Having keys doesn't mean you can get the engine started

I've been sitting here, looking at a blank screen. Classic case of writer's block. I can't figure out what to say, or how to say it. But I've been feeling guilty for not having made a post in a week.

I'm still here. Still breathing in and out. Just not good at tapping text out on the keys. I guess I need to clear out the cobwebs.

But it's not just writer's block that has kept me from posting. I had a busy weekend with family. And I feel no guilt for that. I'd much rather spend time living life than writing about a life I wish I was living.

That should make for some good writing fodder. But now, today, I just don't have it in me to pour it out of me onto the digital page.

Is it possible to suck and Blo at the same time?

In honor of National Blog Posting Month (and because I'm far too lame to attempt to participate in National Novel Writing Month) I am going to attempt for 31 straight days to make at least one blog post every day.

Given the fact that prior to this post I have only written 62 posts all frickin' year, that may be a bit overly optimistic. But I have been attempting to put a little starch back into the DigiWrapper, which has been crumpled up and tossed into a corner for far too long.

This may just be the motivation I need to get off my asterisk and get typing again.

So let the blogging begin -- for better or worse -- as part of November's National Blog Posting Month, aka NaBloPMo. Yea, it's probably Blo all right, but what the fuck else is there to do in November?

Warp engines are down and drifting on impulse

So, I know Einstein had a theory about how time moves slower or something if you are hauling ass at the speed of light. I can't say I really understand it. But I do know that time does some pretty freaky shit even when you are sitting on your ass on the couch.

When I was in college, young and impatient, a few weeks or months without any dating life seemed like an eternity. There were different classes every day, there was tons of stuff going on, it was hard to keep track of where I needed to be when, yet it seemed like school would never end and my real life would never get started.

Now that real life is sometimes all too real, time whizzes by in a numbing blur of sameness. Years pass far too quickly. In fact it's been more than 3 years since there has been a relationship involving any physical intimacy. Often if feels like the drought will never end.

Maybe I just have too much time to think about time. I just marked another birthday. My 42nd. For many people, the prospect of turning 40 is daunting. I didn't experience much mental trauma from reaching the Big Four-O. But 42, that's been a bit rougher to deal with. The reason is that my life just doesn't seem to have progressed in the last two-plus years. It's not just the relationship situation. It's finances. It's work. It's personal relationships with friends. It's everything.

It's nothing.

It's 42.

When I was younger I was impatient, impertinent and anxious. I had to learn to be patient. I had to learn to bite my tongue. Maybe I learned those things too well. I've been waiting for something. Waiting too long. spending too much time with my ass on a couch looking at TV and computer screens, monitoring others' lives instead of living my own. It's time to get something moving again.

It's time to shove this couch, this life, this ass, into warp speed. Time's a waisting. I need to speed up the motion and slow down the clock.

***
10 songs with time in the title from my iPod

The Longest Time -- Billy Joel
Wiser Time -- The Black Crowes
Dirty Life & Times -- Warren Zevon
Angry All the Time -- Tim McGraw
Roll Me Back In Time -- Sara Evans
Hard Times (No One Knows Better Than I) -- Ray Charles
Time Flies -- Puddle of Mudd
Time Stood Still -- Madonna
Good Times, Bad Times -- Led Zeppelin
Times Like These -- Foo Fighters
(Bonus track)
Wasted Time -- The Eagles

I think I am missing a step

Well, I'm getting nearer to my long-time goal of becoming a professional blogger. I finally have a PayPal account, which would allow me to accept donations from the legions of fans that happen across my blog.

I also recently signed up for a Skype account, which seemed to be the online communication software of choice for international bloggers, podcasters and vloggers.

It would be ideal. I've been needing a part-time job to help cover some bills, so this would work out perfectly.

There's only one flaw to my plan.

The piece to the puzzle that I'm missing is that I only seem to make a new post about once every blue moon, this no one come here and there is no one to donate to my new "profession."

It's always something.

Epilogue to How long does it take to get over someone completely

Every day, it seems, someone comes here looking for answers as to how long their broken heart will take to mend. I guess that shouldn't surprise me, as I turned to all sort of online resources when I was in the midst of my own heartbreak and despair, searching for answers. Searching for something to cling to when my world collapsed around me.

