The pastoral or countryside is reasoned to be thought as, attaining true ease; a place where disseminating the myriad trials of what many tout the career search, often asked in two questions: what is your passion and what is your purpose? When confronting these questions with answers they sound like nothing more than predeterminations, educated guesses for foots protruding doors at least midway before closing. And so, it is imperative to leave behind something, if it all grand. I imagined myself rushing toward my first step out of the shower to inscribe this. I wouldn’t want Mother harking at my indecency from leaving behind small hairs after washing and so again, I hear voices ringing through my ears a slight epiphany, that individuals are not at all fat, small, skinny, tall nor bad looking. They’re instantaneously unique and current age makes more sense of you being you. Regular folk want recognition until it physically pains them to be who they are. And as it goes, actors and stars ominously make a living off portraying regular folk. This TV is as much a crime as pulling off a trigger in the streets and some questions lie between what one watches for and where one strengthens their aim. The youth want social uplift toward a conscious marker and to write for tomorrow isn’t just a job for today. Rather, the mark is a responsibility beholden of the fruits they labor. Their labor is expected to essentially and indistinguishably, kill each rotten fruit before spoiling their time. I write because of a joyous pain never agreeing on the right path to self-express and then again something only American literature places its feet upon, is the righteous and true, because our lives are made from stories. My misgiving(s) as a writer, is my reaching a countryside and as it’s no longer a phrase or saying that needs a proper form of study – “to be a gentleman,” I am.

In character wise as a monk, loyal as a martyr and as uncertain and insightful as a philosopher; he humbles in grace as a butterfly and swifts through the night as a fox. To go on isn’t meaningless and what’s eternal in spirit is today’s facet of information at youth’s fountain. These attributes parade around the mind of young writers in America, like marching bands in competition. To never leave space blank is hard and at times addictive. How often though does the addiction really kill if swarms of information buzz and tick throughout a multitude of experience? How is a life successful in craft without ending pervasive distortions? Truth becomes a bit harder to find and that my friends, is my orange comb’s bristles being easily mistaken every time for teeth instead of pointed ends. As I near the last lines my day up until 3:10p has encompassed black coffee, a documentary, and small portions of writers’ thoughts hopefully telling a rich story of love and companionship. Also, of which I’ve shared with my brother through phone conversation, is that a man writes on as far as he can go. Sometimes he’s dependent upon how much his robe whispers, “coffee, book reading, and wine,” sometimes in that order or sometimes plain repetition.

I discovered the “Red Key Tavern” from reading Susan Neville’s essay “Light,” Issue 95 of the Image Journal. She speaks of Sunday nights and how enjoyable wine and conversation are with one of her close friends. I’m twenty-four and it’s twenty-eighteen. Do you know how often I hear cigarettes are bad for you? I’d like to think I’m doing something different by smoking American Spirits or Lucky Strikes. I only smoke on occasion, but it started as a consistent habit in college. A habit encompassing intellectual debates in fostering brotherhood. A whole year has gone by since the last I wrote in this booklet. It’s been an interesting few days after leaving my latest journal behind. Reading back on my past entries I wonder if I improved at all. In some cases, I can say I did and in others not so much. This is a lesson though on how quickly time passes without a notice. That’s how longing feels when I’m smoking a cigarette on the side deck. I wrote some notes this morning and added material to a few projects I’m working on, my brother arrived home a bit early while Mother left for church round 9a. It feels good to have these periods of silence to myself sometimes. Waking up without reaching for the TV remote, but instead my pen. I make coffee in the kitchen while a slow passing of the next contemplative hour resumes. Nonetheless these few days without my journal have been tantalizing and paramount. The next morning while walking to work, I noticed three bail bonds places directly across from the Marion County-City Building. “What a trap,” I say to myself. I wanted to write down my initial thought soon as I saw it, but I forced myself to open my eyes just a little more to the things around me.

