I woke up this morning in a decent mood.  I’m at an interesting point in my life. Currently out on my own. Living with my girlfriend  (and by “out on my own” I mean free from my parents). It is a pretty easy life as of now. I don’t have much to worry about, although I know it’s a transitional period of my life and I do need to get up and get my ass in gear. I started a project about a month and a half ago, a “Joint Venture” with my girlfriends parent’s who are very successful at their careers (which I will keep anonymous). They have packaged up a product detailing how to recreate their success and we are selling it online at a pretty hefty price tag. Every aspect of the project looks lucrative and I also get excited to think and work on it. Although it seems my steam has been depleted to a degree after I got back from vacation (Myrtle Beach, it was nice). I’ve spent the last week laying around and being unproductive. To me this is the ebb and flow of life for me. I bust my ass and accomplish things, but seem to lose motivation just before that breaking point where true success lies beyond. Anyone, this isn’t an internet marketing blog. The point is, there are opportunities approaching me and I finally feel like this is the step before I actually start living. I want to talk a bit about a few things that influenced me to write this now.

The first was my mother’s new blog. http://sherryshort.com. I read her first post and it revealed a side of her that I am not so familiar with. I got a bit choked up reading it. It’s not particularly depressing, well aside from her first post, it’s inspirational. It just amazes me how unobservant I’ve been all these years, not just in regards to my mother, but to everything. I realize I’ve spent so many years (early years) of my life floating by. I was just a shell. Mom has always been there for me, not always financially but to a degree I’m glad we struggled with money. Well, let me clear that up. My mom has never (to my knowledge) been financially stable but my dad has done fairly well at accumulating wealth and I have lived under his roof for the most part. Money was tight in the beginning early on, before my parents got divorced, but I was young enough to where it didn’t matter. The things I consumed my day with were hardly related to money. Things like playing with friends and exploring the vast land in the bluegrass trailer park, a place I spent many years growing up at. Through that time my parents had their ups and downs and finally decided on divorce which, in my opinion was for the better. These two people love each other, they just had differences that couldn’t be settled. They wanted different things and both have benefited from their decisions. I can’t speak for my siblings but I would say they agree. My dad is a strong willed individual, and he’s got the drive to accomplish his dreams. Something I always admired and hope to find in myself. He has put his happiness and dreams on hold to raise us, for that I will always be grateful. I feel like a shit head looking back at how I treated them. I built up a lot of unnecessary pressure around a lot of the things me and my dad fought about. My relationship with my mom has been drastically different. I’ve always had an intense interest in the spiritual, metaphysical, paranormal and that is a passion my mom developed for herself throughout her life.  We’ve always had inspirational discussions about many different subjects related to that realm of things and those days were some of the most fulfilling in my early life. I love my mom and I know I don’t tell her that enough. We’ve been through a lot throughout our lives together and I have no regrets to any bit of it. I hope she has never stressed or dug up any negative outlook on how she treated me or the process in which got me here today. Life is all about the good and the bad and I always say, the bad makes the good feel even better. To be honest, I owe a large part of the way I believe and feel about life and my complete schema of the world to her. She didn’t force me on anything, didn’t need to, I was attracted to it. The more the days go by, the more I realize how similar I am to my mom. As I mentioned in my last post, I struggle with motivation. The best way I can sum it up is, I’m a dreamer. I dream big. I have grand ideas and I can even see them becoming realities but I lack the drive to accomplish those. I am not entirely sure that is the situation with my mom but she seems to go through the same cycles I go through, the ones I’m trying to break. I want to work with my mom. We share very similar interest and she has a lot of the know how that I can turn into profits with the skill sets I’ve chosen to become. Many occasions I can remember, she gets very excited and motivated about something. Very passionate and then, as with me, life catches up with her. It’s hard to watch this struggle, but I know she will prevail as will I and probably together. I don’t see her enough, I don’t see anyone enough. I’m a complete home body and it’s starting to bother me.

