What the hell

So much has changed, and yet I reckon if I looked back over these pages to a random entry I’d find myself still going on about the same old stuff. It’s kinda comforting, kinda frightening. But what can you do? You obviously aren’t as different now as you were then – much as you’d like to believe you’d changed so much. Still frightened, still bold, still trying to stand out, still trying to fit in.

And what now? I meditate when I remember, I run and feel I’d be crazy if I couldn’t; still make plans to do better, and I’m doing ok. I have a house I love, friends I adore and a life I wouldn’t change. I’m healthy, and well, and I’m listening to a song by David Gray right now that reminds me a whole lot of Dave Matthews Band’s Crash Into Me or Damien Rice’s The Blower’s Daughter and it’s bittersweet and a whole lotta melancholy.

 

I just started a new job, and today one of the girls at work asked me, “Do you write?” And I said of course I do. And she said, “No, like for yourself. For fun.” I had to answer her honestly and say no. But I got stuck wondering, why the hell not? And then I remembered that I had made writing my job, except not the kind of job where you get to spin prose and twist stories like flax and enthrall — I do the kind of writing where it’s endlessly the same and about nothing and for no one. It’s vaguely distressing but clearly, not enough so to make me change.

Except some nights when I’m alone and wondering what the fuck is happening with the world (Leonard Cohen dead and gone, Trump rocketing around Washington) I feel compelled to write.

And so many nights pass and I don’t put pen to page or fingers to keys because I’m tired, I think, and because I have written so much and I deserve a break and no one reads my shit anyway and that’s ok – because I never really wrote it to be read. It was only ever as way to silence the gaping maw of my mind with another task.

Well, first entry for a while. There is a god.