A Revelation and A Resolution

              The past year and a half has been one of the most exciting and beautiful of my life. In gas station parking lots, on pew kneelers in a catholic cathedral, and in a copse of trees awash in ashy failure, I’ve begun to discover just what it means to belong to another human, and to be entrusted with a human soul. My faith has been challenged more directly and more ambitiously than ever before, and has continually emerged from battle refreshed and renewed.

               Through the record-setting heat of last summer and into the heavy woolen winter, I worked two jobs, averaging more than 45 hours a week, and managed to take a full load of courses more intellectually ambitious than any previous semester of my collegiate career. In order to complete projects and study for exams, I was frequently obliged to burn the midnight oil until relentless daylight seared my irises, already dyed pink by contact lens irritation.

                And in January, I stumbled out of it with a 3.85 cumulative GPA, and onto a plane. From January to May, five of my best friends and I rampaged across the South American continent in an ancient station-wagon, taking life as it came.

                I came home, swept back into my arms a woman for whom the adjective ‘incomparable’ was personally crafted, slid a ring onto her finger and set a date.

               I say this not to toot my own horn. Goodness knows there are resoundingly more popular venues for torn-tootling than this blog.  I say it to give myself perspective: my life is awesome.

               I say this because through all of it, I have been consistently distracted.  I let the most miniscule uncertainty or tension in a friendship upend my world. I let my perfectionism become writer’s block, and my writer’s block become a monkey. The monkey, suffering no similar creative blockage, has purchased a saddle and become a relatively nimble horseman at my expense, since.

               I’ve known, throughout, that my life is awesome.

                But somehow, despite maintaining a mostly-proper outlook of the big things, I’ve allowed myself to lose the intense gratitude of the remarkably blessed.

               This evening, due in part to John Wayne, King of the Apes, and some minor unpleasantness that has arisen regarding my employment, I began to compose a sad, sad, song.

                No worries, I shan't be sharing.

                Anyway, the upshot was something along the lines of the endless endurance required to live, and the way in which we all get stretched out further than possible, until God—having unfairly extended our rubber-band souls to the point where the gritty grains begin to show—lets us snap back together. Fulfilling my role of Faithless Israelite 1, I was on the point of expressing doubt as to whether He was ever going to stop stretching.

                  And then it hit me like a musket-ball between the eyes. An archaic truth, unearthed in millennia past, and a personal mantra for me since roughly my twelfth year of existence: it’s all in your attitude. It’s all in perspective.

                   It’s odd to me that I’ve been so close to right this whole time, all the while allowing a pessimistic and thoroughly unindomitable frame of mind to overwhelm the sunniness in which my soul was made to bask. It leaves me more than a little embarrassed, let me tell you.

                  It also fills me with gratitude that a certain Someone was willing to extend the revelation while I was soggily sobbing in verse form.

                  And finally, it allows me to repeat my epiphany for your benefit, and for my own when the time to be reminded comes again: how good or bad your life is is not entirely in your control all the time, but most of the time, it is. And when the skies seem black, and cares attack, and you essay to count your blessings….Count ‘em, count ‘em, count ‘em. And put some soul into it. 

Some History

I began writing, began actually writing, at an early age. From approximately age eleven, I channeled my predispositions to self-expression and performance most devotedly (amongst many lesser passions) into the written word. I wrote approximately eighty pages of a prodigiously complex novel at that self-same age of double-ones. The story centered on a surprisingly dramatic civil war in a medieval kingdom in which all of the characters were named and styled after myself and my cousins. I was a ninja. I lost the girl I loved, and I died. Even at eleven, I understood that one must murder one's darlings, death and tragedy are inevitable, and readers relish the unexpected.

Two annums on, at thirteen, I decided that I'd try writing songs, so that someday I could be an ultra-famous musician. My motives at the time, I believe, revolved around impressing girls. My early songs did impress my sisters and their few friends who saw them, and to this day, I continue to feebly poke away at lyrics, and in recent years, abomination of abominations, I also write poetry. 

At about thirteen, I was entangled by a story about a boy, a girl, and a posse of warring aliens that was originally dreamed up with only the barest whisper of an accompanying plot by my best friend, and his best friend. For a few years, all three of us bounced ideas off one another, but in the end, my best friend and I lost track of his friend, and--with apologies to my best friend--most everybody but me lost track of the story. I, however, fell so deeply in love with the world I created to accompany the characters that had been birthed from the original cardboard cut-outs that I decided to devote myself to writing other fiction, so that in ten years' time--a guidebook advised me it took nearly a decade of practice before one was a truly worthwhile artist in prose--I'd be a worthy scribe to finish the story.

It has been ten years. In those ten years, I've written three complete novels, two halves, innumerable songs, slightly more numerable articles, and the bones of a spartan post-apocalyptic musical. And I'm still not the writer I hope writes that story. But I am more determined than ever to become him. I am more determined than ever that this writing thing--if I love it so much as I claim--deserves attention and deserves effort, and that it is entirely worthy of my best efforts to eventually dress up this blog, to send articles, essays, short stories and novels to editors and agents who do not want them, if only to demonstrate to myself that I love writing, and I mean to do it as well and as fully as possible. 

This post, then, if anything, serves as my ultimatum to myself: I am announcing my intentions to the anyone-at-all who may stumble across it. I intend to write, and as your poor luck may have it, I intend to write here.

Here goes.

That Moment...

...When you post on an interesting blog, and realize that you´re posting under the ramshackle leftovers of your teenage xanga persona. And then you think ¨Zounds. I could use this thing.¨


...For the moment, I´m all tied up in blogging at thesouthernrampage.blogspot.com, but I have some ideas for this place, when I´m finished there. If you´re interested, check back here in June. At which point we will do our darndest to cancel your interest.