Bitter? Man, I’m a volcano.
You don’t even know.
You don’t understand me.
Can’t see what I see.
My hopes and dreams.
You tryin’ to break at their seams.
I know your kind.
Not too hard to find.
Uptight, weak, under-ran.
Boy, you can’t even act like a man.
You think you got it all with your books?
And your fake d*** fa****** looks?
Sit down and let a man speak.
I barely got time for you weak.
I’m a giant and you a little ant.
Doing things I know you can’t.
I’ve got it all, I know I’m the best.
Don’t even try to put me up on the test.
I’m the man of the house.
And you asking a man or a mouse?
Let me speak I say again!
I don’t need no ink and a pen.
All you talk is about them d*** eggs.
I’ve got dreams baby, wings, not legs.
Why am I the only one with the solo?
I’ve got it together, me, Willy, and Bobo.
Trust me, I got this.
I’m stronger than you think.
I know I can do it, please.
It’s for my family.
Ruth, Travis, Mama, and Benny.
Ain’t nobody gonna stop me.
D***mit, I’m a volcano.
Often times we hear the advice that we should have a goals list. For example, the infamous Harvard study. Students were found to be more successful when they kept a consistent list of goals in their mind. These people had a dream. But that wasn’t the important part. That wasn’t the life-changer. It wasn’t the habitual conscious drive that made them accomplished. Making this list can help you see what you should do, but it doesn’t fulfill them for you. If your dream stays stagnant, forever in your mind but unachieved, it is utterly useless! It becomes the raison that Langston Hughes describes in his poem, Harlem. It will wither in the sun, and taste a sickly “sweet”. An artificial one. It will stay in your mind, a glorious feat, but in reality, it never even existed. Anybody can dream big. Everybody dreams big. But what separates the successful from the rest of society, is that they have the motivation to pursue that dream. They are proactive. Otherwise it remains a “heavy load” upon your back. Just like Anne Quindlen’s perfectionist backpack. She carried high hopes for herself, with a judgement just as high. That’s another thing with a dream. You need to know your limits. Anne’s backpack was too heavy for her, she tried to carry too much. To fully achieve your dreams, you need to know how much you can carry, along with giving in the effort to carry with you. A camel’s journey is long and harsh.
Foolish love. It is a disease that spreads wide and lays hands on just about every human with affection. Foolish love stems from the inner call of greed and self-fulfillment. The moment a person’s affection because self-seeking and puts themselves over their loved one, they have just became foolish. If this is so, then is not the whole world’s love foolish? A selfless love, or even just a less self-focused love, is it not so hard to achieve? Often times it may start out as a real love, or seem so, as with Jay Gatsby and Daisy. But as the story drives on, an admiration for their love soon turns to a morbid disgust, up to the point that the reader can feel no pity for Gatsby’s end. It’s a conflicting judgement that can only be reflected upon the readers themselves. Fitzgerald recognizes this foolish love, yet evidently in his life, failed to extinguish his own shortcomings. Merely knowing and acknowledging the problem does not always solve the problem itself. Fitzgerald wrote his stories based on his life as an output to his problems, but even they failed to suppress the effects of his foolish love. In the end, Fitzgerald does not even end up with Zelda, reflected and foreshadowed by Gatsby’s separation with Daisy. In a sense, Fitzgerald knew the his own problems, and his own demise, but he failed to solve them and fell into a trap he had already detected. An act of a truly foolish man.