As I’m sitting here, I need to change my shirt. Armpit sweat begins perspiring heavily underneath my arms and they feel cold against the blue cotton I’m wearing. I do think it’s the coffee. It drives me to the restroom sometimes at least twice between cups. I’ve only had one this morning and I haven’t cooked any breakfast at all to compliment. I plan on doing some writing hopefully, though I haven’t been outside all weekend. I need a haircut and some discourse with family. Not driving has played a role in that endeavor. Like old folks exclaim, “driving is a privilege and not a right.” I’ve been feeling the effects of that saying for the past six months already and I’m not sure if it’s helped me get better. I do look at things differently, like I always have, but it becomes indescribable too sometimes. Even though I can, it’s tough. It’s tough when a higher authority takes away your privileges by law. Yet, the one-word existent within our English vocabulary is adaptability, which is the development of innate human action, when required. It is more useful and highly considered in our time today. My coffee mug sits filled halfway right beside my empty cereal bowl and the musing continues. I’m a day closer to gaining back my freedom as pieces of my life were stripped away and I cherish all its moments free and bound, because things and instances lead to places and places are the receipts of memories fading overtime. Your creative girth is a beating heart that wanders at midnight under invisible cloaks of innocence. Who must you blame, yourself or the world?

In settlement you can perpetuate your own demise, vying for a message that doesn’t exist and for encampment, the outside messenger you follow is one you mustn’t concern with. My faith in God is unaverse. He’s created something in us all that we know is there, though don’t agree upon collectively. No matter my reading, my writing, or what I say, nothing trumps my foundation. Man has known war a long time and lesser-known place. He has known oppression and semblance and lesser of these things forming our human structure. To know complexity is knowing the creator’s wish, and for peace instilled within us all is one knowing only their true connection to another. I want to be free like everyone else around me and if I’m unable to make those personal choices as difficult as they are, then telling stories of how good life really is, can be what it may. We’ll all be judged for sure so I must live my freedom and be comfortable. For whom I am with, is also who I am.

The need to determine the rest of your life so quickly is what becomes even more difficult. From each interview being reduced to a question, and each question being reduced to an employer, and each employer to a specific field of work, I wonder what's next. Until finally, the door closes in, gliding across the surface like a hockey puck, to cap the wedge between what's considered welcoming and what's considered a need for privacy. It's like a grin that slowly dissipates from increased frustration. I'd still like to inch deeper. I envision a small cottage perched on a rocky hill. It overlooks a rickety boathouse just a few yards down. From the wooden backside of the boathouse, long tendrils overlay moss-covered steppingstones leading up to the cottage entrance. From the boathouse a pier extends out into the murky, evening waters of the lakefront. A paddleboat tied to the pillar, sways left and right atop the water's ripples and soon disappears into a thick fog nestling the trees 'til dawn. On a grassy plain void of crime, destitution, painful sobs, and grievances; I hear of God’s imagination being offered to humankind. A land quiet and somber. I see a fencepost standing firm at the bottom of a couple-mile road near the forest beneath smokey blue skies and a resident's chimney releasing smells of sweet cherry pie. From a white windowpane at high noon two acres of color front the forest floor lingering not too far behind. Inhabited are deer, foxes, brown bears, and woodpeckers, serving as alarming reminders we’re only passing through once. All of it from a back window fronting the edge of the forest as it opens halfway to springtime breezes bellowing sounds of a city wind with a similar view. Scathing heavily across never-ending skyscrapers, white- and blue-collar workers trod the streets like scattered ants in formation. Commuters we call them, natives that stay, and settlers who occupy the same space. These people dawdle from floor-to-floor echoing sentiments of temporary freedom among their search through a mirage. A mirage of money lasting only so long as one strains their eyes to see beyond the next floor. Their mood switches from angry to happy, furious to passionate and with each step and each floor, their shortsightedness never finds the solvent to its trick.

E.B. White once commented on a great city landscape; it is known as New York or in other words, The Big Apple. He says,

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Commuters give the city a restless tide during the day; natives provide solidarity and its continuity to move on; but the settlers give it passion and a reason why, for others.