As for my dad. Our relationship is totally different than that of my mom’s. He’s a very strong person and that strength has pushed me to amazing experiences. I only hope he instilled enough in me to live my dreams. We’ve always had some static in our relationship. A large part of it is I don’t feel I can be honest with him, I can. Just not about things like this, this blog and a side of me that isn’t all about being successful and making a lot of money to live my life the way I want. Truthfully, I don’t know how he feels about it. As with many father-son relationships, I want to make him proud. To a degree I feel like I’ve let him down. He has always cared so much about not living life the way he did. I don’t know the complete story, but from what he’s told me and what I’ve gathered. Life was very rough for him and my mom. She was pregnant with me when she was 17 and he was 19 (I think). I can’t imagine it being easy. By no means were either of their families wealthy and there is a plethora of dysfunction within them (not to shed a negative light on them, I love my entire family). My dad never wanted that kind of life for me. He always told me, whatever you decide to do, be the best at it and you will succeed. I agree with this in a big way, but the plan from day one for me was to get good grades, graduate college and get a high paying job. I didn’t want that. I am an entrepreneur and I’m happy with my life as of yet. I retain the ability to see the big picture and small things rarely bother me. There has been a lot of pressure behind doing that my whole life. It didn’t bother me until about 2 years ago when I was in college and realized this was a miserable place. The more I got into internet marketing the more I didn’t want a job, I wanted a business. It was both the hardest thing in my life and the most liberating experience in my life to stand up for myself and tell him. At the time, I was working at DW Wilburn and was making a pretty decent chunk of change and the plan at the time was to save that money and start my business. I did do that to a degree but it didn’t pan out the way it could have if I were smarter. Alas, life is a process and I regret none of it. One day, my dad found a letter from EKU stating that my Keys money had been lost because of low grades. I had a feeling he found it when he called me from my moms house and told me to come straight home. I knew it would happen eventually. But, by the time I got there, I was different. I felt it. It was such a strong feeling. I came clean. I hated all the lying and deceiving about my grades and school and money and everything I ever kept from them. I was born anew as I told him my plans and decided to move in with mom and eventually get my own apartment. That day was the first day of my real life. We came to an understanding. As men. I was his equal that day and he had to agree to disagree. It was very liberating. A lot of pressure was released that day alone as I decided to make it happen for me. Since then, he’s been very supportive but I get the feeling he wants to lecture me when I come around and I know he is politely refraining to do so. Maybe because I don’t come around very often (despite the fact he lives 15 minutes away) and he doesn’t want to do anything that may push me further away. I love my dad, but I hate disappointing him and I feel like I do when I don’t really have anything to say for myself and my current situation. I like it, but I know he wants for me and I want more for myself, but all in good time. I dream of the day I can go back and be with my family knowing there is no issue between us. After all the only issues between us have been related to my career and chores as I was growing up. He’s very easy going besides that. So I guess I’m trying to say, when I get my money right, I’ll have no problem facing him and showing him I did it. I don’t want them to worry for me and my feeling is if I discuss my situation with them or my past decisions since then, they will worry for me. I’ve depended on them long enough and I just want them to be happy. Not worrying about their eldest son succeeding or failing. I will succeed. It just may not happen as fast as he wants. I just don’t know how to prove it to him without anything to show for the life I’ve chosen to live. It will happen, I have no doubt. Regardless, I am very happy to have lived the life I have with my parents. I am privileged to be raised by them.

The second thing that inspired me to write today was my best friend Shane. I read a blog post of his on facebook today and he expressed some feelings of coming back from Chicago to the quiet slow life of Richmond. It sucks to hear him think of himself as a failure. He’s always been someone that has kept me entertained and has helped me tremendously develop an advance sense of humor that, one day, I will portray in the films we make together. We use to be inseparable, most of our days consisted of coming up with comedy. He has an astonishing amount of talent and after dabbling in the comedic world, he has proven to be one of the few that is at the level to perform. He does belong in comedy and this set back of not being in Chicago taking classes has in no way thwarted that. He remains talented and I believe in his success. He talks about people using him to make themselves look better, mainly in harmless forms of jokes and what not. To be fair, he made himself the butt of the joke before anyone else. He is very good at self deprecating humor and I’ve always enjoyed it, but gets offended when others use him as the butt. I don’t really think I do this, it may happen occasionally but it’s less if not the same level of put downs he expresses upon me, none of which has offended me.   I do realize some people rely on these put downs toward him when he’s around them, which really isn’t fair. Regardless, he has a unique view of life that I’ll always want to hear.

It feels like I’ve drug on pretty long.  So I’ll wrap it up. As always, feel free to comment.

