Heyo. I just came to lay down some thoughts before I get a quick sleep for first Sunday of SCOOP. So ****ing cool that I've heard about it forever and this year I am full on grinding it. So cool
Had an interesting last day and a bit. Just very social. Hung out with my one friend who happens to be a girl in town who I may or may not have had feelings for in the past. Don't worry, she shut me down a few years ago, I'm over it haha. Hung out with some of her crew last night and we went golfing today (she's my go to golf buddy). Getting home from golf I ended up driving past all of my crew who just happened to be walking by my place for a walk. A few of them were getting drunk tonight, and I decided to tag along for a bit. I'm back before midnight, so I did not degen haha
Me and one of the dudes who has become a part of the crew in recent years and who I haven't had the chance to chill with much ended up having some good convos. He just got back to Swift from uni for the summer and he is trying to be sober as well. I know I've mentioned I'm being sober. It's not like I ever had a serious drug/alcohol problem, it just ended up having so many bad associations that every experience ended as a bad one. Drinking is fine. I'm not anti-drinking haha. He had his own deal too, but since we were the two sober guys for the brief time we were at the bars I gave him a lift home when I left.
He had a lot of interesting stuff to say about Swift Current and the kind of people here. He basically is not a fan of the town. It's just kind of a ****hole, and his big point was that most of the people still living here are doing nothing with their lives. And he's right. All of the people that have gone on to do or are trying to do something with their lives has basically left, a huge exodus of positive spirit. Now the town and the bars and all that **** are filled with the people who don't have any kind of goals. Sure, there's farmers and lots of families here. But there are all of the people who never went to school, who never got a job, who live at home with their parents doing nothing.
That is literally my entire crew haha
And I love them. I love all of them. But they don't have goals. Which is okay. Not everyone needs huge aspirations. Our society needs all kinds of people on all kinds of levels to function properly. But this guy kept talking about how it is so easy for pot and alcohol and Swift Current to kind of pull him into a malaise where it's hard to keep on the straight and narrow driving towards anything.
I can obviously completely sympathize with all he's said. I am in town and I am social, but I am also on my own island on my own mission. I left the bar on a Saturday night early so I could wake up at 6:45 AM for SCOOP. Most Saturdays I would have just stayed at home anyways.
My one golf friend is not of that same ilk. She is not part of the crew. She is her own separate entity in my life. Last night I hung out with some of her crew, kids I grew up with who graduated engineering programs. They are talking about applying to other programs, looking for work abroad, all of these brilliant people in Regina and Saskatoon. And I just have my Swift bros.
Even in the Vancouver creative writing program so many people were defeatists, especially the screenwriting kids. They'd write a short involving a hundred people packed in a church and joke about how they would never be able to make their script, any of their scripts. Write them and let them disappear into the ether. It was such a load of sh**. I was a non-functional human my last year at UBC, but I decided I would make a short film and I actually made it happen. It was not great. It was not even good. Some people (many) would probably say it was not even mediocre. But I made it. I was trying to accomplish something. Even if my heart was never fully in writing, I was trying to make it as best I could. I wasn't doing nothing
So many people don't have purpose and that was probably my biggest life struggle before the poker journey. I am not saying I am superior to my friends here. I love them. But I also feel like Swift is not an end destination for me. Bigger and better things are out there in my future. Of course, I don't fully know what they are or where they'll take me. I just know I won't be here forever. I can get a job and live my life and be fine with it, but that is not what I want. I want to do something. Even if I fail, I am out here trying to make sh** happen. That is better than most people can say
SCOOP SCOOP SCOOP. I am going to have so much fun the next few weeks