I'm not saying the pursuit of one's own journey isn't a significant task, I think that almost every city resembles a type of New York, a type of landscape that caters to desire. These places are for me at best, a countryside and a home. My place of solace and where I reside in place to be free of obligation. To be free from someone else's projection of my ascent. This desire causes also a quarrel I most often have with myself, this idea of starting over. Each place is its own trail into the next and that trail at that time is always the one urging its humble traveler to seek jubilance. Blarney is the name of a town in Ireland and the commonality seeming to exist in each countryside, is the arrival to a new destination in life and the journey to get there. Grandmother told me “we’re out of time.” More and more, we these people who run, are out of time.

The reaching of my countryside spawns the reality of what internally exists along this road. The journey is more than just a couple miles of dirt foot tracks glued to the ground leading past a rancher's fencepost in an open plain. It is more than watching rain drops echo out to one another from the dry protection of a log cabin, overlooking a gloomy ravine. These human senses we all encompass, hear their voices call forth a beautiful mist we can only revere as a work of intelligent design. It is patience, patience is the internal key necessary to get comfortable with a new setting and environment. The time it takes for one to find the job that grows into a career, takes much more patience than one would expect. As my soul longs for those elements to align, the settler begins his journey, searching for a purpose and a direction to follow. The challenge resting at the core of its ineptitude, relies heavily on the settler's progress. Whatever it may be, patience is the sacrificial root to personal development, and it pays a deep homage to constant change until it starts reflecting the true value sought by those in pursuit. It is for the traveler to decide what he or she, considers virtue.

Like passengers, we commute back and forth, creating the impossible. We've created the smog itself above the City of Angels. In Lagos, Nigeria, some citizens work three to four jobs. To obtain our wants achieving a standard of living is necessary. A relentless city demonstrates the grit and mighty fortitude of its people, who are willing to make the working lifestyle their resolve. In process they become, and their dreams form a reality where their hard work builds foundational success. What commuters create during their travel, is the transformation of a setting, a place. Residents take hold of these changes and contemplate ways to move forward and build around the interests that gauge them. They stretch the commuters' ideals into possibilities. They discuss the benefits and drawbacks to their arrival, thus forming new life and causing this unseemly effect for the next batch of travelers. With an ostentatious vanity, they make their way through, knowing that this aspiration for something, for their becoming, certainly takes time to develop. I do think it is a discovery nonetheless, where each of us dig into ourselves like the traveler searching for fulfilment, to pull up a diamond we didn't know was primordially there. These diamonds reflect our hopes and dreams, as they shine brighter each day we become closer to ourselves, because we feel that urge to leave the places where we found nothing. The places where locating a diamond was over sieged by rubble, clods of thick soil, and small hills hiding the boroughs of where many people have dug before. And though the commuter must remain in quest of their countryside, at least they leave a tad-bit wiser than when they first got there. As my man Al covered my Chardonnay at the Severim this evening, his gesture puts me in a good mood. A mood of doom after two glasses and a great round of pool, Mr. Zeek a friend of mine said… “you gotta take some trips man. If I were you, I would.”

I’m getting older now and whether some believe the quarter-century crisis is a real thing or not I think the importance lies within reaching a milestone marker in life. As if another level of wisdom is attained in a new stage or era, the possibility one aims for is a thought of never truly knowing how big the world is. How big the world is through one satellite. By the time you zoom in to one person, one life is only experienced. And as it goes, that life becomes a parody of singular vision we indulge for ourselves. I’m condemned to write and once I’ve found my voice, then I’d have no choice but for going to war, listening to our social conscious as the source before me. Developing and acting off a global mindset without traveling is detrimental to opinions relieved of checks and balance, otherwise facts that were opinions before set-in-stone is the middle ground, somewhere between those I love being alive and the trembling fear of death forthcoming. So, my writing won’t stop, though my black book is behind me once again. I left it at Ike & Jonesy’s round later in the evening last night. This has been my second offense. It does a man/no good when his expression is suppressed, because a lack of resources negate his assertions at that period. To be on the losing end feels repugnant and unsavory. The lesson here, is to not bring your books or significant writing materials to the bar. There remains a story in that loss and I’m sure it’d happen no less different if I were away someplace else, exploring my environment.