Searching for hope and reaching out for help.

And I found it too, but not on some website or blog, and it wasn't some profound discovery like finding some new continent after sailing across a vast empty ocean. It was more like the ocean tide itself, creeping up ever closer before retreating again, over and over, until finally, one day I realized I was afloat again. No longer aground. That's not to say the hull hasn't scraped bottom a few times since, but I've never end up high and dry again like before.

To those of you still searching, I empathize. I truly do. And perhaps on some of the posts here you may find something that you relate to, something that resonates with you and helps in some small way. (This post is feeling an awful lot like a rerun. Note to self: Need new blog material.... oh and a Powerball ticket.) But I don't have the answers to your quandary, because only you (and hopefully your family and friends) can effect how long it will take to move on from a relationship that once meant so much and is now gone.

Perhaps having a teenage daughter has helped me. It's hard to hate and entire gender when the person you love and care most for in the world is of that enemy camp.

It was amusing to me recently to see her with a new "friend" as she called him, acting all flirty and affectionate (OK, that part didn't amuse me very much) when just the day before she had broken up with the boy who was then her boyfriend. No long-lamented suffering there. Just youthful exuberance that I could only hope doesn't, and didn't, get too exuberant, if you know what I mean.

I wish I had some great "happy ending" to write for all you heartbroken seekers out there, but I can't do that. Not yet. For the ending to my life and love story is not yet done.

Once upon a time, my every waking moment was consumed with pain and loss. Now, I can't say there is are no down times or irritations. But it's normal life shit -- frustrations with work and gas prices and trying to balance the checkbook, not getting to spend enough time with family and friends or just living life to the fullest. Normal, old, boring life passing the time until the next time I get to express the passion and love for life and another person again.

But I say it again, people, this is not an advice to the lovelorn column. Someone left a comment on an one on my earlier breakup posts and I was tempted to fire back and just say "get over it already, and get over your damn self. Move the fuck on!" But I realized that isn't fair. For many, the pain is new and fresh or lingering. And they aren't trying to pull me back into my previous pain. After all, I chose to write the things I wrote and post the things I did. And maybe, just maybe, it will help someone to have something to read, or a place to vent some of their emotions too.

But I am not whomever the modern equivalent of Ann Landers or Dear Abby would be. I'm just me and past heartbreak doesn't rule my days or my dreams anymore. In fact it's not much more than a fading memory, like when I realized the other day that I got 4 stitches once after getting cut playing baseball, but I couldn't quite remember just how I got cut or just how much it hurt.

It's just a line on life's resume.

There are more important problems in my life now, like broken computers and the inability to update my iPod. Now that, my friends, is the stuff of 21st century Shakespearean tragedy.

Finding a familiar plot

I haven't been to the movies in more than two years.

Oh, I've watched a lot of movies. I've lost untold hours -- OK, days, weeks or months maybe -- watching movies on cable. Some I've seen several times, some I missed along the pop culture highway.

But I haven't set foot inside a movie theater in more than 24 months.

I used to go to movies with some regularity, even alone. I had decided some time ago that I wasn't going to let being single, or having a weird work schedule, keep me from doing things I wanted to do.

Then for a while I had a significant other and we went to movies quite a lot. After the relationship ended it just felt lonely to even think about going to a movie alone. After I got passed that, there just haven't been many movies I was dying to see. I'm sure people would tell me I've missed some good cinema in the last couple of years, but off the top of my head I can't think of any films I really wanted to see.

Oh, wait, there was at least one film that I wanted to see and did go see: "Brokeback Mountain". So, I guess my whole not-setting-foot-in-a-theater line doesn't hold up to scrutiny. But the primary point is the same. I just haven't been going to movies, or had any real desire to go either.

But in the last few days I've been seeing some previews for a movie that has piqued my interest. It's called "The Lake House," which reunites "Speed" stars Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. But it's not the stars that is the draw. It's the story, or at least what I can glean about the story from the movie trailer and details on imdb.com.

