It’s been a hot minute.
It’s three and a half years since I posted anything to this blog. To this receptacle I had intended to dump all my various thoughts, inspirations and fears into.
But life intercedes. Events occur. Media distracts. Work disrupts. People flow in and out like the tide. Thoughts get tangled in the net of the now and it takes every effort to sort them out, much less commit them to electronic paper.
The night that you first kissed my lips
It came as a surprise
But I was made enchanted by the
Twinkle in your eyes
Life is chaos.
Things happen. Details change. Choices made.
Every minute. Every hour. Every day.
Constantly.
Two hearts
Regions apart
Aching with the same desire
How they long to be together
Entangled by passion
Entwined by ecstasy
Comforting, caressing, surrendering
Once is never enough
How they lust to share the fire
Hot and roaring
Flickering and pulsating
Lapping, quivering, bellowing, ascending
Exploding
If only it could be
She moves with the light
Sparkling effervescent in her beauty
Beaming her joy into my heart
Shining her warmth across my soul
I spend great hours in her splendor
Basking myself in her radiant smile
We touch and our bodies together glow
A brilliance of the brightest day
But now the day grows long
Light slips away from darkened corners
She is pulled from me by setting suns
Across the floor, folding into the horizon
Beyond my reach
The end of December is a time of introspection for many of us, on both a personal level and also of the world at large. We look at all our wonderful times of the past year: the accomplishments we made, the places and events we experienced, and the magnificent people we’ve shared them all with. We also throw a cautious glance at the moments that were not as wonderful – the painful instances and losses we had to endure – in the hopes that there was some significance to the suffering. We then take our pencils out and start jotting down our new “resolutions”… what we will do more of, do less of, or simply do better in the coming year ahead.
This past year was a difficult one for me. Everything seemed like it was going so well as the year began. So many of the goals I had set out for myself those decades past were finally falling in line. I felt relaxed; I felt happy. I was ready to tackle the world…. THIS WOULD BE MY YEAR.
Disappointment brings up a whole cacophony of emotions. Anger, sorrow, fear… each one twisting around inside of you like a wrestling match for control of your inner psyche.
I’ve had to deal with disappointment quite a lot this year, and last week brought some more to my doorstep. A few months ago I chose to reestablish a relationship with my ex-fiancé Ellen. I ignored all of my better judgment, hoped for a miracle, and on Thursday got burned to a brittle crisp.
Earlier this month I went to see the final dress rehearsal of “Evita” at Circle Theatre. My friend Todd Lewis is playing Juan Perón in the wonderful production, but starring as Evita is Jolene Frankey, a woman I was doing a show with exactly twenty years ago. She was but a little girl in that show, and now she’s a grown woman, a mother and a superb singer and performer. To me it does not feel like that much time has passed… it’s startling. (Oh, and Todd isn’t so bad, either.)
It brought my thoughts since then back to that time. It was a critical point in my life. Through those five years of experiences I was able to enjoy life and conquer some of my innermost demons… but it came to an abrupt, painful end.
Today I turn 47 years old. It’s been turning over in my head since I got up this morning. FORTY-SEVEN.
That seems unfathomable. How did this number sneak up on me so surreptitiously?
When you are young and primed for your life to begin, a number like that can seem a LONG way off. You have dreams and ambitions as wide as the sky… and SURELY you have all the time in the world to make your conquests.
It’s a completely different viewpoint now. Suddenly you realize that there’s a deadline to all of these goals. The finish line seems just as distant, and you’re quickly running out of breath.
Does everyone feel this growing sense of urgency as they get older, or is it just me?
It’s been over a month since my last blog post. During that time I’d been working on a post that, while started with good intentions, got too buried within its own subject matter. Work and family was more of the focus over the last five weeks, and some personal issues kept shattering my focus on the material I had set out to create. In the end, I decided to table the post and just write something here more “stream of consciousness”.
