Journal Entry Type #45: I Have a Few Bones to Pick and Then Let Go

It looks like WP realized typing in gray wasn’t really the way to go in terms of color. I went back to the old way of WP instead their new format of blocks because I couldn’t get the words I typed to be black. It’s the little things that bother me. Needless to say, I’m finding some things are missing here and there when I originally switched over the to the new blog platform. Some of the dates were missing and my entries were just floating around in time and space. Why is it so damn important for me to know what date and time I wrote a particular blog entry? I don’t know but I can lose sleep over it. I will have to do the same thing and organize some of my formatting on my pages and past blogs. I prefer things to be uniform, but I can spend hours if not days on this, but today is not the day. I have other things to do instead of spinning my mental wheels on this.

I had plans to write more blog entries the last remaining five days of May. I was pleased I had posted more than 30 entries and was hoping to get to 40, which I will do before the last of this month (basically today). I was thinking well, maybe I will get to 50 if I’m lucky. It’s the competition I have with myself but then if I do too much blogging, I don’t get any fucking writing done. Yeah, I know put the money where my mouth is but for all the bullshit going on in the U.S. (the Coronavirus, protests turning into mini riots, and my incredible eye pain), I’m giving myself even more of a break. I wrote down for myself my new plan for the rest of 2020 and while it is much the same thing, it’s my mind and mental outlook I need to focus on as well.

I thought about another black man in the U.S., this time in one of the states I grew up in, Minnesota, and while I could have said so much more about it on my personal FB page, I did not. The only thing I said was this, “The tragic thing about what’s happening in Minnesota is everything!” It doesn’t mention the death/murder of George Floyd and the eventual arrest of Derek Chauvin. It doesn’t mention the inability of police departments to get their shit together and hire and train their officers correctly. It doesn’t mention the peaceful and not so peaceful protests. It doesn’t mention the two sides that people always go to when things like this happen (left and right, Democrat and Republican, black and white, urban and surburban, cop and civilian). The list goes on and on. My lack of commenting on this until now doesn’t mean I don’t give a crap about it, but I saw some things on my personal FB page that serves as a reason for my staying mum.

Let me say no matter what angle you’re standing on, it does no good to call people out for not being as “woke” as you think people should be just because you aren’t posting something as “radical” as they did. My crusty response is: “give me a fucking break.” My compassionate response is: “okay, I hear you, but people are not built to think the same way among any major or minor group.” My academic response is: “we need to start looking at the foundations and restructuring of police institutions because those built with profit not public service as the core element will always have corruption.” The war on crime is about as old as the war on drugs. It’s used a governmental propaganda tool and comes in very handy in political debates and elections. I see postings about how the Boston Tea Party protest in 1773 and while to me it seems sacrilegious to waste tea, I understand the change it would later bring. I’m hoping what is going on brings positive change, but the means some are trying to get there is counterproductive to me. Then again, I haven’t had a target on my back ever for looking like George Floyd.

In addition to my personal situations and feelings/thoughts I need to work out within myself, I find myself diving headfirst in maybe procrastination of my rewrite. I spent much of the weekend coloring, organizing, sizing, and researching about bookmarks. Where to print them? Hole or no holes? Tassels or no tassels? Which ones are the best ones out my designs? How much will it cost? Where to sell them? How to sell them? It doesn’t make much sense to me to pay a large amount of money each year to only sell a small amount of bookmarks outside the U.S., but I also don’t want to exclude people who live outside the U.S. from buying them. These are the things I wrestled with inside my brain. We all know the hardships and difficulties of owning a personal business. You need to drum up clientele. You need to come up with new products to keep them interested. You need to do this. You need to do that. It’s really ridiculous the scenarios people can have inside their own heads. Chances are people aren’t going to be lining up to buy my bookmarks.

I start to go to the negative where what’s the point if China gets a hold of my designs, prints them because they have so much more capability to create bulk items, and then sell them for cheaper around the world. The logic is people will buy modified designs versus mine. Maybe, the good thing I have going for me is China will probably not find bookmark selling very lucrative compared to movies, handbags, and cigarettes. Although I’ve heard they sure like to inappropriately use other people’s T shirt designs and have no issue the repercussions to the original seller. But in the long run, it shouldn’t scare me into not following my dreams or more doing something that I want to do. It comes to this: taking the leap, doing it, and letting go of all the what ifs, negative and positive.

There’s a lot of personal, public, and private anguish, anger, frustration, and hurt going on right now. I’m not one to ever say I know how someone else feels because I don’t. I might have an idea but that’s all it is. So, on that note, I close this with the following quote, knowing it is only that and nothing more.

“Either you run the day, or the day runs you.”

–Jim Rohn