All Meandering is an Aside

Been a minute since my last post. Got caught up in the grind, as we all do from time to time. Forgot about the take back, clap back, but it's a long weekend and some things have not yet arrived, so here we find ourselves.

There are times when I've got that itch, that restlessness, that skin-crawling tingle. The feeling that keeps me up at night doing chores no one has any business doing at 4 AM. The feeling that keeps me up listening to another Bon Iver album, sweating in my boxer-briefs, typing into the cyber-ether. My proverbial shout from the mountaintops to the bottom of the sea.

I hope you don't mind this divergence into something a little more personal. There are times when my fingers must. When they have to. Have to type. Have to spin words like spiders must spin webs, like electronic daemons must crawl the interweb, trawling cyberspace until the end of time.

Soon, I'm going to be a father. I am going to have a little girl. It could happen at any time. She'll come into this world wet, squalling, and nothing will ever be the same.

Now, I'm in a new job -- a job I am really good at, that I enjoy, that pays well, gives good benefits, where my coworkers and colleagues appreciate me.

I've recovered from a bout of sickness earlier this year. As much as anyone can recover from anything that doesn't kill us.

My life is transformed. So quickly I hardly recognize the man I see in the mirror each day I wake and each night before I sleep. When I can sleep. When I can stop the endless thoughts cascading like a palmful of water.

The second book is done. It's out and published, finally, after years carried long beyond the anticipated term, though the labor was easier than expected.

So, what now? To where do I go from here? Have I arrived at my destination? Or merely a layover? I suspect that adventures galore await but knowing the course of my life as only I (and, perhaps, a few others) know, there's that neverending suspicion the other shoe will drop. And that clatter will be followed by a silence so immense I cannot fathom what it will contain other than horrors beyond even my insomnia-induced imagination.

Call it dread Cthulu of the ever-present foreboding joy.

And so instead of quiet or solace, I seek sound and tumble-downs. I place myself amidst a rabblerouse just to keep me distracted. Such desperate distractions even the act of writing about my need to be distracted is distracting enough for these meager hours.

But it's not all doom, gloom, or lack of satisfaction. No, rather it's a keen sense that I was not born to be complacent. Or if not born, then certainly not shaped over the years to be complacent. I was made, one way or another, for more more more more. I am for the edge, the plunge, the dark, the depths, the heights, the cracks that meet crevices, the spaces far out and away.

And I'm truly lucky to have found a partner to share that journey ever onward. Beyond luck. Beyond blessed. Beyond beyond. Words fail but they approach.

It's hard to share those rare moments where all of your thoughts, complex and complicated and eccentric as only you can be at your innermost self, with another person and be instantly understood, instantly accepted. Instantaneously unalone and happy.

Yet still here I am. Awake as my love sleeps. Awake and worrying myself raw like a dog gnaws a bone. Awake and secluded in a sonic bubble while these words pour forth to try and describe something I cannot rightly describe other than to keep typing.

I am changing. I am changed. I am excited and scared at both ends.

But whatever I am or becoming or being or feeling, I intend to stare directly and embrace.

So it goes.