This morning I forgot my wallet. I never grabbed it from the top drawer and as I’ve still been unsuccessful in obtaining my black journal in between the day calling Ike & Jonesy’s, I decide to walk over instead. After work I found their doors locked shut and their chairs atop tables where bar stools hid in darkness underneath. Nothing crossed my vision, nor uttered a sound. I also feel bad for not writing as much as I should have. Picking up a book to read while it’s gone, nor these lulls urging me to independence the same as a lighthouse looking out for a parting land across the blinding sea. In dark hours leading the ships in, every day is a search until dawn. It’d be nice to be known well enough to be handed my journal back. There then wouldn’t be any excitement in my writing as I’d feel bare because no journal, no wallet, no money and no context for why they’re lost at the same time is only me having enough quarters for a bus ride home. I have no charger and now you begin seeing how superficial our lives have become. It’s hard for me to not converge my interests together. In this world we live in today one must certainly think beyond that. Everything seems and is emerging together in all of time. Now it’s only the time one must be diligent with before it passes.

By this time, the individual has gathered equipment to survive along his journey. When it's all said and done, he’d have become a native, eyeing his trench coat worn over decades with glee. The native wears the trench coat of travails, the drudgery of openness, and the shield of permanence and solitude. The goal for a native I think, is to be an example for a new generation seeking the same opportunities that were previously unavailable before. This type of longevity is a double-edged sword. After a few concrete years at an establishment, more people seem content with moving on rather than staying loyal to the same relentless task that eventually grows into the next phase of their lives. It is difficult nonetheless and what I'm saying is that it is not the career, but the search regarding it becoming too much to handle for the one searching in the first place. The native provides much context for the young soul they’ve embraced so long. Their travel has led to the openness required to accept permanent change to a new place or environment that one hasn't grazed before; it provides that psalm for their life and for their travel. Their steady openness has also delineated overtime the anguish felt by the settler to rebel against a world of confirmation and subjective approval. It is the ability to sharing opinions without remorse or guilt that continues to help us grow and accept what we may not be able to change at different times. Conveying that type of honesty to ourselves and admitting that we feel stuck, puts one foot in front of the other towards something much greater than ourselves, a decision. The native rollicks in his countryside and commits daily to its landscape as a spiritual place of awakening. On occasion I am reminded that many others also claim their life’s greatest desire is to write. The same souls hankering for creativity will either grab ahold it or stay in their place hoping the rain dries. For those with faith in the rain to run amidst, beauty is held available to capture. I may not be called to be a lawyer and play it safe. I may have to lose more stories and miss out on insights that display a glimpse, the delight is continuance and continuance is travail.

The main point for me contributing this to the career search is because these three different types of ideologies I express are, what I feel to be, the personality types of growth among the workforces. I think they've always been present in the workplace and in life, but as a youth changing those basic forms of thought, adulthood is a forever growing process. It'd seem as if the older I get the more the “cliché" saying utters a constant truth in my head, that we're all just winging it. I believe that starting this journey and learning something from it, is patience being understood in a way where I am patient with myself first. To make the most effective decision at that time I think my will being pledged for waiting, is a structuring discipline needed to create the so-called freedom I seek. It's almost like the question of freedom is a contradiction because I assume that it is the best option for everyone else around me regardless of the times. My current occupation will remain the same, whether I'm there or not, because writing is boundless. But school and education opened my sense of clarity to envision a countryside. It has always been the discipline to forge ahead no matter what and the structure I've followed for myself to persist is in real world experience outside of academic affairs. My best stories for me are my real stories to tell and they become important as I am becoming. He or she then makes choices in terms of how they'd like to see the world around them. Their world magnifies an actual plan, and it details the reason I'm at this point. I take all I've learned and mold something out of it. Their world is finally the place where they are free and create freedom for others being mentors, teachers, coaches, and the likes thereof.

