. You just turn into a Gap or Old Navy chick at the fanciest and call it a day.
It just happens. You look up one day and your whole raspberry leather furniture set, and expensive antique mirror and hand-woven life size throw rug, expensive lamps and televisions turn into a complete Futon setup. Viola! Welcome to your new modest, no more silly, fruitless bullsh\t life and fruitless interactions with seedless people.
The reality check of my “new life” came for me (during my conscious downgrade) when I drove through a Taco Bell once. While counting my ashtray change, I gathered enough to get a Taco Bowl salad. But when I pulled up to the window, I was $.05 short.
I will never forget how that lady looked at me with her brow up as if to say “I’ll wait.”
My hungry mouth just dropped.
My brows raised.
She kept looking (as if to say) “You’d better go get that nickel, sweetie.”
I put my car in park and began fidgeting around. I then got out to go to the back seat (sliding the front seats up and back)…yeah…in search of this nickel-still.
She looked on-still.
When I raised my head, and looked over at her, I said to myself: “Wow. This is the world. And she doesn’t care that you are broke while trying to invest in yourself.”
It was like she was positioned there by some higher power to test me and see if I was really ready and about this new life mine-trying to invest in myself and fight for time to be what and all who I could be. Remember that Cosby Show episode when the family assumed roles to teach Theo was life in the real word was like? That’s how this moment felt. It was like this woman was positioned in that window, holding back my bag of food for exchange of $.05 whole cents I was short of.
For a minute, I got scared. I was like: “When I was doing fruitless things and working a fruitless job, that paid blossoming money for with a shiny car and plush pad, I didn’t have this problem-it’s time to go back.”
It freaked me out—for a minute.
I was mixture of scared, and saddened with tears in my eyes, but I was humbled. I wasn’t embarrassed. I was just enlightened because I knew that with what I was trying to do, I couldn’t have it both ways. I saw that as a snapshot of many more of these kinds of days to come.
Needless to say, no, I didn’t get my salad.
I was hungry as hell. I could just taste that sour cream and picture me breaking off pieces of that edible crust and dipping it in my salad. Ooooh I could just taste it! Every time I see a Taco Bell or a commercial, I think of that 1st struggle day. Because it was outside of my personal struggle-this was in the hands of someone else in this world with me. The only thing that made me content with that moment was that she didn’t know me and would never see me again-and too, I wasn’t on crack…just on “creative” is all.
But as I was driving, a sense of calm came over me and I was no longer afraid and ready to jump back into a fruitless, dispirited life just to look a certain way and drive a certain thing when I knew there is more to me than that.
So with that particular day I went through, that made me curious if (considering the online poster’s rants) was she, too, a down-grader.
Did she have a dream?
What in the hell was her daily struggle for?
Was my looking at her rants some divine intervention I was drawn to and these were the lessons of examples served as warnings I would soon be going through?
Like her, I was one of those very same people at this very time I was reading her rants. (pay attention to that line because that is the point of my story v. that infographic)
At any rate.
What I wanted was for her rants to lead to an end where there was a light at the end of this tunnel.
I wanted hope in that-hope in that somewhere in that there, I wanted to work something out for myself.
But I knew I had no right to press upon her-what I felt she should be doing [to lead anybody out there reading this] to an end game or end goal.
She just didn’t have one.
And I just had to accept that.
So instead of yelling at the screen everyday, I made peace with that.
But instantly, I thought about a conversation I had with a friend of mine named Anthony (a photographer-he called himself Orgena—“a negro” backwards).
In 1999/2000 we were this flavorful mix of artists, Goths, musicians, gamers that hung out playing the same game for 10 hours in the day, tech geeks, misfits, and talented
