2017 Goals and Ideas

Life lately is pretty simple and straightforward. I work, spend a lot of time online, started playing guitar again, and hang out with my lover. I quit smoking recently and life feels a million times better than it has in so, so long. That nasty addiction affected so many more things in my life than I realized or even wanted to consider. I feel free now! This will be a great foundation for starting other healthy habits, like exercising more.

I am looking forward to the holiday season, being around those lovely Swedes again and the nearly constant darkness and snow. There are so many stories and ideas I want to write. I also have great plans and hopes for the year that will follow. When I look back on my goals from about this time last year, I achieved a few of them, which is great. So I am going to record my hopes for this coming year, too.

Publish my writing on Amazon and have an income stream from that.

Start a blog on motivation and mind/body/creativity hacks.

Travel to Mexico and South America.

Swim in the ocean a lot more.

Learn a skill like content marketing or SEO.

Spend more time with loved ones.

Spend more time with animals.

Visit a meditation retreat and meditate every day.

Become fluent in Swedish.

Paint a lot more.

April 9th, very early morning.

I came upon some information recently about the importance of creative output. You must make a lot of whatever it is you make, and not all of it will be good. This is how masterpieces happen. Not like I'm expecting to form a masterpiece on this blog, but this idea inspired me to start writing more on here.

Recently, I was reading over some journal entries from the past year and was surprised at how interesting some of my ideas were. These were things that I had forgotten all about, that I just jotted down to ease my own mind, to work out some personal conundrums or just to reflect. Often times my journal entries start with, "I have no idea what to write..." and then end up trailing off into something entirely different. Once I get started, I'm often shocked at how much flows out, and when I go over it later, some of it is good stuff.

We don't see it at the time, when we are having these thoughts or ideas, and we especially can't ever see it unless we record it somehow or share it with others. I think I (and people in general) could benefit from recording their thoughts more often, if only to review them later on and never show them to another person.

How many times have you seen someone say something extremely intelligent or make something beautiful and compliment them, only to have them react in a surprised or doubtful way?
We're not aware of our own creativity. We downplay it, or ignore the ideas when they come, not even noticing anything significant about them. I think the truly innovative thinkers are the ones who aren't afraid of saying something dumb or creating something unoriginal.

It's just a matter of having enough self respect to allow your ideas to come to some type of fruition, even if that just means saying or writing them.

Thoughts From Last Summer

Today feels like limbo, or purgatory or something. I just need to get the words flowing and the rest will find its way.

Lately I remember my dreams when I wake up. Last night there was something about a car and a really unstable rocky road downhill. Something about driving past a town that had a 50s Elvis-ish theme and thinking of that Stephen King story about the city with all the dead rock stars.

Everything I want to write feels so damn cliche, which is why words aren't always my favorite mode of expression.

I'm having thoughts about 20 years flying by and looking back at this moment, or this time period.

These past 2 months will be something I remember forever.

I am in intense resistance to all of this ending.

I can feel it in my upper back and my neck, it's where all my suppressed tension and anxiety and resistance goes. What is the alternative to this involuntary clenching of my muscles? Maybe just feeling the anxiety instead of ignoring it, maybe taking deep breaths, exploring it thoroughly. It's starting to really hurt and bother me. I've always held tension there but this is a whole new dimension.

So many intense events these past couple months, so much strangeness all the time, crazy characters, drama, pain, laughter, absurdities, the ever changing landscape of life. How it flows, how it overwhelms with sensory data and then bores nearly to tears, and oscillates between the two with ridiculous intensity and suddenness. Another one of those extreme cases of "one or the other" I seem to know so well and find so familiar. What seems to be a characteristic of something that has the quality of constant change. The habit of changing habits. The permanence of impermanence, if you will.

"The shoot-the-messenger mentality has doomed any number of

military leaders, business leaders, coaches, parents. It's been widely

reported that Saddam Hussein practices this, with much the same

result as Hitler's. Literally shooting bearers of bad news is horrific

enough, but the crime of shooting ourselves rather than rationally

dealing with accurate information is arguably worse!"
-The New Psycho-cybernetics

Why are we so hard on ourselves? Why are we so forgiving to friends who confide in us yet ruthless with our own issues? It is indeed a moral issue whether we apply the lessons we've learned. How disrespectful is it to ignore your own wisdom? We learn all these hard lessons, digest them, come to insightful conclusions and then just throw it out the window.

