The Foul Mind

I have on occasion said a joke or phrase that horrifies those strangers around me. It take a lot of conscious effort to control my foul mind. I work in a profession(security contractor), where I am mostly surrounded by rough, disgusting, and sick minded men. I love the fact that I am able to talk about the most farfetched, cruel, and down right fucked up subjects that come to mind while at work. Current subjects: How we should skull-fuck Iran and zoophilia. From the little experience I have in working a “real world” job, political correctness, and politeness seem to be the dominant social behavior. Dog fucking, it seems, has no place in a professional, productive, and cohesive work environment.

I don’t believe I can handle a job where censoring my dirty mouth, avoiding offensive subjects, and being a “nancy no-no” are required. I worked in a warehouse for a small skin care company for two months. Aside from the two owners and two other guys who worked the warehouse with me, the staff of fifteen was all women. I remember one time I came into work, still sleepy, possibly hung over, and one of the girls said, “Good Morning, Raul.” to which I responded “I fucking hate my life.” With a horrified look on her face, she proceeded to say “You know, life is beautiful, you have a job, my husband doesn’t have one… blah, blah, blah, I’m a narrow minded bitch.” I don’t remember what, if anything, I said to her, but I do remember thinking, “Really? Take a fucking joke, cunt.”

My dark sense of humor began to develop when I was a teenager. Back in the days when Rotten.com and ebaumsworld.com were relevant. The internet allowed me to grow insensitive and to hold nothing as sacred. I learned to love and adore our first amendment rights and to despise censorship and any form of dishonesty. Internet writers like Maddox and Tucker Max combined with the violent, hate-filled attitudes of the men I served in the Army with, allowed me to realize that it was alright to laugh at the thought of: taking a preacher, bending him over a pew, fucking him in the ass, until he swears that he is a Jew.

In his book, Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain says of the people who occupy the male dominated profession of line cooks “You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. You wouldn’t be too far off base.” I believe, to a lesser extent, the men who work male dominated blue collar jobs, exhibit these dark characteristics. We like it. We like being able to exhibit our lowbrow, unhealthy, sickening selves in the place we spend most of our time.

Some people do need to feel safe at work. They want the humorless shield of Human Resources protecting them from anything mildly objectionable. Their spirits may be too soft or more likely, they just like to separate their work environment from their personal lives. A pretentious fuck may claim acting like a testosterone infused monkey is just immature behavior that is reserved for lower classes. It’s not conductive of those who are educated, of status, or of fine pedigrees. So fucking what?

The thoughts in my mind are raunchy; I smile with delight at that which I should cringe, and my mouth is dirtier than a Mexican hooker’s pussy. Does that make me a bad person? No. There is a difference between being able to laugh at the deviant and actually doing it. It’s the men with this kind of humor who you want to fight your wars, fix your cars, save you from fires, police your streets, and cook your meals. Dark humor creates a deeper connection amongst men than whatever bull shit team building exercises the corporate world pushes.

~Raul Felix

Warrior-Scholar

“Any nation which draws too broad a difference between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.” ~Thucydides

Its easy to envision the warrior as an overzealous, testosterone infused, rage machine only hell bent on destruction. Its even easier to portray the scholar as an aging, pretentious, ivory tower elitist, digging through obscure scrolls and texts in insolation. In order for civilization, and us to progress as individuals, the mind set that you’re either/or must cease.

The warrior: whether he be a Soldier, Marine, Sailor, or Airman; must be willing to educate himself in the ways of the world. He must not only know how to fight, but why he fights. He must come to terms that sharping his mind and increasing his knowledge is every bit as important as keeping his shot groups tight and his body strong.

The scholar: whether he be in academia or an armchair intellectual, must acknowledge that only feeding the mind, while letting the body decay is a great heresy to nature. History may have been written by the scholars, but the warriors were its creators. Intellectual discussion and theory is grand, but the warriors actions and application of ideas will win the day.

