hold the door!!… to freedom

This year is the year I will go forth and try to accomplish my goals. I already have about six goals on my mind, but the thing about goals is they are kind of like Christmas presents. You only care about them if they’re yours. I was walking home with a friend yesterday and I was drowning on about how I have goals and I sorta want to accomplish them, at least at some point in my life, but especially in this new year, because there's nothing like the month of January. The weather is great and everyone is super happy because Martin Luther King died, and we get to celebrate with the bank closing. And maybe that day off will push some of us to crack open that book about saving for retirement that you got for Christmas a few years ago that you’ve only been using as a coaster for your cocaine. No cocaine in the New Year for me. I wasn’t really afraid of it becoming an ongoing habit, but last year I also thought I was gonna have a lot more friends by the end of the year, and today I am sitting in my room, typing on a document that won’t be read by most, with 6 plates covered in ketchup on my floor. Sometimes you will make plans that God will laugh at because he thinks you’re stupid. Oh well. 

So I’m walking home with the aforementioned friend, one of very few, and I am talking about my goals. I’m also talking about them as if she is a very lucky individual, as “my goals” isn’t set to release for months. So I am walking with her and only giving a few hints about the direction I am planning on going with my new years goals, and I could definitely tell she was listening because I was speaking VERY loudly and every once in a while she said “uh huh”.  Before I go any further, I want to announce now that I am human. I am a person who breathes just like you or me. I have moments when I look out at the sunset and I think I must be the luckiest person behind the wheel of a car right now because I am being blinded by the red sun rays while simultaneously running over several speed bumps, presumably. So, when I was teasing secrets about my goals and dreams to this “friend”, I was just like any other human. Shocked and offended that she has no questions. “Are you nervous?” ”What inspires you” “Do you want to hold hands?” None of that. Where have all the girls gone, who support the other girls with bigger dreams and more money? The sidekicks and ugly girls alike have seemingly abandoned the alphas and left us all to ponder life’s great hurdles on our own until we are picked up on the side of the road and taken to a place of love, where goals go to die, and are replaced with the ideal of sex and pleasure, which are now the only starlet taking center stage in teh off broadway production of what happens in your minds eye. 

I WANT TO OPEN THE DOOR! Ok there it is. My goal for the new year is to open the door for people. More. I would like to live in a place where we can all disagree about a million political issues and purchase a plethora of hair products daily, and even after that still have the wits and good southern roots to hold the door for a person in the wheel chair, with a glass eye and head lice from Guadalajara. I do want all the sillies out there, who would rather turn a blind eye on my goals and dreams to learn about how a revolution begins. Typically from gravity, force or another law of basic physics. In what sense, you ask? When a round person falls down a grassy hill I would estimate they would make several revolutions until they have reached the bottom of the hill, where they will bounce between cars on the freeway like a pinball machine. I want to be the roundest and largest of them all so I can create the most revolutions in this great big world sponsored by Amazon. If I start opening doors for people, maybe one day I will be able to open doors for people. But this time the door is a metaphor and the thing I am opening it up for is freedom.  That way Martin Luther King and I will both shut down the banks and die and everyone will take our dream journals and sell them on a store front you can purchase for $29.99. I will open the doors, and for large people with grass in their hair from a hill, I will push them very hard, and if they still don’t fit. I will find another door, typically used for cars. Individuals supporting the Israeli government. I will gladly open the door for them in hopes that one day I will rise to a position elite enough to blow them all the fuck up. 

I think I got this idea of creating a goal regarding doors because one day I was at a tattoo shop and I was pulling the door. Pulling and pulling until the store clerk motioned that the door was locked. The one next to it was perfectly open. I pull on the next door. Locked as tight as the lips of a war criminal being asked what the Big Mac secret sauce is made out of. Once again the clerk motioned to me. “Push! It’s a push!”, they said with their hands. Then came the pushing, but that door was heavy! I finally got in, but if i though that was heavy what's more heavy was the story the tattoo man told me about the KKK moments later. I was scared I was gonna regret my tattoo choice, you see. So I asked if he had any advice with overcoming tattoo jitters. He recounted the story of the time a founder of a KKK, neo Natzi regime in the south waltzed in to get some of his tattoos covered up after having a change of heart on racism. The tattoo artist and him ended up sharing a hug in the end because sometimes people change and sometimes tattoos change as well. I looked down at my phone and saw the inspiration that brought me to this shop in the first place. A picture of the woman with a mustache tattooed on the side of her pointer finger. It made me put out a sigh. I walked to the door I now had mastered, but not before holding it open for the next person entering the parlor. “Heavy doors, heavy days, our goals will be the change”, is what was probably going through my mind after my initial thought, which was “Why is that man covered in grass?”