Here's the plot outline as detailed on the Internet Movie Database site: "A lonely doctor (Sandra Bullock) who once occupied an unusual lakeside home begins exchanging love letters with its newest resident, a frustrated architect (Keanu Reeves). When they discover that they're actually living two years apart, they must try to unravel the mystery behind their extraordinary romance before it's too late."

The storyline resonates with me. I can relate. It sounds a little like a story my ladyfriend Brat and I have lived off and on for a long while. In our case it's not time, but distance, that has kept us apart. We've had a prolonged correspondence and conversation across time and space. Perhaps there is something profoundly intimate about corresponding with someone, whether in letters written with ink on paper or in real time with pixels on a screen.

I've long known that I am better at expressing many things, particularly emotional things, in writing rather than with the spoken word. But I suspected maybe I was just weird or verbally inept. But for centuries, lovers separated by distance or duty have writing to lovers and loved ones with stunning clarity and eloquence. Perhaps technology took that away from us. Or perhaps technology is now giving that power and purity back to us.

Oh sure, there is a proliferation of typographical and grammatical errors all over the Internet and blogosphere. But there is some stunning writing out there as well. People write about the things and people and events most important to them. They write with passion, wit, style and flare. People let us see their heart and that's a powerful, poignant thing.

Brat has let me see her heart, even though she has tried to hide it or protect it from time to time.

And isn't that what we are all looking for? Someone to connect with? Someone who we understand and appreciate and who gives us those same things back? In an exchange of embraces, emotions and bodily fluids, of course.

Movies
Writing
Long-distance romance

Writer's apathy

I sat down last night to write a post, but got no more than a couple of sentences into it and walked away from the computer. I came up with another idea for a post today. Both were a couple of good rants. But I find I just don't have it in me to rant.

It's not writer's block. More like writer's lethargy or apathy. I just don't have the energy. Just don't care. Don't care about much of anything.

Maybe it's the relentless rain. One of the recent weather reports said we've had something like nearly 30 days straight with rain, some of it heavy. The days are dark and gloomy. The sun breaks have been few and far between.

I can certainly understand why a man this week climbed onto a bridge here in Salem and threatened to jump. It's the second time a man has threatened to do that on the same bridge since I moved here. The first guy snarled traffic for the better part of a day with his threatened suicide, which happened about a week after I moved to town. The irony this week is the threatened suicide attempt came barely hours after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Oregon's assisted suicide law. Maybe the guy needed a push. Or a pill. Or a plane ticket to Mazatlan.

I wouldn't want to say I'm suicidal. That would be an overstatement, a radical over dramatization. Besides, who has the energy for something like that?

Ever been so tired, so worn out that it's too much effort to take a nap? To go to bed at night? That's the feeling.

Yea, maybe it's the rain. Or maybe it's something else. Not that it matters. It's not as if I have the power to change either factor at the moment. Fortunately, some clearer dryer weather is in the forecast in the days ahead. The long-range forecast for the other situation is not so bright. No sunshine on that horizon anytime soon.

Maybe I'll tell you about it later, when I have a little more energy.

Blogging
Weather
Rain
Salem, Ore.

Pulling the stuffing out of the bird

Writers block. Everyone knows what that is, right. Staring and a blank piece of paper, or nowadays a blank computer screen, and the words just won't come. It evokes images of emptiness. A lack of words. A lack of expression.

It's much more insidious than that in reality. True writer's block is when you have feelings and emotions to express but the fluid is trapped behind the cork in the bottle. A vintage with so much promise gone to vinegar for lack of a corkscrew.

That's sort of how I feel today. So much I had hoped to express and an utter lack of ability to get to it at the peak of its flavor.

The problem is that I don't know how to adequately say thank you to so many friends and family members who have helped me in ways large and small over the last year and more. It is important to note that any difficulty I claim to have suffered and endured is nothing in comparison to those who have lost loved ones in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or who have had their family lived disrupted by the anxiety of long deployments with a spouse, or sibling or child or parent serving in harm's way every day. And certainly my little splinter of difficulty is nothing compared to those in the gulf states whose lives were uprooted and whose homes and livelihoods were destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma. Those people still deserve or respect, our compassion, our help and our prayers.

