and i know i’ve been odd..

so what’s holding you back? no, i’m not talking about kentucky’s seatbelt campaign.. i’m asking, as directly as possible, what’s holding you back? back from being/doing/thinking/saying/having/feeling exactly what you want..?

lately, if you haven’t noticed, i’ve been odd. there are, of course, plenty of excuses as to why.. but really only one reason: i’ve let myself get there, let myself need to be back on the living room couch to huddle under my blue afghan, trying to recite some mantra in hopes that it will mystically make things right in my soul.

now, i recognize that i can be overly romantic and/or dramatic at times but i do, sometimes, need to sink into my irrational fits of despair. maybe it’s a way of getting my dose of perspective.. i don’t know.. but i’ve got my phone call from buddy. and it’s time to get off the bed, go outside, and get to work.

from salinger’s franny and zooey

Franny shrieked, “Will you shut up, please?”

In just a second, in just a second. You keep talking about ego. My God, it would take Christ himself to decide what’s ego and what isn’t. This is God’s universe, buddy, not yours, and he has the final say about what’s ego and what isn’t. What about your beloved Epictetus? Or your beloved Emily Dickinson? You want your Emily, every time she has an urge to write a poem, to just sit down and say a prayer till her nasty, egotistical urge goes away? No, of course you don’t! But you’d like your friend Professor Tupper’s ego taken away from him. That’s different. And maybe it is. Maybe it is. But don’t go screaming about egos in general. In my opinion, if you really want to know, half the nastiness in the world is stirred up by people who aren’t using their true egos. Take your Professor Tupper. From what you say about him, anyway, I’d lay almost any odds that this thing he’s using, the thing you think is his ego, isn’t his ego at all but some other, much dirtier, much less basic faculty. My God, you’ve been around schools long enough to know the score. Scratch an incompetent schoolteacher–or, for that matter, college professor–and half the time you find a displaced first-class automobile mechanic or a goddam stonemason. Take LeSage, for instance– my friend, my employer, my Rose of Madison Avenue. You think it was his ego that got him into television? Like hell it was I He has no ego any more–if ever he had one. He’s split it up into hobbies. He has at least three hobbies that I know of–and they all have to do with a big, ten-thousand-dollar workroom in his basement, full of power tools and vises and God knows what else. Nobody who’s really using his ego, his real ego, has any time for any goddam hobbies.” Zooey suddenly broke off. He was still lying with his eyes closed and his fingers laced, quite tightly, across his chest, his shirt-front. But he now ground his face into a deliberately pained expression–a form, apparently, of self-criticism. “Hobbies,” he said. “How did I get off onto hobbies?” He lay still for a moment.

Franny’s sobs, no more than partly muffled by a satin pillow, made the only sound in the room. Bloomberg was now sitting under the piano, on an island of sunshine, rather picturesquely washing his face.

so are you using your real ego? do you even know what it is?

–sorry, yet another big thought condemned to incompleteness 😉