Gotta Be More

There's gotta be more.  It's a simple truth in my life that there's gotta be more.  Gotta be more to life than simply the bittersweet symphony of being "a slave to money and then you die."  Gotta to be more things, people, places, intensity, passion, sex, love, adulation, distractions, stuff - the list is endless - as there has even gotta be more of "gotta be more".

This insatiable quest in chasing a kind of satisfaction that is forever out of reach. 

It led me to anxiety that I would never actually satisfy any need or want, then frustration that I was powerless to manage this feeling of chasing and striving and endlessly seeking, onto anger that I was failing at so many things and not quite getting just where I wanted to be or performing at just under what I felt was my optimum level.  And finally, exhausted, I will swirl into a hopeless spiral of depression and bitter defeat resigned to the realization I was broken and inadequate.

So, still seeking a "gotta be more" to it than this shit, I retreated into what soon became the religious experience of drinking.  Drinking was the holy magic that lifted me from the mundane and elevated everyday life into an almost instant "gotta be more" situation.

When I was blinking back gulps of tepid wine, I felt I was arriving at that "gotta be more" apex, where life is more than the humdrum mediocrity of details and meaningless routine.  Drunk, I was indeed getting more out of each moment as I was embraced by the warmth and intensity of being thoroughly in my own private universe.

And so it was for a long long time.  Each day I would endure the what I saw as the trite nonsense and endless trivial details of the real world only to rush home and gently escape to my drunken nirvana.  It was my way of answering the nagging existential dilemma of "but surely there's gotta be more?" when faced with the dreary drudgery of day to day.

But in the meantime, life was happening in the background - we were married and my career was evolving and opportunities were taken and missed, my daughters were born, houses bought and sold - the orchestra of life was playing loudly and dramatically as ever.  But I was only present in half of my life, otherwise I was furiously drinking myself to believe "there's gotta be more."