Sacrifice
Sometimes I feel like my head is split in two. My crazy workaholic side likes to live in the office taking care of business pushing paper and shoveling shit. On the flip side, my destructively chaotic artistic self spends it’s time shooting off into light-space-time-clouds-dreams you name the cliche all the while plotting to put an Excalibur sized blade through the heart of the asshole who’s still delivering on someone else’s terrible tacky project. In the meantime, keeping the peace I guess, my conscious self becomes a shell of a personality while trying not to let the heated inner turmoil rise to the surface.
Work for what you want. Makes sense.
Go where the money is. Got it.
Stay in it to win it. …ok.
True talent rises to the surface. Sounds promising.
Now’s the time for sacrifice. Wait…what?
Sacrifice is what you do when you’re losing, remember? When you’re down a goal, you pull the goalie because you’ve got nothing left to lose. When you’re in a hell-hole on the battle field, one guy stays behind so the rest can retreat and get away. If there’s seven people in a life raft in the middle of nowhere with nothing to eat. That’s when you sacrifice. Not after you’ve completed umpteen years of school and are at the peak of your abilities. That’s not when you put aside your dream and hold-up the mediocre talentless fucks who haven’t and won’t ever figure it out.
Sacrifice is an enabling evil word. It sounds valiant and heroic. “Oh, I’m going to sacrifice my energy and spirit for the betterment of the whole.” Shit, dude, fuck, man, you’re getting played!
Day in day out, life doesn’t stop. Time doesn’t slow down. You’re either stuck, spinning or rolling. Mostly, the day we live in has produced a lot of stuck people. In twenty years you won’t see any films made about 2010 in which a graduate gets out of college and gets a nice cushy job at the most influential newspaper in the world. That shit just doesn’t happen anymore. There aren’t even any jobs at inner-city schools. No, we live in a society of stuck.
Or they trick you into spinning. Technology is changing everything, but business stays the same, that is, business stays ruthless. Bright eyed and bushy tailed wizards of the new age emerge from the tunnel of institutional education to find an “opportunity” with the trolls and ogres of the dark ages of corporate wars. What goes up, must come down. These cynical boomers can’t use their blackberries, but they’ll whisper sweet nothings in your ear until you’re the only wheel moving the train forward with no leverage to become an engine.
Who’s rolling, is anyone rolling? Or are we all spinning in sacrifice? Will the fresh, eager, spark of excitement over the endless possibility of life fade away before an adequate amount of sacrifice has been made?
Sacrifice? Fuck it!