The scholar and the warrior are men with their own ambitions, motives, and agendas. Each fighting a personal war within themselves and the world. It’s not enough to just be warrior or scholar, one must become both. Without the thinking of the scholar and the doing of the warrior, he will falter and face defeat on the battlefield of life.

Being a warrior-scholar doesn’t mean one has to be a member of the military or academia, but rather embrace the warrior-scholar spirit and mindset. It means being physically and mentally tough enough to overcome the trials and tribulations of life. It means being mentally versatile and resourceful enough to find solutions to each common and unique problem life puts in front of you. There will always be times where mind will triumph over matter and others where matter will beat the mind. Why not have both as an asset?

~Raul Felix

Resistance

In The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, he writes about the number one enemy of all artist. He calls it Resistance. Resistance is the reason we log onto Facebook first thing in the morning instead of getting to work on our craft. Resistance is the reason we come up with excuses as to why things can’t be done; instead of trying to figure out how it can be done. Resistance is what keeps us in our comfort zone. Its what keeps us from pushing ourselves and getting shit done. Resistance is the reason we stay mediocre and live a life of melancholy.

Resistance is the reason I haven’t posted a single blog update in over a month and half. I have been making excuses. I’ve drawn a blank as to what to write about. The muse was fucking with me. A blinking cursor with nothing written before it has stared at me, mockingly. A nasty sense of self doubt filled my being. “Maybe you don’t have what it takes, Raul. You’re not a writer, you can’t even keep up a silly little blog that no one reads.” That’s the cynical, devilish voice of Resistance stomping on my ambitions. You know what? Fuck you! I am more than good enough to accomplish my dreams and ambitions and I’m not going to let YOU or anything else stop me.

“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.” says Pressfield. I have a daily struggle with it. I have these grandeur visions of the man I will be five, ten, twenty years from now. Then I ask I myself what have I done TODAY to help me progress towards becoming that man? If I draw a blank, I feel an intense sense of disgust towards myself. If I can come with maybe two or three little things that helped become a better man, than I do have a small sense of self satisfaction, even though most of the time I feel I could have done more. For example, if can say to myself that today, I wrote 1000 words in my journal, I read for one hour, and I ran 5 miles, I will file that underneath a day where I beat Resistance(a tiny bit) and did something to become a better man. If on that day all I did was browse aimlessly on Facebook, watch movies, jerk off, and maybe did a half-assed work out. That’s a day that Resistance kicked my ass and I think of myself as a worthless bum.

Resistance is there every single day. It never gets easier to beat it, as you become better the challenges it throws your way become tougher. It gets in your face and tells you in the most brutal way possible. “Yeah, you wrote 1000 words? So fucking what? It’s garbage! How about you write 1000 words of something actually readable?” You meet that challenge and it turns around says to you “Oh, you wrote 1000 words of good stuff? So what? It’s not great. Try again, pussy.” Even when one creates their first great piece, Resistance will say to you “Oh wow, ONE great piece? You’re nothing more than a one hit wonder. You got lucky. You can’t do it again. You have no talent.” It’s a vicious, endless cycle. The challenge will either make you great or it will bury you. I chose to dig myself out and become great, no matter how deeply buried I am right now.

~Raul Felix

Cooking

Over the course of the last couple of months, I have taken it upon myself to learn how to cook. I am no Iron Chef yet, but I have made some steady progress. I have discovered that there is a certain zen in cutting vegetables into equal sized slices and throwing it in whatever bastardized version of a dish I am making. I still don’t have the discipline to follow a simple recipe for two reasons: One, I usually don’t even know, nor have the items on said recipe; Two, I live in Israel and I don’t speak or read Hebrew, so I’m usually left not knowing what I am buying is. Weak-minded excuses, I know.

