By Doug Stuber
What counts as a life fulfilled?
When it takes four hours to pull your
head off the pillow, living up to ancestral
expectations is a wild dream that ends in
misery when your vision soars way beyond minor
accomplishments. Like Donald Duck, your thrusts
can be thwarted by a monk with a stick, your desire
vanquished by shutting down your entire life off
a chance meeting at a sandwich shop.
So you pull a self-proclaimed rebirth to start
the process again in an attempt to have a
career that the home-folks can cheer about.
It's a war. Normalcy versus creativity, manic
against depressed, one woman pitted against
another, and there you stand, crying, as the
police ask with whom you intend to go. You
know your insanity led to all this, so you have
to trust others to know you are on the right path.
"I accuse you of a wasted life," the judge
proclaims, and all you can do is cower and shrug
while humming Smokey's "everybody plays the fool."
It's a greedy, needy life. The path to freedom must
be in helping others. There has to be a way, no
matter how hard, to function beyond the boundaries
imposed in a bipolar way. Get out and beat back the
temptation to quit, grab the best possible offering,
count your blessings, discard the past, and proceed.