You’re Living a Dream, Don’t You Be a Slob
I’ll say this: I vividly remember my first crisis of profession. I was in the passenger seat of my dad’s car. He was driving me back home from school in Boston. It was right about the magic hour – night was just about to fall on us. It was very cloudy but not overcast. The brake lights of the cars ahead didn’t blind so much.
I might have been too young to be worried about What Kind of Real Job I’d Get, too young to realize I was still full of so much of the potential it takes most people their entire 20s to fritter away. But I remember being fed up with my probable future and said flat out, “I just want to stand there on a street corner and tell people what I think.”
It didn’t make a whole lot of sense at the time: Me standing there, literally on a soapbox, or milk crate, spouting off about philosophy and all. Tony Shalhoub’s possible prophet character from Life or Something Like It became the closest visual analog when it came around.
As time mellowed me and my brain reconfigured my past, as it continually does, that moment of panic became an instance of clarity, one of those rare times when all this fiddle becomes the vapor that it’s always been. The crisis was in the beginning and the end the opportunity to be aware of me being self-aware enough that I more or less do know what I want and have to do with my life and that what my ego has chalked up to be the indecision of a brilliant mind is really the fear and laziness of a man-child who must keep going even if he does not know the way.
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