Within someone else's portrayal of a system, proper navigation is lost. The masthead is broken above the ship, and we're eaten away by the smog resting over our heads. The symptoms are subordination, condensed thoughts, purposeful ignorance, all of which convert to normality. This back and forth between indecisiveness because independent choice isn't granted when working under others. The goal to remember is to be the native remembering those who've helped you break the chain of fear. It is to create in you a positive continuity to move forth and not measuring up in part, for what others might see. It really is mastering time and money that fosters the hope necessary to rise. I think of Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac and how he displayed so much passion for the environment around him, sacrificing his lifetime to grow plants and feed the earth. I think of hope in the young eyes of Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist from Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When dealing with uncertainty, he used his intelligence to transform his conversation with other intellects and homed in on his reaching towards greater. James Baldwin comes to mind with his acclaimed novel Go Tell It On the Mountain, sharing the story of a boy contemplating religion, culture, and scorn. Many books encompass these lessons we look for daily and realizing where we are in life is a major tool to have.

Just as I'm confused over wanting to immerse myself into a countryside because I visualize escape (where and what does it mean?), is just as confusing as life choices themselves and how to shape my life out of a dream. Welcoming, means to keep my door open for any and everyone to share their truth whilst giving advice to me on how to excel. I welcome that advice as an acceptance of truth and through listening, a direction is revealed. Privacy is the work to which I must commit. Whether I approach the doors of my alma mater or seek the previous guidance. This is the work I'm doing when my door is closed. When no one else is speaking my freedom reigns. It is my study on how to commute from A most efficiently to B, putting my knowledge of the gentleman in place. In conclusion, the underlying questions of continuance remain. Is it possible landing a career that fully embraces my own interests? Is knowing myself most important before deciding? Is going through this process of learning worth it? What I say is that maybe in the end we all create our own countryside or destination of pursuit before even arriving. Maybe we're treading through it unknowingly. Maybe we're always at our countryside, looking from the outside in. I'm unsure of any of these ideas as I continue staring out my window and through the wooden frame of my log cabin. However, I’ll continue overlooking it, deep down inside where I know there’s always a little more. The gift of the native is that you've never met another as me, period.

One of three decisions remain true for an original storyteller: develop character, advance plot, or steer emotion and writers create all three instances at once, line by line. Write and rest. Write a sentence, write two, and I’d hope they’re my best. The character bemoans a push, and I can pull away from there. I ask questions as the character searches answers. Maybe a roadblock here and another stoppage there, and then resolve. Something’s happening. I keep these pillars in mind as our economy moves ahead. We’re under the captivation of war. Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine, declaring war amidst global society and we watch. We watch with intent, and I use we as a stretch because in my coming-of-age I find those individuals part of the generation that adds analysis to its foresight. “It” in our generation, takes the title of ownership when felt necessary to just the same as “we” is used for protest. We tailor a certain responsibility to the passing on of information, enduring the trial-and-error of what fact-checking means. We create pending timelines for the completion of projects and recruit specific talent for specific assignment. We are the middle managers in corporate that never age because our memories are so close to us. We keep them enshrined somewhere in the space of our pockets. We are in the auspice of war and comment in real-time, solutions before an official debrief of the situation stands. Because we add to it. I also understand the limits of our engagement because the younger world below us are a result of impending curfews placed on our technology use. We are needed to steer course on a new set of regulations designed for their inventions. Three-dimensional printers, tablets, and Keurig machines occupy our homes. We wait for establishment before we get married because we create the choices that offer multiple decisions we can make to ensure our own security. We fight for stable outcomes that shape and mold society’s moral compass. We add platitudes and work together for better group outcomes. We create a lane for identity the youth sometimes absolve and circumvent and we’re finding better ways to help the hands that’ve already been discussing outcomes.

