Ben Bonkoske

I’ve been getting up rather early for as much as I’ve been sleeping in. Some days this week were wasted in bed, but today was a comforting reminder of how little work needs to be done when you actually do it. I think we as humans are plagued by the way we think. It is not so much what we need to do, but thinking about what needs to be done that is our Achilles heel. I spent probably an eighth of the time I spent worrying about my elusive workload doing what needed to be done and I’ve gone from irredeemably behind schedule to probably on time. It is other people that are making my skin crawl by how slowly they attribute to my expectations. It feels like bugs dancing on my flesh with pitchforks. I think very highly of people when, if I looked no further than my speckled bathroom mirror, I would be much less disappointed. I’m at least not mad, or overstimulated, barbaric like I have been the past few nights from a concealed testosterone I refuse to let flow out of me. It has resulted in an unproductive temper. I can see the moon from here; this angled makeshift desk that I write from as I slowly swim across all the properties until I make it back home. I worry I’ll have nothing to come back to its been so long since I visited. I don’t always know what I want to be. I think I just tell myself enough persuasive lies that I think I’ll be all right in the end. I’m just not sure what I’m going for besides reject townie teacher. I’ll spend my whole damn life in one place, slowly decaying from the belief that I never reached my potential and spilled all my dreams and freedoms into what others expected of me, or unreachable goals that nobody could expect to materialize. I’m not hard on myself. I’m hardened like a callous from running thousands of miles in my lifetime through a dark forest only lit by the cigarette dangling from my lips. I can make it home. If only I knew how close to it I was, I wouldn’t always be trying to recapture an old football game. I can’t tell if I’m sick of everyone or just myself. It gets hard to be likable after you’ve known someone for more than 10 years. Try 20. I think I still know one person from that long ago that I still have a warm affection for. And from her, I get a call maybe once every five years. I’d bet there is somebody I’d still enjoy for the rest of my life. Doubtfully ever meet them. It is nearly impossible to break through into a casual relationship if you are outlandish as me. I’m not crazy anymore, luckily, or soon to be fatally. Bored to death. Here I am, thinking I’ve obtained sanity when I’m rambling like a madman on a trampoline. Over the woods, we go. Until tomorrow, another expected assumption I’ll forgo.