Not failing at success… I was just resting…

Normality. Who would think it’s so… normal. Aside from the name, I mean. Things just settle back into their routines with such regularity you swear you’ve been eating bran.

So it is with my life. I mean, I have a job again. Vicky and I are still together. We’re picking up where we left off in August. We’re going to refi our house… we’re going to buy the new bed we’ve needed for the past 8-9 months…

And I’ve started working on the book about success again.

Being out of work just screwed up my ability to work – I mean, to write. For some reason, writing regularly keeps me… regular. (There we are with our bran references again.) But I never gave up on the success book. I even told Vicky that I’d be getting back to it.

And back to it I am.

I spent this week rereading what I have, reviewing my research, doing more research, writing some more, and, yes, feeling daunted. I’ll get to each of those points, one at a time.

Can you believe I already have one-third of the book complete? Seriously! One-third! That’s not bad, after all, for giving me some idea what I was shooting for. Oh, I have my complaints. It’s not nearly funny enough. (But I would say that about all of my books. Not one of them is funny enough.) Books on philosophy have got to be funny or you’ll just want to cry. And, on top of that, it is a book about unemployment, alcoholism, and death. This is funny stuff, you know?

I’d already done a crapload of research, not to mention the mountain of survey results, so you can imagine how shocked I was that I hadn’t started! Mind you, only about a tenth of all the research ends up in the book. (After all, who would want to read that?!) But it was in continuing the research that I found the most amazing thing.

Months back, I wrote about “underlying forms”, using the wrong term to refer to Plato. But did you know that “underlying forms” refers to Optimality Theory? It’s a linguistic convention used to create a hierarchy much like that of… Maslow! (Remember me mentioning his “Hierarchy of Needs”?) Without knowing it – to make a long story short – I’m tying together such diverse paths as Kundalini yoga, psychiatry, philosophy, linguistics – and, of course, unemployment, alcoholism, and death – to get at the core of something that touches them all and that nobody thinks of in relation to any… success.

It’s incredibly daunting but, at the same time, a terrific subject for me. You see, as political and passionate I am about current events and ethics – this has nothing at all to do with any of that. So, I don’t have to worry about any of that seeping in. It’s like writing in this nice, little bubble, a safe place where I can be cool with everybody. Nice.

So, two-thirds to go and I’m on my way…

Summer is not out of the question!