A Week and a Half

I guess that's not too bad to wait between blog entries. I could probably post daily, but I'd expect the quality to go down with the increase in post rate, making it akin to a Facebook Status Update - something I'm not fond of either.

No one needs to know every little thought I have. It's bad enough that the people I know hear the drivel that spews from my lips in person, although I'm told that it's sometimes pleasant drivel. I'd like to think that writing this stuff down gives me a few moments or minutes or hours to contemplate what I'm trying to communicate and most days it does. Right now, though, I'm streaming consciousness and drinking coffee.

After the journal post, I thought of a few things to write about, like my love for haiku writing and reading, why a single man was capable of adding some 1300+ words to the English language and these days people generally use only about twice that number daily, or a review of Godzilla which Tabitha and I saw on Friday. I'll probably do those topics at some point or another, but there's something else I've had on my mind lately. Love.

Yeah, as sappy as it sounds, I've been thinking about love a lot more recently and what that too-simple four letter word means to me. Part of love has always been, for me at least, ensuring that those I care for are in good spirits and health, perhaps not fiscally solvent but able to keep their heads just above water. There are many of my friends for whom I feel this love and if you've eaten at my place I hope you've felt this love and who have reciprocated in turn. It's a deep, warm, supportive feeling that lets you sleep like a baby.

Infatuation, though, is what most people think of when someone says they're in love. The crush. There's nothing like that sensation when you've got it and once it's gone, it's make-or-break time for whatever relationship has been woven as a result. The thing is, everyone wants that sense of infatuation and sometimes you find it or it finds you and it's not for the person it should be with. But sometimes it is... and it's amazing.

The impatience, anticipation of speaking to or seeing that person, watching for signs they feel the same way about you, all of that is quite literally intoxicating and like any opiate will hook you like a five pound fish on twenty pound line. There's no wonder people hunger for that feeling. I get the butterflies in the stomach, the moon-eyes, a warm-fuzzy tightness across my shoulders, and an uncontrollable need to smile at absolutely nothing.

It's akin to visiting a theme park, getting dizzy on the teacups, feeling your stomach flop in the roller coaster, knowing that the haunted mansion is down that path and you can't wait to get to it. To perpetuate the metaphor, once you leave the theme park and those flip-flop feelings settle down, you have a choice to find a new high or a new equilibrium. That's a hard choice to make in the face of intensity, one that a lot of people have difficulty with myself included.

I adore my wife, it's my sincere hope that she knows this and believes it, feels it daily from me whether I'm there with her or absent. The feeling that when that person isn't with you or in proximity at the least, you feel like there's a part of you missing, that's the love I share with Tabs. I'll hear a joke and expect to hear her laugh, but she's not there and now I have to remember the joke to tell it to her later. Dedication, I call it; the kind of love that I think most people secretly wish for in a relationship with another person even when they're saying they want an infatuation.

What I've come to learn is that you need both. You need both infatuation and dedication, the former occasionally and the latter perpetually. Some people are lucky enough to have that with their partners and everyone else calls them lucky bastards. I count myself among that rare group and am constantly amazed at how lucky I got to have my best friend as my partner in life.

There's always going to be times when that sense of love is in short supply, but sometimes that's what it takes to remind you of why you're with a person and it's enough to set those butterflies fluttering.

It began on May 14, 2014

The closest I've ever come to writing a blog was an annual update on a miniatures gaming website showing off whatever I had been working on for the last few months. While I love writing and the format of journal entries, I'm horrible at keeping up with them. Once, my writing was prolific and streamed out of me faster than I could think it. Stories were rare, but poetry, prose, and stream of consciousness (like this) much more common. These days, I don't write nearly as much, though story seeds crop up much more frequently.

Stacks of mostly blank journals lie accusingly next to my nightstand along with the spiral notebooks that Tabitha and I wrote back and forth to one another in back in high school. There's a few simple journals, faux-leather wrapped folios of lined paper that would be indistinguishable from the hundreds just like it sold in big boxes across the US. The flowered journal I kept through high school, filled with poetry, lists of names of people I had met and their astrological signs, little bits of nostalgia crammed in the pages like flyers from the Fusion Cafe and concert tickets. Then there's the other journals.

There's a few specialty journals you wouldn't be surprised to see in a Barnes & Noble, like the Star Wars Journal (made pre-prequels, thank you very much!) whose spiral-bound, wide spaced lines are randomly indented by quotes from Episodes IV, V, and VI and silhouettes of the characters they're attributed to. It's fuller than most with my shoddy penmanship, the first half dozen or so pages with entries from my brief time living in Virginia with my father, step-mother, and step-sister, with the two or three entries written about our trip to New Jersey to visit my dad's family there. The rest is filled with characters, plot ideas, rules alterations or inventions, and the like for several of the Star Wars roleplaying games I've had the privilege of running.

Another would be what I call the Curmudgeon's Journal, boldly advertising it's intent to be a private vent for the well-adjusted sociopath on the cover. It's also interspersed with quotes from celebrities and historical figures regarding the stupidity of Man. It was a gift, well-received, from someone who's heard me rage against the ineptitude of the masses on more than one occasion. While there's no shortage of material for me to fill it's pages, this journal lies empty.

One of my favorite unusual blank books was purchased during my last trip to Disney World: a yellow fur-covered book with unlined, pale ochre construction paper pages inside, little black bead eyes and embroidered nose and mouth on the cover. Imagine the Evil Dead II Necronomicon crafted lovingly from the head of Winnie the Pooh by the Disney marketing department. That's how I think of it - a beloved childhood memory made into some thing. One time I thought to make it a photo album of the trip, but it's laid fallow for years.

Another favorite I picked out at a Ren Faire years ago. Dyed red leather stamped with a dragon design and held closed with a huge Celtic knot button and leather jesses, it is a beautiful work of craftsmanship and I'm loathe to dirty it's pages with anything less than the perfection it deserves.

That, I think more than anything else is what keeps me from writing, that fear of putting something on the page that's less than perfect. I find that I edit, re-edit, check grammar and paragraph structure, delete sub-par sentences, research more appropriate synonyms, edit again, et. al. in place of getting down what I wanted to record in the first place and it is this attempt at birthing perfection in place of crafting it that has kept those journals blank for so many years.

Perhaps that will change. I've got stories to tell, so long as I can let them be (in my own estimation) ugly and unrefined for a while. It's my hope that this journal without pages won't stay empty.