Entry 16 - September 6, 2012

The world is like a smashed hourglass with mirror shards for sand. A busted reality where time flows faster and slower at whim and where you see yourself and your past and your future reflected in moments that can never be assembled in a proper pattern.

Which is all very histrionic and maybe works as an analogy only when you are three whiskeys in. Which I am not, but I still think that is where it belongs.

My day was full. I did what I needed to do, I enjoyed bits of it, I was challenged by bits of it. I survived the whole of it. I didn't feel completely attached to it. Or perhaps I was in the moment often enough that I don't have a litany of thoughts here at the end of the day.

My mind is quiet. The jobs have been done and the tasks completed. All manners of punctuation has been attached and found satisfactory. And I worry about that. Perhaps it is because I need something to worry about, creating phantoms from every shadow to add dramatic counterpoints to a life lived so like every other. Or perhaps the alarm bells are clanging silently somewhere and their sound will only grow until I understand, too late, that there was an issue.

Or perhaps I am simply not good at settling for satisfactory. But if every day was fantastic and amazing all of my limbs would fall off from the force of all the gesticulating.

As I leave the day behind and move forward to the next, I imagine a discombobulated incongruous version of myself, floating with all of the bits gathered in a swirling cloud around my head, like the nucleus of an atom. And my arms and legs and torso electrons zipping about, collecting and processing energy, functioning and doing with only vague direction from the brain.

I can feel a warmth growing. A light. Somewhere in my life. I am planting seeds and watching the soil. And I fear and worry. Because I would rather be cautious and sad then rash and hurtful.

But what I really want is to be dynamic and helpful and wonderful and amazing. Like I know I can be.

Entry 15 - September 4, 2012

Speaking is the fastest form of communication. And that makes it the most prone to error. Chiseling a message into stone is probably the slowest, and the place where an error lasts the longest. Or so I assume. I only thought about it for a little while and then I typed it out. Writing resides somewhere in the middle, a ponderous form of communication that also can be done flippantly and swiftly.

Writing is about making choices, about revising and refining. It is about bringing a toolkit of craft built over the years and applying the contents to a problem. Writing can be wonderful, writing can be profound, writing can be profane and urbane and terrible and low and pointless. Writing can be what it is crafted to be.

I'm working on making changes in life. The kind of changes that are supposed to be permanent and positive. The kind of changes that I know will be painful and wonderful and temporary and permanent. Because change is usually all of those things. If you see the world as a long process of constant change it becomes easy to ignore the chapters and the verses that define who we were at a certain time. And if you ignore the content of each sentence then you ignore the meaning of the whole story.

It is an argument I have made before and an argument I will make again.

For tonight I am stamping my foot into the dust and saying that the things I did today mattered. The things that I have said today mattered. And that if I stomp in the same spot often enough then I stop just saying and start carving.

Whether or not I will leave behind a litany of errors is for the future to decide. My chapter and verse will be in the attempt not to do so.