As these two blogs are going to be very interrelated for the next month I am reposting the original article I wrote here.

On September 11th, 2009 I turned 30 years old. The morning of, I went to the doctor’s office to have a stitch taken out of my neck. The stich had been put in after a biopsy incision had failed to cauterize. I sat there reclining and staring up at hot air balloons he projected onto the ceiling (presumably to pacify any nervous patients) while he prodded at the wound on my neck he’d put there a week earlier and informed me that the skin had an infection he’d have to give me something for.

He left the room to get his prescription pad and returned with a manila folder instead. When asked, he told me that apparently the biopsy results had come back. He flipped open the folder and scanned it’s contents. Then followed 30 seconds of silence which he decided to end with a punctuating, “Hunh.”

I squeezed the edges of the couch reflexively. “Something wrong?”

Well, he said, it looks as though you’ve got some cancer cells in there. Nothing to be too concerned about. This is a very common form of skin disorder and it doesn’t tend to spread to organs. You’ll just have to stop spending a lot of time in the sun from now on as this is very much related to sunlight. We’ll have to schedule another appointment to have it removed.

I considered the prospect of going another week with this on my neck. An image came to mind of Ian Holm telling John Hurt what his stomach ache really was and making him schedule an appointment for later in the week to have it removed. “Do you have any other patients after me today?”

Uhm…no but…isn’t it your birthday?

16 new stitches later I was driving the five blocks back home.

Cancer. Non-deadly form of cancer. Doesn’t tend to spread to the organs. Doesn’t tend too. If I were more a Woody Allen-type, I thought to myself, I wonder if I would distill something clever from this? A funny anecdote that I could tell people later. I didn’t feel clever. I felt sleepy. Lethargic. Like I was swimming in warm mud. My common physical reactions to impending depression.

This wasn’t any irrational fear of death or hypochondria. I believed the doctor when he said non-deadly cancer.

It was that the word cancer had been spoken at all. There had been a lot of words like cancer spoken recently: tendinitis, fiber, minoxidil, bad cholesterol, high blood pressure. A growing vocabulary of terms that I didn’t remember coming up in conversations 5 years before. A list which painted a portrait of someone who, if not old, could distinctly no longer be classified as “young.”

I wondered, when did that happen? More importantly, what did I have to show for it?

When I was in high school, I was told that I would go on to do big things. Charismatic, articulate, and outspoken I had a way with adults that won most of them over easily. They weren’t sure if I was going to be a writer, a director, an actor or an artist but they were sure that I would be at least one of them. And I believed them. These were my plans for the future. I just had to graduate and get started and it would…just happen.

At 30, I’m now a recovering alcoholic living in a small town in Colorado. I’m overweight, have little or no savings, and I work as a telephone tech support agent for a company that resells conferencing services to different businesses. I spend most of my day in a cubicle surrounded by other “support agents, ” answering on average 40-50 calls a day from panicky angry employees of other companies who have just spent 5 minutes on hold pressurizing their levels of frustration to red-line before venting it on me, the first person available to them. Of those 50 calls, 90 percent of them are the same 5 problems, all user error. Actual technical knowledge isn’t necessary to be a “support agent.” My exchanges with the employees of other companies consist mostly of me deflecting their complaints while rereading them the directions they failed to closely enough. I do this long enough until we discover the road block they ran into and I push them over the top of it. They disconnect in a huff, and I move on immediately to the next call. I do this for 8 hours a day.

My free time is spent with my close friends and girlfriend, entertaining ourselves and making plans for the future. Plans for future trips, possessions, and events that, at the moment, we have no way of paying for. But then, it’s the fantasy that provides my necessary anesthesia to bear the mundane.

Plans, I thought, squeezing the steering wheel. Plans for the future. When I was young I was going to be a movie star. Now that I’m older I’ve traded that in for the dream of owning a house and having a job that won’t slowly petrify my soul. As I pulled into my apartment complex I began to wonder what it was in my past that had made me the way I was? Why is it so hard for me to act? Why is it so hard to move forward? My intellect began peeling into the layers of my memory – divorce, rejection, sadness. Considering the possible repercussions of my first female rejection and the ripples it caused along the time line of my personal growth. Was it the embarrassment of being caught by my Dad with a dirty magazine when I was 13? Was it that time I got drunk and paraded naked in front of Serena and Lucas? Is that why I’m 30 and stuck?

As I turned these things over in my mind, searching for the knot in the rope that I could untangle and make myself happy again, something began to penetrate my fog. I said it before the thought had fully revealed itself to my mind.

“This…isn’t action either.”

Disassembling the past and blowing out the dust is just as potentially masturbatory for people inactive such as myself, as making plans that are never put into motion. It provides you the illusion of progress, in place of actual struggle and hard work – results which are completely intangible and unmeasurable.

My self-analysis broke down.

“So…what do I do?”

Well…that was a month ago and I have been puzzling over that question since then. What do I do and why? I’m still not entirely certain but it seems to me that meaning and substance in life occurs through action, not intention. Who do I want to be and what does a person like that do? Some things are still the same as they were when I was 17 – I would love to be a writer and have been calling myself one since I was 17. But a writer is someone who writes, not someone who plans to. There are many areas in my life that I would like to address with action, from health to career.

As this is beginning to sound dangerously like a plan without any accountability, I would like to propose an exercise. Starting November 1st I intend to begin a daily reporting of my actions taken which forward progress in five specific areas of focus. I will make these posts on Brain Flatulence. I’m not going to put any criteria on what constitutes a daily post as the only purpose of the daily post is a slap in the face to stay present to this exercise BUT for every daily post on Brain Flatulence I miss between November 1st and December 1st, I’m going to donate ten dollars to a charity that I’ll come up with later (I invite your suggestions). Should the lethargy mosquitoes feast on me and I somehow manage to go the whole month without a single post, that means that I could potentially be donating 310 dollars to charity on December 1st.

Later this week I’ll provide a more detailed post on what those areas of focus will be and what tools I’ll employ during this process but there are certain criteria on what is going to constitute a successful action. For instance, it can’t be something that I was going to have to do anyway. If one of the five areas of focus is “Finances,” paying a bill would not be an action that forwards progress in that area according to this exercise.

Now I have no reason to request an audience for these daily posts (though they will be there for the record.) Potentially they could be dry and boring. However every Monday morning on Brain Flatulence there will be an article discussing the exercise so far and any impressions or insights gleaned from the doing of it. Additionally you’ll be able to find the product of much of this work on Everybody is Human.

I invite your participation. Check back. Join in. Read. Comment.

If you like, take the opportunity to think about your own life.

Are there any plans of your own that you have let lay dormant for too long?

What’s one action you could do today that would move you a step closer to its fulfillment?

What’s stopping you?