The Consumption

I was doing some packing today and came across a letter from Dannimal from when he was fresh in Guatemala. He talked of time and it's allocation and how even on a basic level, something you love, (in his example writing and then furthered with guitar and song writing) ends up taking up your time and it can easily turn into "work." He used the "day off" metaphor of having nothing to do but spending six hours with pen or guitar in hand and then be left with limited time to accomplish everything else you wanted to do that day. I found this ironic for right as I got sick, my last day in the water, I thought on this subject and upon returning to the truck jotted down the shards of a conversation Taylor and I had some weeks earlier on surfing and work.

I think on Taylor and I's conversation of late, the one of delegating time and the different avenues of pleasure. How if you take out all the other pleasures in your life and focus all your positive feelings and energy (i know i sound like a hippie) into one specific aspect of your life then that aspect which was once so pleasurable becomes tiresome and ceases to bring pleasure but takes on the roll of being a chore of pleasure. The pleasure flees from the activity and it becomes a responsibility.

I never did ask Taylor what his exact thoughts were on the subject but it's something to that extent. When I wrote that excerpt I was still in the throws of Lent and I was still sober. Now that Lent is over and I can drink again I have started to see where I took more out of my life than just booze. I was taking everything pleasurable out of my life. Even though I still saw friends I would remove some aspect of the encounter because I was without a beer in sight. I made surfing the only true aspect of my pleasure because it was something that I had never done drunk and, at the time, I was learning how to do just about everything again while sober. And I can say that being sober didn't make sense at every point. I'm not saying that either extreme is the answer but rather that either extreme is never the answer. Maybe that's what I had to get out of all of this, maybe realizing that I can't annex myself and think that I can fit into the same society I live in is an option. Maybe that I need to retool my thinking and my environment. Cole, at one point during lent, questioned my sobriety in the way that if I was to just go back to being either the party animal or the wall flower, then what would be the point of doing it at all. She brought this up at an early stage which made me question my fasting, and I can not thank her enough for she gave me an answer to a blind question I was existing in. For I'm finding now that it's not one or the other but the degree of consuming one or consuming the other.


(On a side note, I did not head south today but will do tomorrow)