“Confidence is like putting on cologne in the morning. A little dab behind the ears and one on the neck, and people will brighten up as you get stuck in elevators with them. Once that runs out though, and you start sweating, well, kinda goes the other way when you’re the stinky guy everybody’s trapped in a warm metal box with only one exit. My advice? Try keeping one of those sample bottles of cologne on your person, and try keeping on a nothing-bothers-me grin on your face.”
(Jo’jaxon is one of the cast of the Also-Rans, the book/game thingy I’m working on. Imagine him with an elbow on the bar as he’s thinking his way through a basket of free peanuts)
“I’ve spent more than my fair share of hot summer evenings in the klieg lights, where you got the eyes of every bored audience staring holes into your back. Let me tell you, confidence is not something you have like a deep well inside of you; its like starting your day deciding on whether you got time for cooking up eggs and toast or maybe you only have time for a handful of cereal flakes as you head out the door. No matter which one you choose, by the time you’re deep into stomach rumbles and the second inning’s barely started, neither choice of breakfast stuck around that long. So what do you do then? Make it look like its not bothering you that you’re half starved and you do what you came out there to do till you can get out of there.”
“People ask me sometimes, y’know, when they’re not busy laughing at me, how I still get out there and do my thing on the pitcher’s mound even knowing that sooner or later, I’m going to mess things up royal. I usually tell them something like, ‘well, if I didn’t go out there, then all there’d be was stories of when I did do something.’ Memories, basically. That’s what it is, I think. You wanna go out there and fake the smile, fake the good times, and get in the game and play on in peoples’ heads all fresh, or do you wanna just be a faded out has-been that people forget more than they remember you.”
“Me, I’ll take the fresh memories over the replaceable ones every time and twice Sunday. So, dab on that Eau du Confidence and get out there yourself to do something you didn’t think you could do today. Don’t worry about feeling nervous, neither. We’re all out here faking it, every one of us. All you gotta do is fake it, too.”
(Like what you’ve read so far? Maybe read some more! Or explore the blog? Definitely comment, which is like reading, only much more active, in that you’re writing?)
The Also-Rans 
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