I am inspired to stop being so damn passive, and I mean this in a general, approach-to-life kind of way. I'm always thinking that I'd like to be happy, or successful, or creative, but I just wait around for these things to happen to me. It's like I subconsciously believe that they are a matter of luck. I never consider aggressively seeking them.

Well these are habits that are beginning to take shape. I like these lively ideas. The most inspiring people I've encountered and known have always been the fiery ones. They tend to be quick to anger, quick to ecstatic joy, and just excited in general.

Why are people so afraid of going after they want with everything they have? Is it possible, as the author states in The New Psycho-cybernetics, to approach the subject of acquiring happiness in a cold and systematic way? 

I am testing that out.

In Motion Again Soon

I am currently in Sweden, and have been here for the past two months.

Tomorrow, my travel partner and I are flying to Britain to stay for two months. We will be living in a hostel in London for the first week. Thankfully, we have ear plugs this time (the best thing you can get for hostel living, as learned through hard earned experience).

Big cities make me a bit nervous, but it will be a cool experience.

Since I started traveling in May of last year, I have visited six countries. They were France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Bulgaria, Greece, and Sweden. I have grown accustomed to hearing the people around me always speaking a different language. It will be surreal to be somewhere where I can hear conversations around me and understand them again. Oddly enough I miss eavesdropping, hearing the funny or interesting stuff people say to each other, and knowing that I can walk up to almost any random stranger and strike up a conversation. It was something I never appreciated until I visited non-English speaking countries.

Hearing different languages around me has been amazing too, and I will definitely miss hearing Swedish every day. I love this language... Still working on learning it but I understand a lot more than I did a couple months ago.

It's been really nice to be somewhere calm for a while, and to take a break from always going from place to place, big cities, and lots of people. I experienced that for a bit when we went to Stockholm (a great place by the way), but for the most part, we've been in a small and very quiet village.

London should be quite a shock, and I'm pretty excited to see it. After London we will be flying to Romania in April, to stay near Transylvania and visit the supposedly haunted forest, Hoia Baciu (which I plan to photograph extensively!) I have seen amazing pictures of the place on the internet here and there for some years now, and it's unbelievable to know that I will actually physically be there not too long from now.

Since I began my adventures last year, it has been a huge goal of mind to find a job I can perform while traveling. In fact it's been my only real concrete goal. I have finally found something! I am officially a freelance writer. This has always been a lofty dream of mine, one that I thought I might have a shot at accomplishing some distant day in the future.
Anxiety about money pushed me to pursue opportunities just for the hell of it, and I started seeking out craigslist writing gigs and sending out lots of applications each day. I honestly did not expect that anything would come from it given the fact that I have almost no experience writing officially.

I've been shocked, in the best way possible, by how well it has worked out. I feel an immense freedom as the result of this opportunity, to the degree of almost being frightened (in a good way) at the possibilities that lie ahead. I am definitely feeling the dizziness of freedom lately.

History

In my lifetime I have always heard people talk about their ancestry. The history of their own country, who their family lineage descended from, essentially identifying with things that I felt no connection to.

It seems almost blasphemous to admit now, but I never felt that any of that had anything to do with me, or now. I did not feel a connection to the factors that shaped humanity in terms of society or race or anything of that nature. I thought nationalist ideas were silly, and that people exclaiming that they are "Proud to be an American" sounded a bit foolish. They didn't choose to be born there, and being American had nothing to do with them, they had just happened to exist in this place as easily as they could have happened to come into existence somewhere else.

It seems so obvious now, but since traveling Europe I have realized that different places really are different. I always defaulted to the opinion that "we are all human, regardless of where we reside", which is of course true, but there are so many other factors that shape us, and that is nowhere near the whole picture.

Any time I tried to pick up a history book or was in the vicinity of someone talking about periods of the past, my eyes would glaze over. I am currently staying in Greece and there is a book at this house called "The Fingerprints of the Gods". I thought the title sounded interesting so I picked it up and flipped to the first page, which showed a letter from some past military figure discussing features of a map from 1513. I was instantly bored and put the book down.

