Crying in the wilderness

I need something good to happen.

I just got assigned a child support payment two days after finding out that a job I was promised will not be materializing.

I'm supporting two people, two dogs, and part of my kid, and I have no idea how I am going to continue to do that for very long.

Tomorrow I file for unemployment.

This is not what I dreamed.

I even pray sometimes, in tiny shameful breaths.  Just "help", usually.  "Help me, God.", sometimes.  I have yet to notice any good news so far.

I'm going to have to do this myself.  Why is it so hard to get that notion through my head?  It seems to be difficult to have faith in my ability to solve my problems.  But that is the only thing that seems to help.  Well, the only thing in my control, anyway.

I control only myself directly.  I must practice controlling other things *through* myself.  That is, practice using the control I naturally have over myself to assert an intended effect on my environment.  That such a thing is possible, I can believe.  That's a start.

I can control my environment.  But to what extent?  That seems likely to be something that comes with practice.

I can control what goes out of my email account, for example.  I can send resumes and issue other correspondence that is clearly a necessary requisite to receiving job offers.  The telephone as well.

Where to send the emails, and *what* to send?  Learning that is only somewhat under my direct control, as I cannot watch and learn every possible opening or need a company may have.  But any work I do in that vein will increase my exposure, which seems vital to a successful process.

This seems clear and obvious enough once stated, but it is necessary for me to take my mind down this path.  Down all the paths that I may have walked before, but that don't stick until I wear them bare, making them easy to walk the next time.

I need to keep reminding myself of the power I *do* have.  In thought and in deed.

Amen.

This is exactly how tired I want to be at 8:20 on a week night.  Tired enough to really be ready to go to bed in two or three hours, but no longer.

All it took was getting up at 6:30 this morning. After going to bed at midnight.  After spontaneously waking up, massively hungover, at 6:30 the previous morning.  After crashing at midnight again.   And spending all day running errands and driving four hours across west Tennessee.   Midnight to 6:30, twice in a row.

That's all it took to make me good and tired.  Plus a painkiller.  Plus one can of beer.

Now I feel nice and tired.  Not exhausted (somehow).  Just relaxed.  Looking forward to bed, but not dreading it for being too near.

Tired enough to not be in denial about my problems, whether to deny them or inflate them.  Tired enough to just.. see them.

The things that suck do, indeed suck.  And the things that rock, rock.  That sounds so simple-minded, so facile.  But it is so very easy to lose sight of.  Maybe it's why wisdom tends to come with age -- as a child, you're full of hope and depression and determination and impatience and all the thousand other words we have for describing various forms of self-deception.

The good and bad always co-exist.  The dog I spent too much to neuter will be much better off and better for me because of it, for example.

Too tired to hope.  Too tired to worry.  Just tired enough to see.

I'm stuck in limbo, and the money's running out.

I'm stuck in limbo, and the money's running out.

Trying to move back to Nashville.

The guy at the recruiting agency assures me that I've got a position to go to, but the employer hasn't specified a start date yet.  This puts me in a bind, as I don't know whether to look for other jobs or commit to this one by renting a place.  Except I can't do that because I don't have proof of employment.

I thought I had the job a week ago (or so.. has it really only been five days?).  The recruiter said that the employer had decided to hire me.  This was great news.  It still is.  But nothing has been signed or sent to me.  The fact is that, right now, I do NOT have a job.

Project:  Start with "The first thing".  Go.

The first thing to keep in mind is how much everything is going to smell like oranges.  This has been associated in the past with strokes and other forms of physiocognitive breakdown, but as a side effect of the treatment, it serves as a harbinger of greater alertness than ever before experienced, rather than permanent sleep.  The olfactory effect arises in both cases from the onset of sudden drastic changes in the brain's psychophysiology, but in the case of the awakening process, the reconfiguration is expertly guided into a more complete and truly holistic apogee of order; the level of efficiency in neurological function is improved so drastically that emergent properties occur in the system of the brain, resulting subjectively in what most beneficiaries of the process tend to describe in such terms as 'beatific', 'resurrected', and in a number of cases deemed statistically significant by the leading experts, the precise word 'omniscient' is used.

