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.

An Expression of What...

This evening I have attempted three times to record my thoughts concerning an incident this evening at work, but the three attempts have each been ruled a strike, and the at-bat has ended for that original concept.

In the face of such odds, one must retire, and regroup.

Unfortunately, I have been so overwhelmingly fatigued that regrouping led simply to another cluster of thoughts to fan out at the plate. In this case, I suppose the urge to express oneself overwhelms the need for there to be something to express.

Ah, Life, With Your Colorful Surprises...

Possibly this serves as a beginning of something, possibly a renewal of old things, or more probably a momentary diversion for the author. At this point, while I do find this more interesting than my previous blog which advised readers only that while I was interested in them, I was not interested in blogging for them on this site, and can they please ask for me at the front desk, I don't intend to advertise it. I intend to first see whether there is anything to advertise. An initial careful inspection of the prospective product to verify that it is, indeed, worthwhile.

I begin this, but begin it without fanfare for a number of reasons, primary among them the fact that I can't stop writing. Or rather, I have stopped writing, but my mind has continued to pour forth endless writ, but is unwilling to transfer it to anything that anyone could read. It strikes me that one fundamental desire of all those bestowed with a sufficiently bloated ego to think that they can write is to have an audience. And while the chances of an audience developing for this spartan page are somewhere in the neighborhood of a hippopotamus becoming a spokesperson for WW, the chances of an audience developing for the essays written on the parchment of my mind makes the hippo seem a sure thing.

Additionally, I am not a man who likes to think of himself as pretentious. This is directly a result of the fact that I'm astoundingly pretentious. Still, one doesn't like to let the thoughts dwell, preferring instead to think of pleasant things, like hippos who go on diets discouraging the consumption or ravagement of human beings, and as such, I don't like to anoint my foul head with the fouler title of Blogger, until I feel I've done more to deserve it.

Finally, I find that the warm reception for many of the things that I have done in the past has frozen me with stage fright of the present. The warm reception has paralyzed me, and leaves me unable to write with ease, convinced that I cannot take risks, and cannot match that which has gone before. This is bunk, hogwash, and even lower substances that hogs don't deign to wash with, and I intend to challenge my assumptions, and teach myself to take risks, and to be ridiculous again. Because if one isn't ridiculous, one isn't necessarily genuine, and when one isn't genuine, one is pretentious, and when one is pretentious, one is ridiculous.

So there it is. A commentary on the seriously unclear nature of the future of this blog. Let us see.