I did, however, in a manner of speaking endure my own female-named storm spreading a path of destruction in 2004. Her toil was more emotional, but did involve major disruptions to life and career. She completely and literally changed the landscape for me. I can't say I'm thankful for that. Maybe one day I will, but I am thanking for my friends who helped me rebuild my life.

These aren't necessarily in any order, but I have to start by saying how thankful I am for my daughter. It is because of her that I came to understand what unconditional love truly means. She is my motivation to try to be a better man. She is my inspiration. And now, thankfully, after a lot of years living a long distance apart, I am now back in the same area code, a couple of counties away and I relish every moment spent with her.

I must also thank her mother and her family who have accepted me as part of their family and included me in on many gatherings, large and small. I love them all and appreciate the love and support they have shown to me.

I am also thankful for Brat. She talked me back from many an emotional ledge and talked to me about everything from the mundane to the magnificent over long stretches of dark day and brought me into the light. She helped me see hope and see a future when all I seemed to be able to do was dwell on a past that was long gone. I never deserved that compassion or the affection she has and continues to show, but I am grateful for it none the less.

My California posse was also instrumental in keeping me functioning in the real world when many days I wanted only to crawl into a deep, dark hole to either sleep or fade away. H, B, and L in particular took me out to eat and drink and dance and laugh. Oh God, the laughter was so damn important. And Gene, I thank you too for not giving up on me and being my friend even though I wasn't very good at staying in touch during the year-plus that I let myself get wrapped around a woman's finger. I miss our martini-fueled talks.

I was also fortunate to rekindle and old friendship and make a new one with M and B. In fact is was one year ago today that I was fortunate to share in their Thanksgiving celebration, with B home on leave from Iraq. They were truly an oasis in the desert. I hope to be able to repay the favor some day in some way, but I'm not sure if that will ever be possible. M was a friend from home at an important time, and now that I'm back home, in a manner of speaking, I realized that she helped me remember a lot of the things I love about Oregon and the area where I grew up and came of age. And equally importantly, she helped me realized I don't have to take the shit I don't like about this place so personally either.

OK, so I got the damn cork out of the bottle and this shit is flowing out all over my shoes now. There are so many people I'm thankful for, old friends and new, who have reminded me to get over my damn self and have a little fun. Mike in Colorado and 3T in Arizona come immediately to mind.

I really want to thank all of you who write a blog out there, particularly those listed on the right. I've spent many a happy moment (OK, way too many hours) reading your posts and drawing inspiration from them. Not so much the inspiration to write, although many of you awe me every time I point my browser your direction. But mostly, I want to thank you for the inspiration to live and laugh and love again and again.

Have a happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Thanksgiving

Fear and loathing in the blogosphere

Hunter S. Thompson broke the traditional rules of journalism. He wrote himself into the story. Sometimes he was more the story than the people and events he was supposedly writing about.

I can't say I was a huge fan or anything, so I don't try to write a eulogy for him now that he has stamped a -30- onto his life. But he sure wrote the final chapter his way, didn't he?

I got to thinking that what Thompson helped get started is now being played out on computer screens across the globe all day every day. Aren't blogs just the modern extension of Gonzo journalism?

Gonzo journalism has a point of view, a perspective. It is subjective and personal and raw. If you follow the link you will read that Thompson was well known for missing deadlines, sending materials too late for editors to read, but with just enough time to be printed.

Aren't those all things that bloggers are doing? Bloggers show us the world through their own eyes, through their biases and opinions. Things are important on a blog because someone says it is important. No pretense of objectivity. One of the biggest news in newspapers this week has been President Bush's trip to Europe. Here in California, it's how Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is polling. But in the blogosphere? It's probably that Paris Hilton's Sidekick got hacked, spreading celebrity phone numbers and photos of her bare-boobed and kissing another woman.

Carry on you new Gonzo journalists. But mix booze, drugs and weapons at your own peril.

Blogging
Gonzo journalism
Hunter S. Thompson