It all came together, finally, tonight. Another crisis hit me this weekend, the “What the f— am I doing with my life?” feeling I get every so often, which seems to coincide suspiciously with occurrences of my bank accounts bottoming out.

What occurred to me was that I wasn’t really advancing any causes that are important to me. Since the day I sold my soul to the devil, sometime in June 1999, I hadn’t given a second thought to what might be important to me in life. Even when I quit my engineering job, I made it no further than “What slightly interests me?”

Shazaam! I had been asking myself the wrong question the past five years!

What I *should* have asked myself was: “What is wrong with my world now and how will I affect change/influence it so it matches my vision?”

That question begs a list. And a list gives direction. I would then have to ask myself: What education will I need? What resources and connections will I need to bring such changes about? What skills should I acquire? Who else shares my vision(s)?

This is going to be fun. My guess is this list is going to be somewhat fluid and things could flip-flop, but here’s where I stand as of today.

First Stab at List:
Healthcare
-Educate people about preventative health
-Reduce reliance on pharmaceuticals
-Make sure every working person and student is properly insured for health emergencies and automatically covered for preventative care
-End farm subsidies which promote junk food products and unhealthy fillers/sweetners
-Distinguish between “food” and food products in FDA guidelines/policy

Politics
-Make sure shitheads don’t get elected to represent me
-Reduce power of corporations to influence government
-Increase minimum wage to a living wage
-Promote single-earner family/community structures with social policy, increase (good) parent-to-child ratio
-Promote community-building and children-friendly spaces
-Increase quality of cooperation and understanding among other cultures

Education
-Practice democracy in school systems in function and design
-Focus on personal development, communication, relationship management as critical development skills for youth
-Assess “grades” such that students better understand what skills they have and what they lack
-Make education affordable/accessible for everyone
-Increase extracurricular involvement opportunities for youth

Environment
-eliminate use of pesticides and herbicides
-eliminate use of hormones in animals and humans for food production and birth control
-eliminate large-scale ecosytem disruptions caused by mega-farms (acres of similar farmland, orchards, trucking 75% of country’s bees into one state for 2 weeks); make communities more self-sufficient/local-emphasis, diversify locally
-Advance clean energy
-Minimize wasteful chemical emissions to air/water (power, transportation)

Poverty
-Make dignified housing accessible for anyone of any income

Prisons
-Rehabilitate criminals instead of caging them
-Legalize and monitor drugs

Fun Stuff
-Permanent, easy hair removal
-healthy cigarettes
-eliminate overhead power/phone lines
-design a community and/or pleasing home environment
-design own clothing/jewelry
-eliminate boring, standard, ticky-tacky houses, cars, buildings

Well, that’s a start. Off to bed now and maybe I’ll revise, prioritize and beef up the list so I can get some more direction in my life’s actions.

Changes (poem):
Stomach turning
Turning to face reality once again
How a paycheck can make you feel so far from your dreams
So here I am again
Spinning in the mud
Unimpressed with myself
At the end of the day, what was there to show for your efforts?
I’m so used to rewards
Am I just addicted?

Seconds stretching into years without you
Moments feeling vast, enormous, infinite
How much time did we spend together?
That must not have mattered
We make our nights into lifetimes
A biography already written
From just being together

Doomed and rolling and whirling and spinning
Orienting ourselves
To stand and to walk
Then to run and to create
Without the slime of our ancestry
Weighing us down

Making mistakes
And hitting dead-ends
That make us wish we were dead
Because change hurts so much
Observing without judgment
Our selves and our paths
Accepting consequences
And learning from pain

Resisting impulses
That habits are made of
To valiantly reach for what lives in our dreams
A change of reality
A break from the past
A chance at a future
That feels truer to you

Paying for information
Seems antiquated and it’s not even outlawed yet
The soup of my mind
Thoughts swimming
Collected by the brain I grew and managed
Stored and retrieved by processes I hardly control
What’s yours is now mine
And mine, yours
We’re becoming more connected
That’s obvious
My eggs live outside my body now
And my life grows in other beings
And soon you will know my thoughts
Before I have a chance to rearrange them on the internet
Then it will be so many more words
Than Facebook or Twitter could hold
We might as well give up
And start listening for frequencies
We’ll be one big buzz
Without the joy and drama
Of imperfect communication
An “Uh-Oh-Om”
When we all come together

Now I live among the stars
Diving into them at night
Headfirst on a big box bus
Lots of hills to call my own
People pay to walk my streets
Go where few have gone before
Take the road less traveled-by
No longer strangers
All are neighbors
Living in each other’s dreams
Buying pleasure by the quarter
Feeling guilt for overload
But too much work won’t bring you joy
Since joy is always there to seize

Striving and driving and thinking too much
Obsessing, controlling
Not sure when to move
Emotions and thoughts
A million impulses
More words to explain how we ought to behave
And what’s happy?
And are we happy?
And do we deserve to be?
And are we marching off to nowhere
Or sleeping just too long
And would more trophies on the wall
Require more or different effort?
Life was structured
Now freestyling
Not sure how to win at this game

Sitting on a pile of colorful clothing
Legs crossed
Skirt on
Plucking petals off a daisy

Waking up in this world
Touching a few of the colors that swirl
You make my heart race
Owning what you’ve always wanted
Just as easy as changing your mind
Can’t make you smile unless
I’m dancing to a song I like
Can you hear the music?
Or are you still doing what you’re told?

Standing on the plateau
Surveying the grandeur
Of the valley of my desires
Blooming now in awe-inspiring detail
I look around and nod
It is good

I fell deep in Love *with* you
Now I’m so in love with Love
I just wish that you would join me
Tell your heart to meet me there…