Being The Best.

The swill of narcissism and drama is cheap.  Its cheapness is likewise seductive.  It's not woken by back pain at four a.m., nor by the sudden scampering of large roaches or what might be large roaches in the still heat of insomniac trill.  No.  It is smooth and clean and the purest sense of authenticity one can grieve for this side of the divide, whatever that means, and it is isolation, simple and sweet like a root beer float at age eight.

It is the capacity to sail excuses into the ether and buy them; because it is cheap, it doesn't matter what you waste.  Cheap means you don't have to give up much to make it go.  And because it is cheap, well, unfortunately, or fortunately, maybe it isn't quite as fungible as I thought it used to be.

It is not competing against singularly minded machine-people and being beat without excuses.  It is certainly not acknowledging a simple fact, and letting the simple fact flail into the wind with new found freedom.

I am not the best.  Not the smartest, or brightest, or best looking, or most popular, or most clever, or funniest.

And I am not the best even with heavy lifts of effort.

And that's because effort cannot be forged from the desire to be the best.  Ego-driven effort does a lot, but it is always somehow lacking.

And this is a simple truth that I've known conceptually since I was into Krishnamurti when I was like 11 years old and graduated from The Hobbit and before Stephen King in my early teen years.

The truth is that winning because of ego driven effort is false, hallow, chimera.  Building a life and having a vision for how things should be means a lot more than being best.  It means being able to stomach other people being the best.  It means being able to say "slow down, too fast for me."

1) Work on something that cannot be mastered (music, language, books)

2) Associate with people who have a bigger conception of the world than Brooklyn pizza and late-night drinking

3) Stick to standards when they are hard to stick to

4) Forgive someone for no reason other than forgiveness, and act selflessly in future relations with that person without once bringing up the forgiveness necessary to partake

5) Forget about large glorious visions of what could be.  Work on practical detail-oriented steps for what is.