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Demons of Inadequacy

I've been a little low on output recently.
A character trait of my father's comes to mind when I think about what little I've done recently (aside from play Metroid Prime, a seriously good video game). My father is a man who has always had plans. The real world never quite conformed to his plans for one reason or another that I won't get into here.
Our conversations generally revolve around his plans. He goes on at length about what he's going to do with the near future. The fact that very little he tells me actually comes to pass is long accepted at this point, at least by me. I listen because I care, but I've never quite had the heart to tell him the honest truth. In fact, I don't even have the heart to utter that here. Those of you who know me know what that is; those who don't can read between the lines; those who can't read between the lines should leave and consider downloading more pornography.
I had plans once. In fact, I recall clearly walking around Little Italy with my father once upon a time and scripting the next 18 years of my life (I was seven at the time). Basically at the end of that time I would have a PhD and be making lots of money. Twenty years later, no PhD, although I'm making decent money, though certainly not tons of it.
Somewhere along the line I stopped planning.
There was a time when I couldn't imagine not having my father in my life...in fact, 12 years ago I still felt that way. Even after he moved to Ohio in 1994, I always thought he'd be there somewhere. He was my best friend growing up, my mentor, my intellectual benchmark, but never quite my role model.
Even as a young blood I knew there was more to success than plans. The way of thinking that ignores dealing with reality in favor of making new plans never appealed to me. Still, the years from age seven to seventeen went pretty much according to plan. Looking back on it, I was a pretty stubborn, if quiet, child. True, there's not too much a child can do with his destiny except for perform and take advantage of his opportunities. But my path was one I blazed with exceptional foresight for a young person, even when other paths may have been easier to tread.
Having seen the faults of fruitless planning, I resolved to merely take advantage of opportunities as they arose, sometime around my 17th birthday. The idea of earning tons and tons of money was never really appealing to me, an opinion that has only grown stronger and more implacable with the passage of time.
Perhaps it's evidence of a deep vein of self-destruction in my being. In a way, I've always wanted to fail, just so everyone who has ever had confidence in me would stop telling me how great I am. It's not like I feel pressure to meet their expectations; I just want to stop hearing it. Even praise gets old after a while.
I've written before about the curse of having what people perceive to be exceptional abilities of one kind or another. As a result of having certain things go easily for me, I've compensated by attempting to master things I know are weaknesses in my nature. Having mostly succeeded in that ill-conceived way of life, I'm no closer to satisfaction. Even when I've thrown the game and purposely failed I feel no pleasure in it. Catch 22, right? Damned if I do, damned if I don't.
No wonder I'm not married. Hehe....
Looking at things objectively, I've done fairly well despite throw obstacles in my path. I've surpassed my parents in almost every measurable way, save for producing offspring. In fact, I was so proud that I was childless at 25 that I just about decided to forswear having children altogether. For the most part I've stuck with that, although that's mostly because I haven't found a suitable mate, and the longer I go without, the less I really want to look.
Besides, there's more room in bed when you sleep alone.
Sometimes I wonder how things might have turned out differently if my father stayed in Baltimore. In many ways I'm glad he's 420 miles away. I feel like I would have had a harder time building individual relationships with my family had he been around. It's not like he was completely absent, not until a few years ago. Having seen him fairly recently, it's so strange to see someone who once was so close to me become almost a complete stranger. I've made my peace with reality. He has not.
The distance gave me a much-needed opportunity to look at things objectively, to see my life as it really was. I'm a better person for it, although the knowledge came with much discomfort. There are times I want to lash out at him and tell him what I really think of my unconventional upbringing. Anger restrained me in the past; concern for his well-being stops me now. I'm not sure he would be able to take the unadulterated onslaught of my thoughts, and I'm not sure he deserves it. In the end, I've grown up to be a rather capable and well-adjusted person, and a large part of that can be attributed to his influence. Had things been different, I have no idea how I would have turned out. Maybe better, maybe worse, who knows, although I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be terribly different.
I still think there's load of untapped potential somewhere within my being. My dissatisfaction with almost every aspect of my life seems to indicate that I can at least conceive of better things. Potential becomes less relevant as one gets older, being replaced by execution and effort.
I've always respected people who work hard, who take pride in their accomplishments because they've striven for results. To a certain extent I've coasted through life so far, living on raw ability more so than effort, although there are those who would say I'm a very hard worker myself. Perhaps I am, replacing the challenge of learning with the challenge of learning much more and doing much more than other people around me, while all the time telling others that if I can do it, it can be done by others. Most people limit themselves with one crucial weakness: they lack confidence in their ability to learn. As a result, they aim for lower targets and step over molehills while believing they scale mountains. In the end, they're satisfied, and I'm disturbed. Somewhere in that continuum is justice.
Yet here I am, rambling in a somewhat less than coherent fashion, boo-hooing about things, looking for what exactly? Sympathy? Not really. If I wanted sympathy, I could tell some sob stories. Reassurance? Least of all that. Confidence has never been a problem, except for my half-hearted attempts at socializing. Understanding? Maybe that's it. Maybe I'm just rambling for its own sake.
Like whatever happened to RZ? Once upon a time, RZ was the only reason I even put something out on the Web. To date, I haven't written an RZ tale in well over a year, although the cycle of tales continues to percolate within my being. The well worn stories help me get to sleep at night and one day I plan to at least document his life. The main reason I haven't come back to that recently is that I'm not satisfied with the story. It's not an easy task to take a character who is largely derivative of childhood cartoons and movies, a character who has adventures largely derivative of my wide reading in fantasy, science fiction, history, mythology, et cetera, and make that character and his stories relevant to the world at large. Perhaps the only relevance should be to my own experience, but I always thought it would be good to share the stories with the world in the hopes that people enjoy them and maybe learn something about themselves in the process.
In a related train of thought, some of what I've accepted as canon over the years smacks a little too much of scripting. Plot sometimes takes an upper hand to sensibility, or did in the past. If I was to type up the opus of the summer of 1993, all of 250 pages of relatively random carnage and destruction, the multiple sources underlying the tale would shine through way too much. I might do it anyway, just to see what people think, since no one's ever read more than the first 20 or 30 pages. In fact, at one point my mother threw my writing in the garbage, only for me to fish them out. Perhaps she was making some reference to the quality of what was there. The last three years or so have seen me revisit nearly every aspect of the story, eliminating the connections to various existing properties (Transformers among them), and fleshing out the character as someone worth reading about.
On a side note, it may make good fan fiction.
At this point, the choice is between spinning a yarn about a great warrior and leader, which may make decent fantasy, or attempting to tell the tale from the perspective of a somewhat more relevant character, sort of like Tolkien did by telling the tale of the War of the Ring from the perspective of the hobbits, although that only applies to about 60% of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. On the whole, I think I prefer spinning the yarn and seeing who follows it, seeing who cares about where it goes. The full story would likely fill a number of nice-sized books. If I was to publish the first, I might find that satisfying.
First I have to write it. Plans are great, but execution gets the job done.