Post a Comment On: Return of the Slacker

To slack:
1. to make loose, or less tense or taut, as a rope; loosen.
2. to become less tense or taut, as a rope; to ease off.

Ambition:
1. an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, as power, honor, fame, or wealth, and the willingness to strive for its attainment.

A slacker:
1. a person without ambition.
2. a person who gives up the idea of ambition in order to become less tense or taut, and to make the world less tense.


Why "Return of the Slacker"?

I decided to "get my work out there" and sent it out to hundreds of elite little magazines that nobody reads, and I got rejected by most but not all of them. The amount of effort that went into such a small potential readership didn't seem worth the throwing out my time from things I liked doing, so I decided I would rather stick to my way of doing things, and experiment with other ways of having my work seen. But it involved a giving up of a certain type of ambition and desire for achievement and recognition by the status quo, thus it is "Return of the Slacker" in the sense of not trying to tailor it to chase those socially recognized achievements, or to submit it to their rules. And chasing those things is like chasing phantoms anyway, because especially in the realm of poetry and some other arts, what's the best that can happen? What's the chance you hit it big as a poet? Not much really.

And the end result of my experiments is that I am happier, feel more relaxed about my work, and have had it read online a lot, and published in other places due to it being here first.