Lately, it’s been one day at a time for me. Life got quite a bit smaller after losing both my cat and my girlfriend of 2 ½ years simultaneously. Other issues happened at about the same time both personally and professionally that, all taken together, knocked me down several rungs of the ladder. If I truly believed in luck, I would have concluded that I’ve had nothing but a bad run of it since New Year’s Day. So I make it through each day by sticking with my recently developed routines and dealing with each day’s challenges as they come.
I love history.
Along with science and technology, it’s one of the pillars in my Pantheon of Eternal Geekdom. I read books on American and world history, collect historical pictures of my hometown, and watched the History Channel religiously until they followed MTV’s lead and replaced everything with reality shows.
History is about learning how (and why) we climbed from the humble origins of Homo Sapiens to the dominant beings that we are today. It’s about learning from all of those souls who have gone before us; about revering the heights that humanity has accomplished, but also learning from humanity’s past mistakes… or at least trying to. I wish more people felt this same appreciation.
One of the things I want to accomplish with my blog is to really start opening up about myself. I have spent all of my life feeling misunderstood… by not only the people I interact with, but even friends and family. I have been alive now for almost half a CENTURY, and yet I feel like I have not done enough to define to the world who I am, what I believe in, and what I stand for.
I could let it all pour out right now and write my entire autobiography here, but not only would it take quite a while to write, it would also be an unbearably long and boring read.
So what I am going to do is, every so often, I am going to make a post that focuses on one facet of me. One part of who I am. A slice of me that’s a little more digestible in one sitting. Over time, the individual pieces taken together should make a fair representation of me… or at least that is my hope.
So for this inaugural entry I will start with an easy and obvious one: I am an introvert.
0
It’s over
The end of love
The coda to our song
Pack away the memories
Put away the dreams
Return to Zero
It’s over
0
All of my life I’ve been a dog person.
That’s mostly because that is what I had as pets all of my life. I had one the instant I was born. Shadow, a German Shepherd, was already part of the family as I began my life. My brother and I spent our childhood with that big dog, running around the yard, fetching tennis balls and sticks, exploring the backyard woods, and he was always tough yet gentle. He was trusting and kind to everyone, even to the point of enduring pain – a group of teenagers from the nearby junior high once put out their cigarettes on his head, and he did nothing to them. But as we got older and faster, he got older and slower. Arthritis crept into his bones and made life difficult for him. The day we had to put him down was one of the harder days of my youth.
So here is my first post on my brand new blog. Come on in.
I’ve had the idea to write one for some time. I have been writing personal journal entries since I was a kid, though I have very often gone long stretches without writing nary a word… sometimes several years. I mourn the lost details of those gaps; I’ve had successes, tragedies, and other important events in my life that have lost some of the finer detail now in the passing time. When enough of these events have accumulated up, I often go into writing mode to attempt to preserve some of the information, and to release the emotion that is bottled up inside of me.
There are two life events that have recently happened that have drawn me back to the keyboard. One is the death of my little buddy Hamilton, my cat that has been with me through some troubled times in the last several years. After a week of increasing illness, it was discovered that he had an incurable disease. I was left with the grueling decision of letting him go peacefully or to try to help him hold on for a short while longer (at the cost of his quality of life). I grieved over the decision for an hour, though I really knew what choice I had to make the whole time. He died quietly in my arms that night.
The second event was simultaneous: the breakup of my relationship of 2 1/2 years. She was, unfortunately, not as supportive as I would have wished during the time of Hamilton’s illness. Then, in a contradictory manner, she was opposed to the decision I made to let him go. It was not the only difficult period between us, but it was the defining one that sadly ended our time together.
Now I am left to sort through my feelings on both matters, looking back on the events that led up to the eventful week, as well as my life before that and what to do going forward.
I’ve been at this moment before… as have we all, I suppose. The first day of the rest of my life.
I will post on here as often as I can / as I feel compelled to write. I know some of my friends have recently accepted the “blog every day” challenge, but it’s not my intention to post here for the sake of posting.. Living life takes precedence… blogging about it comes second. So accept my preemptive apologies to any gap I may leave from here on in.
You may read more about me and my purpose for this blog on my About This Blog page.
Thanks for reading!
