feckless

With the recent spike in gas prices, I have noticed that the "see I told you so" crowd of Honda Hybrid drivers are really looking like they were right. Of course, there is nothing we like to do more than to talk about saving our planet and our future by discovering new forms of fuel. But that is all we are, talk. It's easy to have a fair or a PBS special on solar energy and talk about how useful it is, but at the end of the day, we are still using coal, oil and radiation. I don't think we will ever see alternate fuels make their mark, it's just not American to do it the right way.

Thinking of different ways to fuel the world got me to thinking about different ways we fuel our own bodies and I don't mean with food. It has come to my attention in the past few weeks that I might have been going about my life all wrong and that kind of stressed me out a bit. (if you follow this blog with any regularity you might have noticed a dip in the number of posts and now you know why) I thought that my presence in the forgottens had some merit and that I was actually serving a greater good by staying. Sure, I have taken the occasional criticism for my efforts and many of my close friends question why I am still here, but it wasn't until this past week that my straw was located and then thrown upon the proverbial camel's back.

Being useful is just another way of saying necessary. Not feeling so, will cause a lot of undue stress which is detrimental to our overall health... Or so I thought. I think that stress might be a good source of alternate fuel. When I really think about it, stress is one of the main cornerstones of our lives. We create it everyday or we work to avoid it. We exercise to relieve it and we sleep to recover from it. Stress is a major workhorse for us and I have completely overlooked it. I feel ashamed.

When I think of all that I do in a day, I realize that stress can be found or formed in every turn or every moment. If I work out, I feel better. If I don't work out, I can stress out. If major plans work need to work out just right, I stress out about it, if they don't work out or if they are coming up, I stress out. And when I say I stress out, I don't mean lose-control-need-medication-hit-someone-in-the-throat-and-then-get-drunk kind of stressed out. My life has stress, but my life has also taught me how to cope with it in a functional way. Certainly in a family that doesn't know how to handle stress at all, this is saying a lot. The tumor in my adrenal gland which caused all of my medical problems when I was a teenager was the same type of tumor that was only last seen in American GI's during Vietnam. Stress, it would seem, tried to take me out. Having survived, I have learned that everything before that tumor was much more stressful than everything after. I have learned... oooommmmmmm. ooommmmm...

I think we like stress. There isn't one person on the planet that doesn't have it. The rich and famous, whom you would think would be pretty stress free, lives in a world of stress that we, the lowly and poor, will never know. I can't imagine what it must feel like for people to go through my trash and have other people follow me around with a camera taking pictures of everything I do. I don't even want that kind of stress. Of course, the groups that see the most stress will never be known. I'm sure that the luxury animal owners will say that the luxury boat owners don't know anything, and I am sure that the small cover band member will say that the community theater director doesn't know anything. Small business owners laugh at elementary school teachers much the same way front line soldiers laugh at a mother of nine. Who has the most stress.... Samoan Kings.

Samoa is a small corner of the world and Samoans are huge people. They take up a lot of space. It doesn't help their cause that they run around in arousing grass bras and skirts all day, I'm sure it's a miracle that there are not sixty million Samoans running around. How do you feed all of these people on such a small island? That is stress.

Even the peace loving leaders of the world have known stress. Ghandi had to convince two rival religions to get along and that he had the plan to make it all work out, and he had to do this while drinking his own pee. It's hard to convince people that you have a great plan when you are sipping urine on the rocks during your sermon. Jesus, as we all know, had to save billions of people, most of whom had never been born yet, and he only had twelve people working for him then, some of whom would turn against him which would ultimately lead to his death. That kind of slight today would get you capped.

Stress is all around us and I think it's the greatest source of alternate energy. For me, I think it's time to discover a new form of stress and let this portion of my life story go. It's one thing to stress about your own world, but to allow stress to grow inside you for a world that you are not needed in, well... That's just too much stress and that can lead to a stress OD. You have to manage your stress levels just right. Not so much that you are stress free, that would be a dull life and a life where you would not appreciate anything, and not too much stress that they have to medicate you or institutionalize you, no, you need a Goldilocks dose of stress. Just enough to keep life entertaining and remind you to wake up and get shit done. Just enough to lift your legs and keep your heart beating.