A week or two later, for some (unremembered now) reason, I picked that book back up. I discovered that the letter on the first page was talking about a map that displayed knowledge of Antarctica, the way it was before the ice age, and that this knowledge was supposedly unknown until the 1900s. Once I deciphered the dry jargon of the letter and realized the implications of this mystery, I was hopelessly intrigued.

I did not put this 500+ book down for the following 3 days, and it shifted my entire perspective on the history of the human race.

For the first time I actually thought deeply into where we came from, what inspired the knowledge we currently take for granted of space, mathematics, agriculture, languages, what ancient mysteries and intelligence have been forever lost either by accident with time, or on purpose by being destroyed.
I finally understood the fascination so many people around me have for history, the things we "know" and the other, considerably more numerous unknowns about this period referred to as pre-history.

I thought scientists had a pretty good idea of how humanity has come to be. I am not so sure now.

The book presents convincing evidence that advanced humans (on par with, or possibly beyond our level of technology and intelligence now) have existed on earth way longer ago than is commonly proclaimed. For some reason this really struck me. It gave me a burning, and unique form of frustration, of wanting (and possibly needing) to know more about this.

Legends exist in seemingly completely separate, ancient cultures that have shared characteristics, leading one to wonder if there was not a common denominator that engendered their similar spontaneous advancements. There are stories of "gods" coming to undeveloped tribes, in some cases consisting of savages, and bringing them the gift of civilization, teaching them not to cannibalize one another, sharing knowledge of language, science, medicine, and more. It seems to me as though there was a civilization far more advanced than the rest of the world at that time (enough to make them seem immortal beings by comparison) that made it a point to share their knowledge for the advancement and prosperity of humanity.

I am unbelievably inspired and mystified by this stuff, and no longer feel disconnected from the history of humanity.

Goals, long and short term.

Become fluent in at least 2 foreign languages (or more).

Get a lot better at chess.

Go to Germany and the Czech Republic.

Long camp trip (a month or 2) where I live almost completely off the land.

Visit Transylvania and the "haunted" Hoia-Baciu forest, perhaps camp there.
















Take the Transyberian railway through Russia into SE Asia.

Buy and renovate a house (to sell or live in).

Get a lot better at hooping and possibly make it into a performance art.

Finish the book I already started or start a completely new one.

Find a reliable and location independent source of income.

Read a lot more, write a lot more.

Attempt to sell my art at a festival(s).

Have a really awesome pet companion.

It's  my favorite season. Apparently pumpkin pie is quite an American thing, so since I am currently living with 3 Europeans, I plan to introduce them to this wonder.

Life is very simple right now. Lately I've been spending my days learning Swedish, playing chess, and making electronic songs, all of which are very fun. I'm staying in a tiny village where people grow their own vegetables, eat their own animals, and often travel by horse or donkey drawn carriage.

Jag gillar att lära mig ett nu språk, och det är mycket mer lätt med någon svenska  här. Jag älskar svenska språket, men jag är inte talar bra.


I am still in Bulgaria, but we're heading down to Greece in a few weeks, then up to Sweden. The plan is to visit America after that, so I'm hoping it all comes together. Loving someone from another culture complicates but also makes more interesting a lot of things. I am exactly where I want to be.

8-29-15

I am currently staying in rural Bulgaria, doing a work exchange. The work consists of digging up soil for a stone path, sanding and oiling windows, and other various tasks like picking plums or trimming plants. I get free room and board in exchange for my work hours.

It's the first time in a while that I have gotten up early in the mornings and been around a lot of animals. The physical work makes my mind more quiet and helps me sleep better. I feel creative; I feel at peace.

I love this simple life, I love traveling, my passion has been ignited and my dreams have been set into motion. That constant yearning I always had to see foreign places, to not know where I will be next month, to learn as I go, to rely on my wits and spontaneity, has finally been fulfilled. I have always abhorred and revolted against routine and monotony, and this is the ultimate manifestation of that rejection, embracing adventure.

The more I see, the more I want to see.

On July 29th, I had a plane ticket back to Omaha Nebraska, but I decided not to take it. It was a spontaneous decision. I was planning to return because I thought I didn't have enough money to keep traveling, but I didn't want to separate from my travel partner/love, and there was so much more of Europe I wanted to see.

