so you wanna be a _________?
Firefighter. Fighter. Friend. Fucking success story. Great. It doesn’t matter. You don’t matter. You play your part. You roll out of your comforting sleep every morning dreading the grinder. You call yourself the cannon, but really deep down you know you’re just the fodder. Your fire burns. Undirected. It doesn’t even consume you. Soon enough it burns out. The days of competition, the hours of fatigue, the minutes of wanting to quit and the seconds spent feeling the burn of the Co2 building up in your legs means nothing. Rear view fucking mirror. Simple as that.
You speak of the tenacity of the men you’ve been fortunate enough to know and pledge to uphold the tremendous reputation of he who went before you, but you don’t mean it. You fall a willing victim to the abyss of your own complacency, weakness and undisciplined behavior. You move slowly throughout the weak, taking naps like a child, managing your time with the maturity of a toddler and your narcissistic self love protects you from doing anything truly “hard”. You say you want to be challenged, you say you want to be pushed to where you quit, but you haven’t meant it and you know it. You’ve been scared. You show up to the training sessions, you outwork others, but its only because you’ve become a master of fitness and deception. You mislead to them and misrepresent yourself.
Not only are you a liar. You are the lie.
‘We few, we happy few…” you may quote, but happy and few, you know you are neither. You’ve become the manifestation of your own enemy, and the only existential crisis you may face is one that comes from a catalyst of your own creation. You show up to the run. You partake in the interval. But you don’t do it. You’re just there. A bystander in step. You say it’s to keep the pace or to not blow your wad. You know you can break that pace. It’ll hurt. That ever familiar yet enticingly new burn of total muscle failure and the taste of the pennies on your tongue as you breath tease you; nevertheless, you don’t bite. You reside in the realm of comfort and complacency yet more. Your mindless months of self-approbation have lead you down a bright and easy road of relative success. You’re the toughest guy some people know, maybe even the strongest or fastest. But you know it’s not real. It’s a facade. Like a white picket fence in front of a cookie-cutter nineteen fifties house, your fence is just that. A distraction. It hides all the problems inside and screams ‘LOOK AT ME’, but really it whispers, ‘Do you see the real me?’. Most don’t. They believe the bravado and the standards you’ve imposed. The superhero mantra. They not only don’t want to hear the whispers, they couldn’t if they wanted to, for they are deaf to the thunder raging behind the fence, deaf to the shattering glass and the cracking foundation, blind to the rotting siding and desensitized to the electrified gate. It says ‘Welcome’ but it means ‘Don’t come in’. It deceives.
You are the property. May your picket fence protect you.
But some hear the whispers. Through the white noise and distractions, the blissful bright art and paint, they see past it. They see the wires that lead so nonchalantly into the gate, racing current into it and waiting to impress volts into anyone who tries to enter. They see the faded paint and the rot in the siding. They see the broken glass and the house that settled into its broken foundation. Settled. Exactly what you do. The ones who can hear the whispers, for they are the true measure a man. Male or female, they embody a ‘fear no man” attitude and it excites you. It makes your heart race. It makes you twiddle your thumbs and your mind race as you realize they’ve seen through your facade. They’ve listened to your whisper and know the truth, the truth you try to hide with actions and even more so with words. The veracity of their real perception of you IS YOU.
Leave it, or change it. Fear Naught but God.
