SPACE IS GONNA DO ME GOOD?

"It's not dark yet, but it's gettin' there..." - Bob Dylan

I needed space, and I got it. Stagnation had gotten the best of me, and dissolved most of my drive and desire, and I needed space from everything that surrounded me. Family, friends, my workfarm of a crappy job, Anchorage... everything. Luckily, I had enough desire left to force myself to take a leap. Not of faith, necessarily; I knew the landing could very well be the roughest I had ever encountered, but I set my resolve to deal with whatever met me at the bottom of that crevasse.

I left my comfortable home of 17 years and job of 22 years in a state that I had lived in for the overwhelming majority of my 41 years in order to start a new home, job and life. I found an interesting but highly underpaying job that keeps me extremely busy and exhausted, which is fine (except the money). I love my home life: especially with Jen, but also with the baby girls and my cranky 20-year old cat. I like the area that I live in and it is a nice change to not have to worry about the cold and the snow for the first time in my life. And I love the irony that of all the gang, I live in a place with a gorgeous swimming pool, because I will never use it. I really don't like that our work schedules don't allow Jen and I very much time together, but when we do get the odd day off simultaneously, we make the most of it. We live in an exciting place with a million things to do, and at the rate we are going, it will take us about 400 years to do all of it. Because I have so much time for my lonesome, I have finally taken to writing as much as I used to dream that I could. I not only started a pair of blogs, but also pulled out old story notes, poem and song fragments, and partial screenplays and novels, and have begun working anew on a great many projects. I took up cooking as a new hobby, finding a new meditative center in the process, and have started eyeing ukeleles and guitars in the music stores (another long-suppressed back-of-the-brain interest). While I wasn't making a ton of new friends, I have met some nice people and hope that I continue to grow relationships with them.

While my life in Anchorage was mostly enjoyable, it had started to eat away at me. Here in California, I felt refreshed and the world seemed new and exciting for the first time in a long time. Apart from the job, which had started to became dull and annoying to increasing degrees, I was enjoying every single thing that came my way. I was steamrolling happily along and nothing was going to slow me down.

And then I took a vacation.

At first, I made a promise to not blog during our actual trip, but, of my own accord, I decided to take a month off from the process. Three weeks before the vacation began, I was already a wreck. I had gotten out of my routine, which was anything but as far as production went, and I slipped back into my old ADD ways: easily distracted by the slightest things, and absolutely unable to focus on any one thing, especially things of importance. I started to slip at work, and though I still got up at the same time each morning, that 90 minutes of pure writing before work turned into television time, and I found myself sluggish and under-alert during the rest of the day. On my last day at the office before my actual vacation, a casual and unthinking snubbing by one of my bosses left me furious on my way out of the door, and I really wanted it to hit me on the ass on my way out, just so I would have some cause to turn around and do some damage to the fucking place by kicking the glass to pieces.

While I did take copious notes on our roadtrip and had a lot of fun during the Arizona and New Mexico section of the vacation, but Texas left me depressed and angry. The depression traveled back with me, and on August 9, when I had told myself that I would begin officially blogging again, I had a mini breakdown. I jumped the Cel Bloc revival to September 9th instead, and now I doubt that I will start it up again at all. I made a couple passes at entries on this blog before August 9th, but my heart just wasn't in them. As a result, neither were my brain nor my fingers.

And so here I am. Boo-fucking-hoo, you might say. I don't blame you. Say what you want, because I really don't give a shit, and gathering sympathy from the outside is not the point for putting my little sobfest to print here. This blog is merely here for me to exercise my need to write, and when that need is suffering, this blog is a crucial tool towards healing that need. Because I can't just bash words out on a page or on a lifeless Word document and consider myself to have done anything. While this is my blog, it is still a very public device, and it forces me to commit myself to doing something, whether three people are reading or a thousand.

I'm just trying to write myself out of this funk. I clearly have anger to burn, and I need to truly let loose in some fashion before I can continue on as before. Because this is nowhere near as low as I can go, just as it is not halfway as loud as I can fucking get.

Yet again, I just need some space. And if it takes filling up that space with little sputtering whirls of steam, then so be it.

Consider this section of space filled...