Going back to the states would have felt like giving up. Something I had to do; succumbing to defeat. I decided fuck that. I decided I will make this work however I have to, which included/includes being a lot more frugal, finding cheap or free accommodation, going somewhere very affordable (like Bulgaria), and having my friend sell my most prized possession back home, my acoustic Fender guitar.

I've learned that I feel certain pulls in certain directions. Urges calling me to do something, some type of intuitive desire. Fulfilling that desire is important, and once the commitment is made, things tend to fall into place. Once you make a specific thing your goal, or your way of life, it becomes the only option, and that is the way to make things happen. Your creative faculties then go into supporting this because you realize it's your only choice.

"Leap, and grow wings on the way down."

Support for a talented friend.

I am fascinated by my friend Chris. We have always related on a certain level because we both have a tendency to be introverted and I feel like we both notice a lot, especially when it comes to social situations. It makes a quiet person feel a little less awkward to have another quiet person around. 

He is one of the nicest people I've met, smiles a lot, and has a calm and quiet demeanor, so it makes some of this intriguingly dark art he comes up with all the more interesting. I never knew the ideas or stories behind these pieces of art until I just read the website he finished working on, and now I am even more impressed.

http://www.littlehornandthecultofdreams.com/little-horn.html

Thoughts

I feel kind of lifeless today. My mind wants to know why, but maybe there isn't a why. Maybe I need to just let emotions and mental states pass on by, instead of clinging and wanting to dissect and analyze them. Maybe I need to have more self compassion, that thing that a lot of us find so fucking difficult.

Switching up routines is important, health is important, creating is important, mental experiments are something I need.

Maybe getting in touch with dreams again?

Maybe doing that thing where I split up my sleeping hours?

Perhaps simply exploring my own mind could bring some clarity. I find myself seeking distraction all the time, and I think that's normal, but also sort of crazy. Constant stimulation is not an answer. Just allowing oneself to reside in whatever mental state is present without struggle or self judgment is an answer. That includes boredom and lifelessness. I already feel better delving more into this nagging background static of emotion. It works so much better than trying to ignore it or find reasons why I should not be feeling that way.

Acceptance transforms things, resistance deepens them. It doesn't have to be such a struggle.

Paris, the beginning.

I started my travels in Europe at the end of May. The 2 nights before my flight to Paris I barely slept at all. The first night it was because my friends had a party. I created some very purple art, had some good laughs, and even stared insanity in the face for a bit when a friend of mine had some sort of semi-verbally-violent and sexual-esque breakdown. The impact of this outburst was such that I and 2 of my friends all couldn't stop thinking about it the entire next day.

The last night before the flight I was just too excited and nervous to sleep at all, plus a couple friends of mine came bursting into the apartment at 2 or 3 am to "wake me up" and make me spend my last hours with them. I had a painting I wanted to finish for someone specific, and was going to miss these friends a lot, so I didn't argue.

On the flight I was actually able to sleep on the plane for a few hours, something I usually find impossible due to being in such close proximity to a bunch of strangers. I had Aphex in my headphones for a good chunk of that flight and now think of that day whenever I hear those tracks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JviBATrVrNs&list=FLPCW_il8eyX9xa-PoRxA8BQ&index=2

My travel partner and I were trying to keep things light, keep it friendly, stay off the awkward subject of the fact that we had both committed to traveling to a foreign country together on the pretense that we were to be a couple, and that I had called that off but we were both still locked into the non-refundable and quite expensive tickets.

In the plane, the largest and nicest one I had ever been on, I was exposed to my first experience of hearing french all around me. It was surreal at first, but this is something I would grow accustomed to surprisingly fast.

We got to the huge Paris airport, exchanged money for some euros, bought some wine at the airport, marveling at how cheap it was (3-4 euro for a bottle of nice looking red!) and got a cab to the hotel, still quite early in the morning. They didn't have a room ready for us when we got there so we sat in the lobby with plastic cups and drank the wine, unsure of whether it was allowed or not and therefore being pretty discreet about it. We didn't have a corkscrew so I did the old trick of pushing the cork down into the bottle, splashing some of the wine up my sleeve in the process.

