Mission Statement

The name "1,000 Dead Ends" has a faintly cynical ring to it, but my designs for it are resolutely positive.

Here's my whole thing:

I am in a strange place in life - post-graduation, pre-career. Like in The Graduate, and like all my peers. In this place, you watch, you wait, you play cards close to chests, and you pursue the moments that look like they might have that abstract, illusory quality of being "defining." This is a place where, in your native language, you flick words like "safe" and "comfortable" and "practical" sneeringly off your tongue in caustic tones to describe the lives of other, successful people.

Why do you do this? Why not live and let live, or hell, do some of your own succeeding? Because you are afraid to fail. You're unaccustomed to failure. This is not because you are great, but because you haven't tried, and if you try nothing you can fail no more. So you "rise above" and give a careless middle finger to the choices that could lead to success and greatness by any other path than a glorious, meteoric ascent. You wait for the one moment in which your potential explodes in a cataclysmic flash that elevates and illuminates the 1,000 and more moments before, which all passed unmarked in a slow-moving flow of wild dreams that begin where you are, and end with you transcending your condition in some way or another (but you didn't really have the energy or focus to figure THAT part of it out). It feels inevitable, like destiny.

Here's my other whole thing:

I am also in the place where I'm beginning to suspect deep down that these magnificent, potential-energy-exploding-into-light-of-a-thousand-suns-in-a-single-defining-moment kinds of lives are difficult to come by in real life. Also, I'm pretty sure that no one has a destiny. We DO have signposts to guide our way, however; well-worn adages that read like this:

-"Nothing good in life comes easily."
-"Great achievements require great sacrifice.
-"Etc."

These words are designed to grant you the license to dream big and swing hard. What could go wrong? Well, a lot, I suppose. There's the fear, and the distinct possibility that every avenue that appears to you could lead to a soul-crushing dead end; where dreams slink away, broken and shamed, like the soldiers of an unsuccessful revolution. There could be a thousand or more such dead ends in life.

It's a daunting and ambition-quenching project.

However, there is a positive message in all of this, for though I want adventure, I have to accept that the pursuit of it may incur some misadventure. I want to try, but I have to accept that I might fail; and learn to laugh away the failures like I laugh away the clumsy efforts at poetry that I find in my old notebooks in storage units. I have to dream, and if nothing comes of them, at least will be able to say that once I had doomed dreams that I followed to a nadir.

So, with all of that in mind, I'm creating this blog to:
-Practice writing.
-Help me to maintain my interest in adventures.
-Shame me, by its very existence (and the attendant risk of hypocrisy), into having adventures when I might feel too tired or whatever to pursue them.
-Entertain and/or enlighten anyone who might wonder "what [I'm] up to these days?"

Hope y'all enjoy.

"I can wish nothing more for myself than this, that I find, somehow, courage to pursue wild dreams to their 1,000 dead ends, and hope that the 1001st dream is a success."
-Author Unknown