That hasn’t stopped me from making valiant, but misguided attempts at making meals from memory. My usual cooking ritual involves little to no preparation. I simply take a look into the little bits of vegetation and dead animals that occupy my fridge and freezer. Stare blankly for a few seconds or hours and attempt to recall some meal in my distant past that was cooked in front of me by my mom or aunts. Then I try to make them using a mental account of ingredients that were in it. Calling my mom or aunt for the recipe? Yeah, I’ll do that after I fuck it up for the second time in a row. A few times, as many as I can count on one hand, it has yielded some pretty delicious results. Other times ended in disgrace and the mockery of the culinary arts.

One of my first follies occurred when I started using vegetable oil to cook. I didn’t know there was a heat setting other than max-high on the stove. I would put the frying pan on the stove and let it heat up. Then I would pour the oil in and to my surprise it would start to bubble and spray all over the stove almost instantly. Making a mess on the counter and burn my retarded little self in the process. I also didn’t realize that slowly putting the meat on there will make the oil splash and cause it spread like wildfire. Some lessons must be learned the stupid way.

In my infantile attempts at self sufficiency; I’ve made a pretty good ceviche, tuna salad, shrimp monster quesadillas, yellow fish and pizza using pre-made dough. Nothing to be amazed at, but going from diet that mainly consisted of take out and microwavable food, its a start.

I feel I am entering the stage where I can look at something being made and basically understand what’s going on. I’m slowly working on educating myself on what the hell all this ingredients they are talking about in cook books are. I even have the bright idea of using my google translate to help deal with the non-English speakers at the grocery store.

I have cooked for myself more times in the last week than I have ordered food. Not everything I made was good, but I made it. There is a certain level of pride that comes from that. I am making mistakes in my cooking right now and like everything else in life, I’m learning from them. At least I’m scratching off the WHAT NOT TO DO’s of cooking. While I don’t aspire to be a world class chef, I do aspire to become competent at making a solid meal at home. Plus, chicks dig men with cooking skills.

~Raul Felix

Bitch-Wagon

There are times when I feel like I am not making any forward progress in life. I’m an American, so I come from an immediate gratification society. We want everything right fucking now. Fuck the hard work. I know how hard this mentality is engraved into my mind. I find myself battling with it on a daily basis. I want to be successful now, I want to live the good life now, and I want the glory that it comes with it. Though I struggle with it, I know the true secret to success is hard work and diligently working on your craft. In my case, its writing on a daily basis and reading as much as I can. Many a day has passed where I’ve failed to accomplish what I’ve set out to do; and for the most part, had nothing to show for it.

“There is no royal road to geometry” Euclid said to a young Pharaoh who asked “Must a Pharaoh learn like a common slave?” That’s a concrete fact in whatever craft one wants to learn. No matter what class, country, race, or religion one comes from, the road to success is always through hard productive work, diligence, and discipline. I know this intellectually, but it hard not to be a little whinny bitch about it when it seems to take so long and the going gets tough. Another key I believe is not to let your bitching get in the way. It’s okay to say the occasional “I hate my fucking existence” or have the heavy sigh in frustration that only a cigarette or stiff drink can take care of. In fact, the frustrations shows that you’re actually challenging yourself and not just coasting through life.

Don’t stay on the bitch-wagon too long. That’s where the problem truly lies. You’re riding the bitch-wagon longer than then actually working on your skills and seeing what you can to do get better. I’ve been a victim of this countless times. I would bitch to myself about how I can’t get words on the pages or get into the zone. Instead of forcing myself to get something down, I would just let my mind wander, go on Facebook, and overall do jack shit production wise. Next thing I would know, I would have been five hours since I was in full frustration and instead of making the most of those hours, I pissed them away.

Am I perfect now? No. I still find myself taking longer rides on the bitch-wagon than I should be. I’m happy to report though, those rides are steadily getting shorter and shorter. What would take me a few days to get around to doing now takes me a day or few hours. Eventually, I will get to the point where my rides on the bitch-wagon will be at the bare minimum, because after all, I am human and I still need to bitch and moan on occasion.