It just doesn’t seem real how close the messages are. From the time now we don’t talk or echo a word, to the time that’ll pass a year or more ahead and the conversation as a memory wipes away. What hurts more? Knowing you’re in the process of losing, forgetting, putting behind you, and forever closing the door. Is it the time you can make because an opportunity to heal old wounds is ever present. The between time in my opinion makes a difference to souls feeling they fade and wither from people’s minds. If sticking around the other subsides your existence without wonder, and that person who moved in doesn’t utter to echo your name, then is your life being sold for sale? I’ve broken a few rules in this entry already, and as I steamroll ahead, trailblazing at some moments and resting at the fountain in others, the one thing I know now of which one propels on, reflection does take time to be still. For many, patience isn’t a requirement for life. A person can move swift as he may, choosing only in time when to be heard. Yet the times he is not, even after saying something without scolding a response’s need, is almost the key secret of communication.

For one cannot know in true essence what others think, he must remain to choose anyhow, firing off what he can in his own timeline. Respectful of course, only one knows the value of his life by what and how often he reads. Burning the midnight oil then, becomes a requirement for settling in, getting a bit cozy with task, and cleansing. It’s a cleansing of the heart and soul to suggest that one’s mind isn’t all that holds the chaos, thunder, and monumental thought. An immense task has many propensities and jobs divided up for a solid and efficient execution. At the same time midnight rolls around, a set of tasks require a set of qualities geared toward fixing imbalance so that balance may occur. This isn’t but maybe my last bridge of connected thoughts that push me into perpetuity. The short statement expressing a general truth I cudgel my brain on is “when you think you’ve done enough, you’ve done nothing at all. So keep going.” Keep treading the path. Once I leave I’m sure to find my face implanted into a book. I’m reminded that I don’t begin speaking clear til I’ve read a various number of pages. I’d imagine a writer such as Carver, Steinbeck, Twain, and Yeats alike, filling this composition notebook to only toss it in the trash later. I’d be only writing to throw away the words that don’t matter to the context. I’d be pitching every idea and concept I can ruminate on to waste. I’d think I’d be saving it later for something else, yet they all go to timeout instead. And rather than the writer’s block many outsiders forestall the act with, I use my sledgehammer. I stare at the wall for a minute and proceed. The term is breakthrough, as if a bursting pipe underground laid siege to the foundation and of course, I surmise in one sitting my hope of reaching the eventual place of completing a notebook in said position, continuing my stories inside. Where I’ve read enough and spoken clear enough to pick up next day that context, the feat sounds easy without consistent routine. Routine wins thought each time and the greatest routine in continuing life is making babies. It is finding love and immersing into passion. It is growing to understand purpose regaled childhood before work and play turned into responsibility. It is encouraging others with smiles and being humbled to accept the elements on a larger scale at the shoreline. It is looking up when problems persist and its non-judgment in the middle of gossip. It is the strengthening of your faith by association and understanding work accomplishes tasks by hands being put in a room together for a common cause. Routine is knowing the power of belief is also the power to dictate and that we smile for others because the one of you is going to die an eventual death.

From walking in the elements during my days of Traymore to counting the many several situations I view in sight, trudging to point B along my journey. I’m reading a compilation of short stories, I’m on page 279 of Jonathan Franzen’s “Purity,” and working my own few short stories to submit in a writing sample. I remember when I’d free write in fiction and poetry class, jotting whatever comes to mind whether disgruntled or zealous. That passage of time is where I find relief because after it all, I’ve continued. I’ve pressed on through the mud. My boot prints are somewhere mired in the clay and I’m able to admonish experience. I have a little now in contending the novel. I can feel now, and I’m glad my gift is to share what that means. For me, I’m taking time for granted not listening to myself and from that I am these people. As these people we are, just looking at people. And from that, blarney also means talk that aims to charm, pleasantly flatter, or persuade. So, I never kiss a woman unless I know what I mean by it, the same as my destination ahead. I carry my burdens to the platform…

Wake up

Drive Slow

Good Morning

Flashing Lights

Heartless.