Long ago, I realized that most of the people I know, and I would guess most people in general, have no idea what they really want. What people think they want is based almost entirely on how they will be perceived by others, regardless of their own desires, interests, or even abilities. It’s a bold statement, I know, but I’ve seen it so many times, I know it’s true.

Pets are a perfect example. People think they want pets, but the vast majority of people with pets have no business keeping pets. When I was a carpet cleaner, most of my customers had pets, and of all of the hundreds of them, maybe as many as five actually gave their pets the time and attention they required, and five is being generous.

On my bike ride, just this afternoon, I passed a woman walking her dog behind the apartment building where they no doubt live. She probably just got home from work and had to take the dog out because it had been cooped up in the apartment all day. Who wants that? Certainly not the dog. A dog probably sounded like a good idea that she jumped on without thinking about the realities of keeping a pet in an apartment, and now she’s stuck with it. She has to race home every day after work and walk the dog before it pisses and shits all over the rented carpet.

On the way back, past the same apartments, I saw a woman and her mom walking two dogs that they were having trouble controlling. Who thought that was a good idea? They were making no attempts to train them either, because it was all they could do to keep them from running away. They were, again, no doubt an impulse purchase.

If any of these people actually took the time – assuming they have the time – to think about what it is that they really want out of life, I guarantee picking up shit off the ground would not be anywhere on their list. The problem, as I previously alluded to, is having the time to think about what you want.

I was blessed with the time during COVID, and though it was not instantaneous, it was insightful. I used to think that what I wanted was to work with my hands, building things, despite never really enjoying it. It wasn’t even until this year that I came to that realization. They say whatever you enjoyed doing when you were a kid is what you should do as an adult. I’ve only ever heard that from people who enjoy moving dirt, which is not something I’ve ever enjoyed.

When I was a kid, I liked playing with electronics. I enjoyed stereo equipment, video cameras, lighting, and anything related to audio and video. I never pursued those interests for a variety of reasons. I wish I had. Well, I am now, I just wish I had done it when I was younger.

The point of this rambling, though, is not about my life’s regrets; it’s about the idea of knowing what you want, and how once you figure that out, the things in your life that you don’t want stand out it stark contrast, especially if you’ve already built a life around the things you don’t want. Just because you’ve figured out what it is that you want from life doesn’t mean that all of the things you don’t want suddenly go away. It’s all still there, and now it has to be dealt with.

In my case, I don’t want any pets. I’ve been alive now for 47 years, and I’ve never known a minute of all that time without some useless, needy dependent animal making a mess, noise, problems, etc. Fifteen years ago, Bonnie asked if we could bring home a dog a friend of hers found because the one we had was old and she thought the kids would be sad if he died, so I said yes, even though I really wanted to say no, and now here we are fifteen years, and thousands of dollars later, I find myself cleaning up dog shit or piss from the kitchen floor every fucking day. I don’t want it.

I also don’t want to live with my mother-in-law. Had I known 26 years ago that she would be the third wheel in my relationship with Bonnie, I would have set some impenetrable boundaries, but here we are more than a quarter of a century later, and we’re her sole caregivers despite her having five other children who all, rightly so, want nothing to do with her.

I also don’t want a yard that I have to maintain or neighbors who leave their dogs in their yards to bark all fucking day long. The problem is, these are all big, costly, ongoing mistakes with no easy or quick solutions, so I have no choice in the short term but to find ways to deal with them, and I do. I clean up the shit on the kitchen floor, but there’s always more shit.

That’s the crux of the problem: Once you figure out what you really want, there’s always something there, trying to distract you. A reckless person might say fuck it and run away, but I know that will only create more problems than it solves. I suppose I’ll just have to keep reminding myself that I didn’t figure out what I wanted overnight, so it’s going to take some time to undo the life I built around what I thought I wanted. As my mom always says: Patience is a virgin, she’s never been tried.