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"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
-Hebrews 11:1





allo, guvnah!


today i want to talk about dreams, or more how working in retail has made those dreams seem so far away. for those of you who don't already know, i work as a cart attendant at target. i spent another long day today doing a seemingly endless job. the life of a cart attendant is sort of like spending eight hours in a gym playing a 1 on 30 pickup game of basketball and the end of which no one shakes hands or says "good game" but instead they endlessly criticize your jump shot and lack of zone defense.

this is not to say i don't like my job. i mean, i don't, but i think my dislike for it is kind of like how a group of girls view the really pretty new girl in school who gets all the male attention. they have no real reason to hate her other than to attain some sick twisted sense of feminine legitimacy. the fact is i cant hate my job because i love the people there and that's the only reason it's even remotely tolerable and i thank them for that. but the heart wants what the heart wants. and this brings me the point i've wasted a paragraph trying to make.

recently i got to thinking about what i was doing in my life, and i realized it wasn't very much of anything. my whole existence has been in what is essentially a couple of square miles. but my dreams were very different. they never knew nor do they now know of man-made restrictions or state lines. whether feasable or not my dreams have always been so much bigger than voorhees. bigger than jersey. bigger than wawas, or irratic weather patterns or people who pronounce "water" as if an "a" never occurred. and for a moment it seemed clear. but that's when it all went wrong.
first of all, i've had many dreams in my day. when i was 6 i wanted to be a car salesman. by 9 i wanted to be jack hanna's black counterpart. by 15 it was forensic scientist. by 19 i was so sure i wanted to be an audio engineer and i am glad to say i got to see that dream to reality. however in the last year financial problems have led me to the very debate i wished i'd never have to have.

do i do what i love, or do i do what will probably lead me to be that homeless dude whose very existence is solely contingent on the success of a message on cardboard for the drivers near the onramp of I-295?

but it gets worse. i also needed to figure out what i loved, because i realized there was very little life in music anymore, at least not an honest one. these days everything has been so polished that i didn't want to be involved in a heartless music scene. so i needed a new strategy, but the fear of my future made finding a new dream harder than finding a needle in a barn full of haystacks. so i thought then that maybe i should step away from the whole thing in hopes of making things more clear cut and organized only to find that things only ended up worse after i bailed(baled)....sorry guys......i had to do it.

i wanted something more. i new way of being, of thinking. i wanted a new life.

i knew if i wanted to change my life, i had to fix some stuff. i've always been the kinda guy who stats more things than he finishes. i've never been a good sightreader, but i know enough to know that its a bad thing to play staccato when the would is playing legato. i had to start with the little things. like for instance, i had be better in classes. i had to be a better person. i had to expose my palette to a world other than ramen.

hold on, lemme explain.........hell hasn't frozen over.

this doesn't mean i'd quit the stuff. i never will, especially not when i currently eat it all the while imagining that in some alternate Camelot-esque universe there is a Nissin factory that gets its tasty noodles from grinding the bones of this year's incoming freshman class...try it, upperclassmen, i swear it makes it taste better.

while all of this was happening i was taking to this very blog and writing about all that was wrong in my world and all that could be done to make it right.

and that's when things got better.


you see, i was so wrapped up in my fear that i forgot to have faith that everything would work out. everything around suggested the contrary, but to believe anyway is the textbook definition of faith. when i wrote these blogs, it wasn't because i was trying to make you laugh, even though i do take great joy in making others smile. i did it because it made me come alive. writing made me believe that a life beyond this garden state was actually possible. i believed that i could achieve anything as long as i had faith, a pen, a pad and an open mind. i believed that things were nowhere as bad as i had made them out to be in my head and that i still have time to see my latest dream to fruition.



so i urge all of you, no matter young or old, chase your dreams, no matter how ridiculous everyone else around you might find it. and don't worry about it not working out. just keep pushing. keep practicing that jump shot and guard your man. if you have faith, everything has a funny way of falling into place. then, you won't have to worry that 1 on 30 pickup game because by the time you finally realize your dreams, the playing field will have already leveled itself.