What Colors the Steel Sky Blue

Since the day I went to school for the first time, the first light of day has lost that welcoming gleam it used to have for me. As I slowly woke up in my bed, I would stretch, turn and let the bands of sun hit my thin legs sticking out from underneath the covers.

With the beginning of school days, I lost my right to those long morning naps, that special right to going back to sleep because the credits of my dream did not roll yet. Since primary school I have been rushing from one thing to another, meeting one deadline after ten others and still not seeing the end of these endless list of accomplishments to be had. In this sense the life as we have structured it in the 21st century feels more like a computer game with endless levels to master and with perhaps no tangible reward other than seeing our name in a list of top players after we have spent the last of our nine lives.

All of this kind of thinking above naturally constitutes, and distills drop by drop from my decades old negative thinking. Like smoking, a habit one can not kick, mostly because every cell of my body is addicted to this bitter poison that seems to poison everything I throw myself into. In this sense, I sabotage most of the things I start, and the opportunities that come my way by blind luck. There comes a time in your life, whether it be your thirties, your teens, or perhaps after you're over the hill, you realize, you just can not continue living like this. Not only is it hard to wake up in the morning, it is even harder to go to bed knowing tomorrow will be yet another day of defeat.

So why do you ask, why is defeat so certain, so imminent, so here, but so intangible. It is because I give life to it. It is hard to look at anything you create objectively, whether it be a child, a painting, or an argument at the supermarket. My failure is kind of the same. I know I create it, I know it is bad for me, yet I feel attached to it with a mother's love for her first born ugly retarded child.

I wish they made a patch, a piece of gum, or perhaps a set of pills I take every day except for the last week of the month for this addiction. But there is no such quick fix.

I have always said that the degradation of one's mind is like falling off of a cliff. Although the event happens pretty fast, much distance is traveled vertically. If one happens to survive the fall, he has to get up, dust off, and somehow find his long way back up. Many people choose to remain at the bottom of the cliff; this is not a poor choice by any means. Who could argue that the top of the cliff was a good place to be in the first place? It was windy, perhaps exposed to too much sun, there was no water and plus it was lonely. There are lots of people at the bottom of the cliff and misery seems to always create company.

On the brink of my thirties, I have just been able to get a to a point where I can catch myself right before I hit my ego with a bomb, just before I step into the interview room and pull the trigger to turn myself into a human bomb, exploding on the interviewer's face with bits of my selfless effacing clouding up the room.

The great thing about our busy, crazy, hectic daily lives is the fact that they provide enough distraction for us all to ignore these core issues. Instead, we keep icing the cake, adding more elaborate patterns. As we add the layers, the structure underneath first weighs down then starts to sag and perhaps for some of us, eventually, it gives way completely.

They say that when a big cookie crumbles things get awfully sweet and messy. I wonder what happens when a small cookie crumbles? Does anyone ever know?