Lines

When you’ve gone that far, where do you go from there? I have the feeling that I made this very grave error back when I started this blog. I was fresh. I was energized. I was full of ideas about where it was going to go and all the things I was going to find out about myself and finally tell about myself with the aid of anonymity. The Beast was hunting full time back then, and acting, as always, as my muse and inspiration. I thought back then that if I told all about myself, that it would help someone, somewhere, deal with their own similar issues. I thought I could make the world a little brighter, one person at a time. I spilled practically my entire life history in the course of a two or three weeks. Every major thing that had impacted my life was laid out in intimate detail. I’d never even done that in a journal. I’ve never told the Sigo even half of it. Oh, I’ve still got a couple of dark secrets, but I pretty much laid it out down to the night I tried to bleed myself out in the middle of the desert. Renaissance came and went, and gave me a lot more material to work with. And jerked a few more secrets from my gut. The ER veered off course then. First it was the guest blogging. Then the Venus-Mars deal. And finally, it just up and f-ing died. There’s practically zero content in my blog anymore, when I do post. I think it crossed the line from meaningful to self-justifying excrement a long time ago. Deep down, I’m scared in my gut that if I don’t keep posting, even some frivolous spur of the moment garbage, that the small reader base I do have will bleed off like a puddle of water in a desert wind, leaving only cracked, barren earth behind. I’ve developed a few close blog “relationships”. I hesitate to label them friendships outright, because they are both more and less than that, in their varied ways. These, too, seem perched on an invisible, fragile, and very thin line, where the slightest touch will send them over the edge to shatter on the black rocks below. My list of fears grows by the minute. Add those relationships to the list. It’s been an incredibly bad year healthwise for me, and I turned 41, and I’ve reached that invisible point already when you start wondering if you’ve already passed the halfway point in your life, and wasted that first half. I fear that I’ve crossed that line, too. My worst fear of all, though, is that I’m becoming the bitter, angry, early aging leech that I promised myself that I would never become. I see nothing but the same four blank walls in my future, the same cage. I’m scared to death that my life as it is right now will never get any better, that there is nothing more to look forward to than paying bills, working, and watching TV every night. I’m terrified that my body is already writing my obituary, and that my brain will accept the final manuscript, and I will cease to be. I haven’t crossed that line yet, but I can see it glowing on the near horizon, approaching ever faster as it becomes a blur of light rushing towards me, to cut me down like a scythe at harvest. I feel like a robot already, with no heart, no feelings, nothing but lines of code, input, output, the sole reason for existence is to continue to process, without tasting or feeling or touching the world that the computer code describes. When you’ve gone this far, where do you go from here?

Michael

Blognote: I seriously considered closing comments on this. This isn’t a cry for attention. (Here I am, screening, explaining, and justifying again). This isn’t a plea for interest or more comments. This just. .. . . . is.