The view from the valley.

I've been doing this "grown-up" thing now for about four years with some successes and some failures. I got a job (good) but I don't make enough money (bad). So sometimes, I feel like I'm just working to maintain a lifestyle that I aspire to or that I'm accustomed to living after all those years at home doing what I want, getting what I want... now, I have bills, I have responsibility, I have to prioritize my life in order to make it from check to check.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not poor. I'm functionally broke. I'm part of a class of corporate poverty in which your yearly salary is good, but not compensatory to your yearly aspirations. So like any chump in my bind, I have accrued debt and moved to the beyond my means zone to keep up with the Jonses and have cool stuff like my friends (who are, coincidentally, breaking themselves trying to keep up with me)... Isn't it ironic.

I often view my adult life like Lewis and Clark emerging from the Missouri Valley and taking their first gaze upon the Rocky Mountains. The pass must've seemed insurmountable, dark mountain after dark mountain without a seemingly "easy" path to follow. I'm not alone in this, I know. There are plenty of people in my age group and professional level looking at this same psycho-geographic connundrum... moving from the easy path of childhood and semi-adulthood into full blown grown-updom. One wonders if they will be like Edmund Hillary, or the Donner Party in their attempts to scale the dark mountains ahead.

I'll make it, I have no choice. I don't do failure well.

But I digress.

Topic 2: Stupid questions people ask me when I work at nightclubs.

So, you know I DJ and work the door at several nightclubs in Chicago, and more often than not, I'm confronted by the rampant stupidity that has consumed black Chicago. Here's an actual conversation I had last night at the door at Funky Buddah Lounge:

Club Idiot: "What's it look like in there?"
Me: "Like a nightclub"
Club Idiot: "I'm sayin', yo. What's it lookin' like in there, fo'real!"
Me: "Dark"
Club Idiot: *silence*
Me: "So, you gonna gimme your money, or do you need any more obvious answers?"
Club Idiot: *reaches in pocket and gives up loot*
Me: "Thanks!"

People concern me.