We got to the room and noticed that it was one bed, contrary to what I had reserved. This added to that unspoken awkward chasm that we were both attempting to ignore.

I wanted to sleep but I was too hyped up from all of the various stimuli, the excitement of finally being in France. So we went out to find some food. We sat down at a restaurant and the waiter came up to me and spoke in french to me. I was way too tired to say anything, let alone attempt to say something in french, so I stared blankly for an awkward moment until he realized and spoke in English to us.
I finally knew what it was like to be the foreigner.

After eating I was actually able to sleep. I passed out for 11 much needed hours, during which I had a dream that I had been on my way to the airport to fly to Paris and had missed my flight.
The crushing disappointment I felt in that dream was so real that when I woke up to find myself really in Paris, I was ecstatic, and all of the other stressful details seemed insignificant in comparison.
I excitedly told my travel partner about this dream, then we went out to wander the cobblestone streets of Montmartre, got hassled by a very persistent man trying to sell us roses, and found a very stereotypical looking french restaurant. I got some mussels that were actually pretty terrible, way too fishy for my taste.

The next day we explored the area a bit, went to another restaurant, and ended up getting a bunch of wine and beer and drinking in the hotel room.

Somewhere in the midst of our drunkenness we came to an epiphany. I had always wanted to travel to another country. He had also always wanted this. We both wanted travel partners for this. The pretense of romance with each other was what made us actually commit to these plans, and even though things played out quite differently than expected, it got us both there.
It all seemed to have a purpose, an order within the painful chaos, and we wrote it down in my notebook so we could discern the next day whether this was a valid epiphany or just drunken silliness. The next day it still made sense.

Blogging from a hostel in Bulgaria at 3:30am

I have many stories to tell.

today at work.

The slow season is back at my work. I was sitting here up behind the front desk when a very skinny young woman walked up to the desk, with bright red marks all over her face. I recognized the marks, people who have been up on meth for a long time have them from picking at their face. She was really pretty aside from these self induced blemishes. Her hair was wet and she looked positively freaked the fuck out. She said there were bugs in her room, all over the place, and that they were crawling on her. She was pacing relentlessly, and said she didn't want to stay in that room anymore and asked us if we could send someone to get her stuff out of the room so she could leave, then she walked off down the hall. I was 98% sure there were no bugs, and that they existed solely in her under-rested and over-drugged mind.

We tried paging the maintenance guy, he had already left, so we put the "be back in 5 minutes" sign on the desk and went to help her get her stuff out of the room, accompanied by the head housekeeper.

 When we knocked on the door no one answered so we used the master key to get in, and heard the shower running. We opened the door and saw the entire room was full of steam from the hot shower, and water was covering the bathroom tiles and seeping out onto the carpet. She walked up behind us at that moment and we were completely stunned. The housekeeper said, "charge her card for this damage! She's crazy!" and the girl kept saying "I need to get out of here, do you see all these bugs?!" and started grabbing her few belongings. "I need to get out of here, and get rid of these bugs, the bugs in my mind", and laughed crazily.

I walked into the room to try to help her get the rest of her things, handing her an inside-out black T-shirt on the ground. I saw a pretty nice looking smart phone sitting on the bedside table, that was completely taken apart.

She grabbed everything and we exited the room. The other desk girl and house keeper walked off down the hall and she went the opposite direction, so I walked alongside her, wanting to help her in some way. I asked her if she had anyone she could call. She said she could call her boyfriend, as soon as she put her phone back together, she had taken it apart to try to get the bugs out you see. I offered to call her boyfriend for her on my phone, but she said she'd figure it out and left the building to go sit next to a guy at the bus stop across the way. A few minutes later I looked outside and she was gone.

Recemment je fumer trop.
Mon energie est fous
Je pensez, et pensez, et pensez

Que-est que ce?!!!!!!!!!!!
Quel sera se produire?
Seulement temps sera montrer.
Pour maintenant, je sera prendre plaisir.

Ahhhhhh vie.

Je suis moi, je ne peux pas etre quelque chose autre de cette.

The other week at work I was confronted with my own mortality quite unexpectedly. There was this older couple staying at my work, well into their 90s, and the husband had taken a fall down the steps out back of the hotel. I heard the story recounted through other guests, who said his wife thought they were in 1946.