Matt

I’ve suddenly got the inspiration to share with the world, a very candid and raw work of mine and it’ll be in the form of writing on this blog. I want to be honest with everyone and at the same time, document my life. I’ll be using this blog in a way that I imagine people used journals before computers were invented or at least before you could find one in every house hold. I want it to be very real and full of character. My character. I’m not a very open person in nature. Rarely do I find myself the life of the party or the meat of the story and I’m completely ok with that. This blog is not about getting attention. I just feel I can express more to you by writing. My ideas have always flown out of me much more fluently with written words than they ever have from my mouth. Many times, I would find myself typing very insightful ideas that I could never say out loud. Not necessarily because I don’t think them, more because I can’t seem to articulate what I mean, on the spot. To me, that is a flaw, as I would imagine I would be much more charismatic and influential if I could. I am anxious to come back and read these a few years down the road and remember my situation, my influences, my state of mind. It would also be pretty neat to have you comment on my posts. I would much rather this be a dialogue than a monologue. I will always think of this as a dialogue, even if the other end is myself. This is a project that I really feel passionate about as of writing this and I can only hope I can maintain this momentum.

I have a real problem with staying on task, and keeping up with projects. Even when these projects could make my dreams come true. I find it hard to stay motivated enough to complete or even work on them. I hope to break that habit, here and now. With you. I’ll be starting another one of these blogs, that is going to be all about my internet marketing ventures and other business ventures, that blog will be highlighting the “Passionate Entrepreneur Matt”. I want to keep these two sides of me separate just to avoid clutter and confusing purposes. I imagine, when I can find the time, I will start another blog highlighting the comedian and filmmaker in me. I have a love for a wide variety of art forms. Making people laugh and using the most advance visual and audio technologies to capture these moments is a very strong passion of mine. I’ve unofficially decided to postpone that part of my life for now though. Film can be expensive and I don’t necessarily want a “career” in film. It is my art, and I don’t want to associate it with my income. In a nutshell, my current plan is to become a skilled marketer and get very good at the art of selling. With the earnings from my internet marketing venture I plan to finance my own comedic film projects so that I don’t have to sacrifice any creative control. Not to say that I want to completely control the creativity. I just don’t want the decisions of my films to be made with the intent of earning more money. I want them to be influenced by the purity of the art. By what will create the best scene for the big picture of the film. The purpose isn’t to get you guys to flock to the theaters and break down the doors so you can spend your money on our movie. It is to compliment the purpose behind the story being told.

I realize I’ve gotten a little off track and many of you will not read past the first paragraph. This introductory post isn’t suppose to “nutshell-ize” my entire life up to this point. That’s the purpose of this entire blog, as well as to present the “present” in a perspective that only I possess. Although I do predict many of you will have similar perspectives and I encourage you to share them. I really want to keep up with this, and my biggest fear as of writing this is I’ll drop the project like I have so many times before. I keep thinking, “how hard can it be, just write what’s in your mind” and I’m literally doing that. Most of my literary works follow an outline. I like outlining and creating a clear plan of action before I write. But not this, it’s free form. It’s “say it as it enters your mind”. That’s the way I want to keep this. My other blogs will be structured with an outline, but this is me. This is the side of me that only few know about. I do mean few, most of my closest friends and relatives have no idea, and how could they? I spent the last 18 years of my life in a shell. So many thoughts in my head, but a fraction (less than 1/1000) were expressed to anyone.

So just to recap. I’m going to lay it out to you the way I see it. Which means there’s no censor. I do cuss. A lot. Not in an angry expression. I just find cussing funny. When used correctly. With this blog, I’ll be sharing with you a lot of my past, and even more of my present and what I can tell of my future. You’ll get all the ups and downs and I want YOU to be part of this. Should my writings inspire thoughts and ideas in your own self I would love nothing more than for you to share them here. I will publish every comment, no matter how rude, vulgar or messed up, as long as it isn’t a spammer trying to get a link back to his website.

I’m going to wrap this up by saying thank you, if you’ve read this far, you are obviously interested for some reason, be it a good or bad one. Any feedback is good feedback. To know that you’ve made it this far is very humbling and inspirational and I encourage you to feed me with that as much as your amazing soul desires. I’ll finally close with a request. I request that, should you feel compelled to, reply with a comment using the form below. I don’t have a specific question for you, but I do want to know whats on your mind. I’ll try to keep up with this blog as much as possible. In a perfect world, I’d post everyday. But in my world, and because at the time of writing this, I have 2 jobs and literally work 7 days a week, it’ll probably be closer to 1 or 2 posts a week.

So Thanks for sticking around and expect a new post soon. Post a comment below and join in on the dialogue.