I took a week off last weekend to try to account for where I’m at this year. The Gulf Coast is my happy place and it always somehow resets my priorities and goals into place each time I visit. I don’t know if it's the sea air or the sun down there but somehow the people of the Gulf Coast, from Panama City, FL all the way to Biloxi, MS seem to be the most interesting, yet crazy characters I have known. Between the people, the scenery of the ocean and sand, and the spice of the cajun food, it would seem that anyone who visits would feel as though they are guests under a big open tent, being wowed time and again as they bustle from one spectacle to the next at a never-ending carnival. Spending time there is always time well wasted.
I know i haven’t written nearly as much I’d like but I’ve certainly been busy living more stories to tell. Life surly has been quite a carnival in the last four months with exciting triumphs, sad scenarios and developing dramas that have kept me very busy and made me very tired. As Jimmy Buffett would put it, I have become "more than contented to be living and dying in 3/4 time,” but I too, “must confess that I could use some rest.” Under the advise of Dr. Jimmy, a trip to Key West next week will do well to clean me out and refocus my efforts in stumbling forward through this year.
In gearing up for 2019, I could feel the excitement of change looming in the distance like a thick fog. I was all too eager to plunge onward into the unknown blindly and ambitiously. Perhaps one of my biggest blunders at times is forgetting the cost that must be paid to experience personal growth and change.
The circumstances are all too often out of our control and the outcomes of such costs rarely seem fair or justified. When I got a call at 6:45 AM on a Tuesday morning that one of my closest friends had killed himself, the forward progress of my full-steam-ahead approach to 2019 halted on a dime. News like that has a way of hitting you like a freight train and it surely knocked me on my knees. There is a lot more I want to discuss here and I plan on writing another post in this series about death and its meaning in the coming weeks.
For the sake of the carnival, this may have been the event of the year that added quite a plot twist the developing drama of 2019. Out of the despair of losing a friend, and a stern conversation with myself about what it all means, the committee of my conscience mind ruled 8 against 1 that even death cannot stop the carnival. Barrel onward, full steam ahead, just take an intermission first.
This begs the question though, "What are we barreling towards, again?”
Don’t ask me what I want to do, where I want to settle, or what my long-term career goals are. I can’t tell you and I don’t think they matter anyway. I have fallen into the belief that money can be made in many places, if you are able to make yourself useful in some way. Honest Abe sums it up; “Whatever you are, be a good one.”
With that said and considerations of the land my feet would thus become attached to, I seized an opportunity and bought a duplex in Georgia. So I guess I like it here. For now. I’ve spent money I don’t have, worked my dad’s back into disrepair and have given every minute of my own personal time working on this house so that I can live in it and rent it and begin to build wealth. I like to see it as the first space of my monopoly board. It's not Boardwalk, but I’ll get there.
So amidst the passing of friends, buying and renovating a house, finishing graduate school and continually being consumed at work, I have let down my readers here. Never fear for I have returned with fresh stories to tell, blunt comments to make, and ideas for new places to go. As I have said, this is my life, it's like one big carnival. It has many things happening at once and a lot of people to keep entertained. My vow has always been to never let it stop, even in the worst of times. I will continue to frolic freely about the fields of the earth struggling to make a name for myself and striving to experience all that I can with everyone I can along the way. My life will always be a carnival and I will never let it stop.