 He was in the hospital when I got to work that day, but they came back that evening while I was working the desk. He had a bandage on his head and was still wearing his hospital robe over a pair of khaki pants. He asked me if it was possible to get some help in with their luggage. I don't like to admit this but I didn't feel like doing it at that moment. I was extremely busy up there answering the phone and checking people in, but I told them I'd come to help them when I got a free moment.

So I went back to their room in the back corner of the hotel and knocked on the door. It took them a while to answer and the first thing I noticed was the stench of their room, it smelled like straight up piss. He told me he was having trouble finding his keys, and his wife stood there looking very confused. Immediately I felt guilty for not wanting to leave the desk to help them.
I entered the room to start to help them find their keys and he looked in his pocket and found them, and then said let's go. He moved extremely slowly out of the room and then out of the door to the parking lot. When we got outside I asked him where he was parked. He wasn't sure, so I asked what type of car he had, and he said, "well, I don't know, you have so many over the years you know..." and kinda chuckled in an embarrassed way. So I asked him to hand me his keys so I could set off the alarm to find the car.

We found it and inched our way over to it. He was pretty fussy with me being careful with his bags, asking me not to tilt them and what not. I helped him carry his bags in, hyper-aware of my youth and agility, something I take for granted each day.  They seemed so confused and so slow that I wondered how they even did anything or were able to drive themselves around. I realized while putting the luggage in the room that these people were at the end of their lives.
I realized that youth was fleeting. This realization hit me like a ton of bricks. Somehow I go about each day mostly blissfully unaware of this. I thought that I had started to accept my own death, and it's easy to think of it nonchalantly when you just imagine winking out like a light or crossing over into a different dimension, but old age, foggy brain, failing body? That isn't pretty to think about at all. This was a humbling reminder that those things will likely visit me, and I spent the rest of the night trying to come to terms with my own aversion to thinking about them.

Aujourd'hui et hier mon temperament est bon, et tres heureux.
Je suis tres content, j'ai beaucoup sante mentalement et physique.
Je ai ete concentrer sur mon sante recemment, et cette toujours fait choses bon survenir,
par exemple, beaucoup sychronicite! cette me fait tres heureux.

Je suis chaud et frustre, je pense c'est purement hormonal.

Je sens tres en colere, et je jamais sens cette mais un fois chaque mois. Je ne suis pas familiar avec cette colere, il sembles etranger en mon corps et mon esprit, comme un poison.

Ce n'est pas un disposition ideale pour etre a travail, mais, je dois etre ici pour tout mentalites, j'ai ne pas un choix. Je dois etre ici.

Je devenir plus et plus fatigue, pas physiquement, mais en mon ame, et mon esprit, sont devenir fatigue.

Je ne aimes pas etre negatif, mais, je sera dit quel je veux ici.

Si pas ici, ou?

I was sitting in my living room in Iowa having a huge internal conflict, emotionally torn up. I had been with the same guy for the last 2 years and we rented that place together. It was my 25th birthday, we had been talking all day about splitting up but were having a hard time accepting that it was for the best. We had had many good times and experiences together, and made amazing music together. We had tried to have this conversation many times before and always ended up saying fuck it, let's make up and get along, and I think we both knew we were just putting off the inevitable.

He was sitting out on the porch with the dog when one of my female friends walked in the door and sat next to me and asked me what was going on. I told her the entire situation, and that I was feeling conflicted about leaving but knew I needed to go somewhere and start over. She told me I need to fucking get out of there right now and go experience life! She said that she wished she could do the same, and would do it in a heart beat if it were possible. Her words gave me the courage to know that I needed to take the leap. It was a piece of outside advice contrasting the bubble of doubt I was currently enclosed in.

I had $0 to my name, but my best friend had offered to buy me a bus ticket to get to his town 5 hours West, so I decided to go for it and get out of there. We both cried when we said goodbye but even though I was sad on the ride to the bus station, I could sense big things coming, like I had just knocked over the first domino.

Since then, things have been unfolding miraculously and I'll never forget that conversation with that beautiful lady that was the final push I needed. If she wouldn't have come over I probably would have stayed yet again, out of fear of the unknown.