or “PMA + KBO = Blood for Frogs!”

————————-

 May! What a month!…

 Sorry, April! What a month! (Obviously the first thing to do is to apologize for this post’s tardiness, but no one’s interested in my apologies [APPARENTLY!] , so we’ll just move on and watch as the end-of-month posts move further and further into the future.)

 Listen: April was quite challenging. It was professionally, socially and personally tough for a multitude of silly reasons. I was feeling uninspired in my writing, and pretty let-down by a lot of personal things. And there was this quick-sand effect going on where the harder I was trying, the worse things were turning out. I was punching myself out and bloodying my knuckles doing it (I mean that only mostly in a proverbial sense).

 So I spent a lot of time stuck in the mud, and feeling sorry for myself about it. I complained so much in fact that I got sick of telling the same stories over and over. Ya know, even my own little personal dramas became boring to me, and it got the point where it was okay to just let the days wash by. “KBO”, I would tell myself, “Keep Buggering On”, but it rang sorta hollow because it didn’t actually make me feel any better. Shit was a bummer.

 One day I was talking to a friend who is having a significantly and profoundly more difficult year than I have ever had, and he was talking about challenges he’s facing right now, and I just asked him how he did it. How was he able to maintain his personal fortitude in the middle of such stress and anxiety and disappointment and lord know what else.

 ”PMA, man.”

 ”What’s ‘PMA’?”

 ”C’mon man, you’ve never listened to Bad Brains?”

 No, as previously mentioned, Bad Brains is one of those bands I never got around to, so he played me a song and explained that he just tries to keep a Positive Mental Attitude. That’s it. The secret was to have a better attitude. That’s how fucking cynical I had become, I couldn’t recognize that attempting to have a better outlook on life could actually work.

 So it stopped being just KBO, it was KBO while trying to smile. Take solace in the little things that you enjoy, appreciate the nice weather or a good record or fucking shoot a gun for the first time.

 Do anything you want. You can do it. And when life gets shitty, you have to move forward. We are Human, a stubborn and willful animal that always moves forward whether for better or worse.

 So yeah, in April I learned that:

  plus  equals 

…which may not make a helluva lot of sense, but at least it makes me laugh. And it’s way easier trying to stay in a good mood than getting out of a bad one.

 Coming in May: Drunk Girls!

-diggy

ADDENDUM: I’d like to take a second to dedicate this post to my dog who passed away peacefully in his sleep last week. He was 16 years old, blind, deaf and had scoliosis. But that motherfucker kept plugging away and bringing joy to my family even while the world faded away from him and life was less than ideal. You were a good dog, buddy.