futility

"you sell yourself short.  aim high.  go in firing," they said.  they said to go in tall with unvanquished confidence.  a few hours later I got the polite rejection message and thought about the futility of aiming at all when it is almost certainly always too high or low (and which is better really?).  why aim at all?  why hustle or pronounce or project or aspire?

shadowboxing a locked vault.  sweat and adrenaline into an unfeeling vortex.

it's just unfortunate timing, really.  the real sting is just in the red i recently penned when i drew up my cost of living.  prognosis- negative.  subsisting on deficit for an unforeseeable future.

(if i could go back, and had not been born in the midwest to a breed conditioned toward higher education, and had had a bit more prompting in the way of self-promotion and artistic edification, would i even have gone to college at all?)

in the morning, after a night of light dreams, the parking ticket stuffed under the wiper greeted me like a bully.  waiting and callous.  i mindlessly chose one spot instead of another (though i've lived there for over a year) and so the forces that be- like pheromones or gravity- demand recompense.

but i summoned my courage and found some silver in a penny found- in my leftover lunch from yesterday that hadn't been thrown out yet- in a kind word.

later, when i went to  prepare my camera to use at the school rally, i found a battery had exploded into a crusted mess into my external flash like cancer.  how long had it been inside there?  could i have stopped it or even known?  there is no stopping it now.  an hour later was like the day after a funeral, singing a six hundred dollar dirge to useless shell in my hand.

and it seems that these little threats lie everywhere.  there is no safety.

on the way home, i heard on the radio about the man recently released from years of interrogation and torture in some cold cell.  and i watched the obese woman crossing the road.  and saw that man in the wheelchair with the long ponytail and i thought of the futility of everything

and what very different shapes a bad day can take.

and the futility and the danger and relativity of it all means a handhold with despair.  right here and far away from my family and any real suffering and an old, sad ache.