~SteelLion

Wow... I totally suck @ this journal thing. I really do mean to update this more often but pretty shiny things distract me and it winds up in the same category as the gas bill. Alot of crazy stuff on the work front, no longer a contractor Woooohooooo! I am now permanent full time with benefits 401k and the lovely lovely quarterly bonus ( its like FREE money...yanno?) Odd how I used to be a writer first and the IT gig was just bonus money and now its the other way around. I still love to write but its definitely become secondary. Although my job has called down to 10 hour days so I'll probably be doing more of that too.

Part of it is tough for me every year I see go past, fewer and fewer people actually read books. Hard to really want to read when you realize that literacy is going down hill so profoundly. Odd to think that there are whole generations now that have probably never written a letter out long hand. Just makes you think, eh?

Anyway another year is getting ready to close out and I am considering whether its time to grow up and act like an adult or continue being the kid watching saturday morning cartoons and eating fruit loops on the floor. Ideas? 37 is awfully close to 40 and they tell me I am supposed to be more uhhh ... staid or something.

Cheers.

I really hate my job some days.

Number one reason why you should never volunteer at an IT gig...

They needed someone to help out on a couple of a server rebuilds for an application cluster ... easy right ... no problem... couple of easy hours on a Saturday working from the couch watching sci-fi re-runs on my plasma tv, eh?

Important thing to ask ... WHEN! Migration started @ midnight Saturday ... lol. So I am stuck working all night when I am normally sleeping ... ugh. Thank goodness for a 10 minute break and DA!!!!!

You know its really kind of funny. I started life 3 and a half decades ago with a clear purpose in mind. I never doubted what I was here for or what I was all about. Oddly I can't help but realize how clouded that has become. All I ever wanted to do with my life was to write, to tell stories to capture emotions and paint on pages with them, to hear the scritch-scratch of my pencil scoring a page with thoughts that move me and hopefully others as well, yet I find myself here now in an office, with with 6 foot walls around me seperating me from a dozen other people who like to chat about stocks and portfolios and 401ks. I dont' know how to talk to these people they confuse me because I look out the window and wonder at how small I am compared to the horizon. But you have to make a living right? Yes. You do. Or at least I do. Don't get me wrong, being a software engineer isn't the worst gig in the world but it does monopolize my life from time to time and I wake up one day and wonder what ever became of the man who yeared for the blank white page to be filled with epic dreams of times long past or stories of what if's and never-weres.

I'm still here I guess. Just not as strong as I once was, torn down by betrayals manifest in the aged scars that crease my countenance where once only big happy dopey stupid grins resided. I shudder to think how easy it can be to get lost in the plodding and sordid crowds we see around us. After all our lives are the wounds but we are the knives, right?

I just want to thank a certain Deviant of Mass Renown for reminding me what life is really about and why I write poetry and stories and look to the clouds and dream of something other than what's right in front of my face. Bless you.

"Our lives are the wounds, but we are the knives"

basically ... I just suck.

Wishin I could find that perfect Storm again . . .

"Our lives are the wounds, but we are the knives"

It gest more and more difficult to write the older I get. I suppose because of how jaded a person becomes as they grow older, learn the scars bred from wounds both personal and global. I remember starting to write at the age of 9 or 10 and being so overwhelmed by passion and purpose to inspire in some young mind the same way that I was by my contemporaries.... Now.. almost 3 decades later I feel hollow. Is this how Howard felt when he stuck a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger? I don't know ... but I can't imagine its much different. I set out to be a writer and I'm probably a good one but the ability to synthsize talent to career is a tough nut. Now I am an IT specialist dealing in operating systems and tool sets and productivity in enterprise environments. Its not glamorous and it bores most of the people I know to hear about it but its challenging work with some little rewards. Odd that now I have all the stability I ever needed to write and so little desire. "one more step and I might fall away ... would it matter anyway" I wonder those questions almost daily since I came to Cincinnati. Sometimes I wish for that life that was never really mine to begin with ... alot. i'm not depressed or lonely ... I'm just tired although sometimes I do wish for that life that included a wife, a daughter to raise and teach and imbue with what little knowledge I possess. I know now, that can never be but still its one of those fond wishes of "what if" which according to another contemporary is the bread and butter of a writer.

People suck... I've learned that. The same people that I wanted to salvage to help have shown me the coldness, the indifference the disengagement with which they live their lives and I've learned it too. I remember when my life was one of honor and righteusness, now in just a few short years since my lifie changed so dramatically I find my life filled with lies, with deceptions, with thievery and I wonder what ever became of that person to whom his honor was sacrosanct. When did I become all that I fought so desperately against? What time did I devolve into a creature at times alien to my every belief?

You know the funny thing about honor... its the one thing you can never reclaim... like virginity it can never be mended or made whole again. You can only pretend ... to what once was.

Wishin I could find that perfect Storm again . . .