Misappropriation of a Blog
Its curious but after reading Layne lately, I feel a guilt of not utilizing my blog in the way she has. Of not using it as a reflecting board for the voices that bounce around in my head. For the personal irritations, triumphs and other micro events that go to creating persons.
Instead I use my blog for entertainment more than anything else. An occasional personal rant about life up close but I cannot do it anymore really. Its strange but there is no anonymity here for me.

I couldn't write about many things because it would repercuss through my external life. Its hard to accept that at times. I juxtaposed my two worlds too much, too quickly and that ability of the blog to bleed out the inside life is gone.

I don't think there's any problem with that in many senses as I can't and won't expose myself in the same raw and open manner that Layne does. My image of her is something out of an acid trip and Pink Floyd and Ralph Steadman. It is a solid beam of light in darkness upon a collapsed doll, heaped upon itself. I would pick her up, would prop her body, would lift her face from her chest. Her deep, deep sadness like an icy wind from her limp body.

But I imagine my own energy, my own heat radiating back. Knowing the glow of positive energies, knowing that my life force is strong, that my will is strong, that my esteem is strong, that my mind is strong, that my body is strong and willing and capable.

I see in Layne an extreme, an apogee or nadir, I can't remember which right now. She is prostrate on the barrel's bottom, oozing into the corners as best she can. I can will anything I can get near, I can mend those broken synapses in her brain that were cut ages ago. I can, I know I can if I just will it hard enough. Its easier that way too and that's the kindred sense I have in her. I relate to her need to be needed by others, to please others, to do for others. There is no greater satisfaction than the gratitude of others, sometimes. I think Layne and I differ in our boundaries, she admits that hers are non existent where mine were shaped by my upbringing. Empathy imparted by my mother, logic from my father, slap them together and mix in the heritages from both sides, how I was raised, the lengths my mother went to to keep three kids and herself going.

My brother feels like he grew up poor and maybe we did, I don't think so. The house I grew up in used to be in books, it was a great big old house. The house we moved into in Vermont was built for us, we had land to roam on. I got to make the switch from suburbs outside Baltimore to countryside with my own kingdom. I was 11 when we moved to Vermont, the year before my 7th grade year. I moved to a tiny blink of a town on the central eastern border of Vermont, from 50,000 people to 2,200 in only 15 hours of driving.

He was already a teenager and, I think, burned about his crappy clothes we had, about the car we drove around in. My sister was well old enough to be on her own life path already. Six years is a long distance to span, especially at 11. With my mother working, I was left to go wild, to run through the woods, to learn how to throw a hatchet, to shooting BB guns at friends in mock wars among pine trees, to sleeping under my slanted skylight windows in winter and watching the freezing rain, slush and snow make ever changing worlds as they drifted off the lower edge only to be replaced by more snow, always more snow.

We would learn that shooting woodstoves with water was a cheap thrill but could also crack one. We learned that matches can combust without friction, just by lying on a hot stovetop. We would amuse ourselves with glowing red hot pokers plunged deep into snow drifts at the doors.

My youth was spent experimenting, trying and doing. It set me up for a lifetime of willingness to try, to want to give a shot to anything deemed worthwhile. Knowledge that continues to be a prime motivation. Did I know I could grow bonsai? No but I did it anyway and have gotten mildly decent in the six years or so I've been doing it. It has its own lessons, by the way.

I know that my hold on my life is tenuous. That this current state of things is just another step to the next state. I am in love, I have direction, I have to-do lists a mile long. But I'm rarely depressed even though I harbor no illusions to myself about the uphill battle I face as well as Layne. Its always uphill, for all of us. Its just a different hill. I guess the real question is where are you willing to stop climbing or where are you forced to stop for whatever reason? Limited by internal inhibitors, by upbringing, by perceived social strata, by economic classification.

The hard part for me is to find that one thing that brings me the ultimate pleasure, the thing I could do for the rest of my life, to pour myself into it, to live breathe and form my life around. I can't settle on just one, there are lots of things I'd love to do for a living but rationalize reasons why not. I need to focus on rationalizing why, not why not. Its so very, very easy to see the route that others should take to their salvation but one's own route must, for some reason, by obscured. Or it must obscure itself because I can see the vague outlines of how to do what I want but the focus isn't there.

I know the steps that must be taken to get there but they are wide apart in my mind, I need to fill in the leaps, make things more likely instead of just possible.
Will I get there? Damn, I don't know. Its too easy to lose sight of the goals as if I were on an undulating sea, lost in the troughs only to rise up to another crest and see how far I've drifted off course. That's why I keep the lists, the notes, the directional markers, those blocks in mind to pound the pitons in to secure the rope, no way am I going in without a safety rope to get the hell back out if I need to.

I don't know, my mind's a mess, cluttered and random. Tired, looking ahead to being tired tomorrow but also thinking about steps, tiny imperceptible actions that propel the drive to the goal. Finding it again each time the wave crests. Wondering, in the troughs, whether I'm moving towards the right goal but moving in that way in any case because direction must (it MUST) be better than being adrift. Though there's that part of the brain that wonders aloud (as always) if its such a good thing to have direction if that direction is toward personal destruction?

As I approach that moment in the night when I can decide to press on, regardless of the consequences, I wonder what a day without work might offer tomorrow. Knowing that I shouldn't but thinking that I should. Just be elsewhere for the day, work on me again, make those steps as big as I can, eat up the miles I know are awaiting me but also knowing that no race I'm in can be won in a day, it can only be won by applying me, all of me to each day as it comes. Riding the waves and moving toward where I want/need (there can be no difference at this point) to go.

But, as my tumblers filled with nothing but the vapors this is a natural place to put the wraps on whatever path I've been trying to take tonight.