Once We Were Warriors Vs. The Loved Ones

Sometimes life is not what we wish it to be. There are opportunities that get missed, relationships that end, and mistakes that are made sometimes again and again and again. We don’t always get what we want; thank you Rolling Stones, and sometimes we just might find we don’t even get what we need. The thing is we GET. We get new opportunities. I try really hard to look at every day as a new opportunity to get it right. I’m going to wake up, put my shorts on one leg at a time, and go forth in the world to be a bit better than I was yesterday. It is a personal mission statement, a mantra if you will.

I think we all need these things. When times are their bleakest, when our backs are against the wall, we feel as if we have nothing left to lose, or any other cliché you choose we have to have something to mentally hang our hat on. I point to those things when I’m struggling. I fall back on these things when life is kicking me in the teeth so that I don’t lose track of what truly is best in life. Here’s a hint it ISN’T the ‘lamentations of the women’. The fact is the only truism of life is that it will change.

The things we take for granted, the status quo of our everyday existence, and even the very air we breathe will change. Life is transitory by its very definition. It is natural. That is the thing we also have to remember; Nature does NOT care. It's like the Honey Badger.  It don't give a shit.  The bad things that happen to us; the disappointments, the loss, the break ups, the deaths, etc. they are not the acts or whims of some mad deity. They can simply be distilled down into nature taking its shitty course.

In order to deal with this we have to be like water. Bruce Lee was right. We have to be like water. Water can be hard like steel, when ice, to withstand the brutalities of life. It can be mercurial, when steam, and impossible to hold or even define in order to allow us to escape. More than anything though when in its normal form it is adaptable, when you put water in a container it conforms to that container. However it retains its ability to become both ice and steam. Water is infinitely adaptable. That is what we have to be as human beings. We have to adapt, to adapt we have to change just as the world does around us.

For better or worse nothing stays the same. Nothing stays in that perfect moment of amber. It instead becomes a whisper, or a memory. You can’t hold it suspended animation like an insect trapped in amber. We live, we lose, we love, we cry, we laugh, & we die. It just is. So tonight when you watch that clock strike midnight and you think about what happened in the last year who you met, who you lost, who you loved, who you hated, etc. remember that it will all change. You will never be this ‘You’ again. Nothing and no one is forever, not even the ‘cold November rain’, thank you Axel and have another donut. Tomorrow the sun will rise, F’ you Mayans, and you’ll start it all over again putting those shorts on one leg at a time. It’s up to you to decide what you do after that.

Whew, well I thought about RANDOM CRAPing it up, but you know what I think this stands perfectly on its own. I hope to those out there that read this drivel that I know, and even those that I don’t, that you take the opportunities afforded to you in the upcoming year to ‘Be’. Don’t settle, don’t miss a chance, and ‘don’t run from it’. Go forth and conqueror.

“Trapped inside a box
Four long years
Hiding from the world
Punished by your peers

Studied teachers words
Staff appointed hearts
Earned a piece of paper
No go forth and start

Go forth, be conquered, go forth and die
Go forth, be conquered, go forth and die

Go forth Be conquered
Go Forth and Die

Now you've graduated
Mind is mutilated
Thrust into the world
Feeling segregated
Move in with your parents
Back into the dark
Landed where you started
Bachelor of Arts

The learning starts now...
Open up your textbooks and turn to the
Chapter concerning your DETH

Night sky
Bleeds red
Black birds
Bring DETH

You'll be eaten by the blackness
Of your rotting mind that's dying
You're consumed with sharpened wings
That penetrate your frightened lying

Go die
Go die
Go die go!

Now you're sad and frightened
Want to go and hide
Maybe get your masters
Eight more years inside
Dream of your own murder
Strangled by the IVY
Drown in student loans
Better off just dying

Go Die
Go Die

You'll be eaten by the blackness
Of your rotting mind that's dying
You're consumed with sharpened wings
That penetrate your frightened lying

Go Forth Be conquered
Go forth and die
Go forth be conquered
Go forth and die
Go forth and die
Go forth and die
Go forth and die
Go forth and die”

* = Yes Jake, yes we should...