Self-assuredness.

You've got to know yourself, man.
What "you've got to know yourself, man"?!
What a load of horseshit.
Let me tell you a simple truth. Nobody knows themselves. And what, on this solitary blue-green ball, would be the point of knowing yourself?
You don't think people get to where they are by the good graces of their self-awareness, do you? Really?
Fuck, man.  Who would want to anyway? Riddle me the fuck that one!
You think I or anyone else gets up in the morning and says, "Today is the day of my magnum opus.  My greatest song.  My greatest lyric.  My greatest good deed.  My greatest shot at philanthropy.  My greatest crime" (well, there are MANY who think this one).
Self belief is all, you scream, red-faced and all passion and piss and vinegar.
Well, my friend, tell that to ISIS, the Republicans, the Australian Liberal Party, fundamentalists and filibuster conservatives down through all time, the lesser poets who rail against a world filled with deafness, the lesser singers and musicians and artists who rail against a public filled with a certain war-weariness for the pedestrian and the thoughtless and the mechanised, the white collar criminals, the blue collar criminals, the criminals of the clergy, the public masturbators, the soul-wasted abstainers, the physically frail, the flagellants and the fucked-up.
See where self-belief has gotten THEM!
There's only one thing to do from my jaundiced perspective.
Stick around.
Just stick around.
Stay here on this little planet, bumbling through each day, stumbling over the wrong thing said and the wrong deed, the eons lost in procrastination and doubt, the hours and lifetimes lost in a lonely sepulcher just shy of being visible to the naked eye, stick around for the measured allowance of laughter and sex juice, and just be there for THE MOMENT.  Whatever your moment might be.
And then stick around for more until the moments spill - one into the next - until you can honestly say, "Now I have had a lifetime of moments."
And then stick around to reflect upon them, or crow and gloat about them.
And fuck up.
This is important.
Make lots and lots of mistakes.
Mistakes that you can say are only your own
because life has a funny way of making you aware that the more mistakes you make on your own, the less regrets you have as time passes.
Even if the resounding echoes of those mistakes haunt your guarded hours down through the years. No, my friend, I have no time for self-assuredness, self-confidence, self-belief.
Self love, certainly.  No one I know past the age of puberty seems to be exempt from that one.
But as for the pinnacles and zeniths and victories and triumphs, I must let them come as they will, if I'm to make any sense of them at all.
And I'd advise you to do the same, if you want to enjoy your life.
Or perhaps you really do know what you want out of life.  In which case, I am of absolutely no use to you.
P.S. We're moving back to Melbourne.

Whiskey Girl