Tag Archives: it’s not easy being green

This is my message to you …


Constantly evolving encompassing change and growth.

I’m no spring chicken so one thing you start to learn if you are even remotely worth your salt

(Just in case you don’t know:

“Meaning

To be effective and efficient; deserving of one’s pay.

Origin

Sodium chloride, a.k.a. salt, is essential for human life and, until the invention of canning and refrigeration, was the primary method of preservation of food. Not surprisingly, it has long been considered valuable.

To be ‘worth one’s salt’ is to be worth one’s pay. Our word salary derives from the Latin salarium, (sal is the Latin word for salt). There is some debate over the origin of the word salarium, but most scholars accept that it was the money allowed to Roman soldiers for the purchase of salt. Roman soldiers weren’t actually paid in salt, as some suggest. They were obliged to buy their own food, weapons etc. and had the cost of these deducted from their wages in advance.

Salt continues to be important enough to feature in the language for many centuries. Other phrases that would have been known to the mediaeval mind were take with a grain of salt, the salt of the earth and below the salt. The ancient roots of ‘worth one’s salt’, and its similarity to the 13th century ‘worth one’s weight in gold’ and the 14th century ‘worth one’s while’ (that is, worth one’s time), give the phrase a historical air. Nevertheless, ‘worth one’s salt’ didn’t exist in Roman Latin or even in mediaeval English and dates from as recently as the 19th century.

The earliest citation of the phrase that I have found in print is in The African Memoranda, a report of an expedition to Guinea Bissau, by Philip Beaver, 1805:
“Hayles has been my most useful man, but of late not worth his salt.”

It’s worth pointing out that, although English is replete with phrases of a nautical origin, none of the above salty phrases has anything to do with the sea.”)

Yeah, so if you’re even remotely informed once you reach a certain age, you come to realize that you know nothing, bupkes, diddly, squat, nada. Once you’ve made peace with this idea then you can set about transforming yourself into a (hopefully) somewhat acceptable human being. Hopefully loved by most and feared by none. The problem is humans are creatures of habit and those bad habits that you form in your early childhood or teenage years tend to solidify so a lot of times rather than fighting your demons as it were you’re fighting against your nature. And damn that feels so unnatural. That’s why most people don’t bother.

I do it every day, I usually fail every day too. It’s really humiliating and its hard to keep coming back to especially when you have a partner that is a constant reminder of your failure as the patterns within the relationship remain the same only serving to emphasize said repeated failure. It’s daunting really. But nevertheless, every day I get up and say ‘today is a new day and I have a chance to make my life better’ and proceed from there. And even if I fuck up before I’ve rolled out of bed, there’s always tomorrow.

I have become comfortably numb …


I got up this morning feeling like several kinds of crap and feeling guilty for feeling that way. I mean here I am in a warm house with food on the table running hot and cold water. Okay I’m not living in the Ritz Carlton and my main source of transportation is a bicycle and I can’t go out on the weekend if I buy a new household item but still … And I still feel like a steaming pile of dog turd. And now on top of that I feel guilty for feeling like crap.(That’s what happens when you watch the news in the morning. You feel guilty for having it better than countless other schmucks and then you feel like an insignificant speck in the universe compared to all these important things going on.)

This weekend my dog Spud bit me, not just nipped at me, full on bit my leg. I have the black and blue bruises and abrasion to prove it. So that was not so great. I sat around for a day crying and trying to come to terms with my having to have the dog put down but then my partner convinced me that we didn’t need to do it because of this one incident. I warned him he could be next, he said he was okay with that. Okay fine. I’m still reeling from that whole experience.

Speaking of my partner, all we did was fight and bicker all fucking weekend. I had four days off and it was so awful I was actually looking forward to coming back to work today. How sad is that? Which brings me to my complacency, my lack of motivation and therefore my virtually not writing anymore … again … I would really like to know what exactly is wrong with me here?

I’ve even joined a wonderful writing site scribophile.com filled with loads of insightful and friendly people willing to dole out advice in exchange for same and it’s a great place … if I would ever put any of my writing on there and keep up a routine. I don’t know why, but I can’t seem to maintain any kind of momentum. I go all guns ablazin’ and then it lags within a week or two.

I’m reading a book by Dennis Leary now and he said something towards the effect of he was too comfortable in his job and lifestyle so he had to give up his cushy job and nice apartment and go live in squalor and claw his way to the top. Yeah that’s great when you’re twenty or maybe even thirty years old but this old back is too old and settled to go back to milk crates and a futon. I just can’t believe that comfort is the thing that is sucking the life out of writing, how sad is that?

I get by-weekly and daily posts from people who aren’t necessarily earning an income from their posts and they seem to be able to do it and do it with enthusiasm even. I wonder what is wrong with me. Well I know a lot of things are wrong with me but in this particular instance, I wonder why I can’t seem to sustain any momentum … I’ve thought about going on anti-depressants but that will definitely not help the creative process … Man, it’s not easy being me, wanna trade?