The science behind the awakening process is sufficiently advanced that many of the world's most advanced heuristic processors are required to even approximate the approach that must be taken toward any specific beneficiary.  Contributing to the complexity is the enormous variability in individual subject experience and history, and the irreducibly poor suitability for an analysis of the process to be cast into any metaphor biological processors can readily understand.

The final word in necessity dictates that human minds alone shall be subject to the expenditures of redefinition as greater than previously instantiated.  The reckless disorder and lack of necessary stricture overseeing the process of meatbrain development heretofore extant shall under the benefit and beneficence of our parasenescent birthing into the immediate aspect of the multiverse dictates and demands that the obsolescent squishiness be reconstituted like digestion into paragonistic rapture represented best as a story about a puppet.

"I'm afraid it just gets worse from there."

"Dammit, and I thought making a writer out of this kid was gonna be easy."

"Nothing's free.  Install the other reality and have another go?"

"Knock yourself out.  I'm having a smoke."

I think I'm a damn fine writer -- words are my bitch, as my girlfriend likes to tell me.  I already knew this about myself.  I've had a love affair and fascination with writing for as long as I can remember.  When I think about this characteristic of myself, my mind soon turns to guilt over how little I actually do write.  I genuinely believe that I have a talent for words, and some real messages of value to express, and I don't want to keep feeling ashamed for not doing so.

Therefore I've formed a resolution to write something for at least 30 minutes a day.  It can be anything at all so long as it's something.  Songs count.  Poems count.  Blog posts count.  Hell, even computer code counts. It doesn't matter if what I turn out is crap.  It doesn't matter if it gets thrown out as soon as I'm done.  The only thing that matters is that I write it.

This blog might be a repository for much of this.  I suppose I don't have to worry about my writing turning out to be a mess of vapid rambling, since nobody reads this anyway.  That could always change, I suppose, but that's not the kind of thing I think I should depend on.  I don't want to be that guy I met at little five points that time in Atlanta who handed me a little booklet, obviously self-published, of some of the worst poetry I've ever tried to give an honest reading of.

I'm not of the belief that the world will be significantly worse off without my ideas being a part of the cultural lexicon.  I want that to be the case, but I can't quite muster the chutzpah to claim that it is.  Honestly, I just want my writing to be read and enjoyed, by whoever at whatever level.  I don't have to write the Great American Novel, and am not so foolish to think that I could.  I'd be happy writing fan fiction, so long as someone tells me they like it.

And I'll stop there -- maybe my next post can be about why I want to write at all.

I write these words to nowhere

As I wait to get wise.

Realizing life is no fair

Still worth a few more tries

I sit here next to my son.  I hear his little three-year-old snores, and I know that, as long as he is close to me, he is safe.

There are few better feelings in this life; I am fortunate.

I also dread the future, because dear god what if I fail him?  What if I already have?  It's not as if I am contributing any significant amount of money to his maintenance.  In that regard alone, I utterly fail as a father.

So it is.  But I love him so fiercely.  His existence gives purpose to mine.  I would like to back up for a moment and say that I know how often such statements as the previous are used in what can charitably be called a hyperbolic way, in order to make a point.  But my general methodology is much more direct and genuine (I hope) than that.  I meant exactly no more and no less than what the words themselves mean:  His existence gives purpose to mine.  I was the *most* surprised, honestly, to find that my life seems to have been rather empty and pointless before this little guy came along.  And, unlike many parents (or how they seem to imply), I cannot take any credit for how awesome this guy is.  I suppose he shares roughly half my genetic code, though.  And I suppose he has learned an attitude or two from me.  But he is around his mother much more than me, and that has always been the case.  So how is he this awesome in a way that feels this personal?

These, and other questions, will or will not be further explored in blog posts I may or may not write in the future.  Life is uncertainty: suck it up.