~Raul Felix

Talent Wanted

I always wondered what talent I had growing up. I never could quite figure out what it was. I’m tall, athletic, strong, and reasonably smart. But I never excelled at sports(I have zero talent in that department) or did well in school. In fact, if you were to look at my grades in school since 6th grade, you’d be inclined to think my future would be bleak.

One thing that always seemed a constant in my life since I was fourteen was reading and writing. My nose would usually be in a book or magazine; though my reading was so slow that it would usually take me about three or four months to finish a novel. I still remember the first novel I finished reading from cover to cover was The Brothers War by Jeff Grubb. It was a fantasy novel based on the Magic: The Gathering universe that I used to be very into. After that I read a bunch of the Xanth novels by Piers Anthony, Question Quest being my favorite. I never read the books assigned to me in English class. To this day I still haven’t read Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, or anything to do with Shakespeare. Though, I do intend to read them at one point. Except Shakespeare, call me uneducated, but I have very little tolerance to read an old and obsolete version of English.

I never quite kept a journal, but I would on occasion write about the “problems” in my life in a word document or would write long-winded e-mails to a friend about what was on my mind. I also attribute AOL Instant Messenger(AIM) for my ability to write quickly. I was not one for phone calls really. I would usually start, develop, and keep my relationships with friends by talking on AIM. So over the course of time I became vastly more comfortable with the written word than the spoken.

It hit me that throughout my life I’ve been told that my writing was very good. I started to wonder if this was the thing that I had a talent for. I needed to explore this. In April of 2011 I made it a goal to keep a daily journal of at least 1000 words. It took me a few months to become consistent with it, sometimes missing four or five days in between entries. Even now, I don’t quite hit  the everyday mark. I’ll miss three or four days a month. I see myself steadily improving though. My streaks of not missing a day where I write 1000 words of usually gibberish and utterly unreadable dribble have increased. I started reading more and more into the subject of writing and doing the one thing that many aspiring writers simply fail to do; write! Write, write, and write some more is the advice I constantly I heard echoed. Seems simple enough. But write about what? Anything! Just write. I don’t feel like I am an expert in anything at the moment, so I started writing about that subject that I know best, myself.

I see this as the second phase of I-don’t-know-how-many-phases project of developing myself as a writer. Simply getting whatever I am writing out there for you, the reader, to criticize, destroy, and hopefully enjoy. Through this, I hope to see if I truly have a talent for writing. Like any talent worth a damn, it will take a long time to develop and blossom.

~Raul Felix

It Begins

Land in Between Lakes, Kentucky

I have put this off too long enough. For almost the past year I have written in a private journal. I rarely share any of my writing with anyone. But I feel the time has come that I take the next step and get what I have in the open. There are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there and I’m hoping that through my evolution as a writer I will be able to grab the attention of some you and hopefully I have something to offer you. We all have to start somewhere and this is how I chose to start. Its not really too important that you know who I am right now. I hope I will be able to show who and what I am all about in the future.

I can entrust you with one dream that I do have, which is to become a writer. I know its a tough gig, that I have a long uphill battle ahead of me, and the writing profession is evolving now and there is no clear cut way to make it. Though, I know one big thing to do is start writing and have others read what you have to say.

I will take you through my trials and errors as I try to make it as writer and as man in general. I will let you into my life and into my journey. I can’t forecast what direction this blog will go, but I can promise you that I won’t abandon it. I promise to be as real, truthful, and direct as I can be for whatever subject matter I chose to write about. The time for thinking about writing a blog for me is a over and the time to take the first step has come.

Like that old cliche proverb says. “The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.”

Here’s to the first step that will lead to a lifetime of success and growth.

~Raul Felix

 

*Picture: Was taken at Land in Between Lakes, Kentucky on my 2009, 2-month long Summer Motorcycle Trip Around the U.S.