Boy, howdy. Anybody else here have themselves a week? Well, we’d best get to it. Wouldn’t want to leave all my adoring fans waiting.

So, what shall we discuss, your narrator mutters to himself.

Shall we talk the hopeless romanticism that still beats so furiously inside of me, even after all these years? Or will it be the difficulties that inevitably arise when attempting to keep and maintain worthy friendships? Shall we talk about change and growth, or failure and demise? Or the damning circumstances of life that are at least always the slightest bit inescapable despite all the efforts and intentions to fight the unstoppable tides of space and time?

I’ve been thinking all day about my desire, and my instinct, and belief that this evening we have ourselves a good one. And now that I finally sit down before this still mostly blank page, the map of possible paths seems somewhat unintelligible despite my hope for the contrary.

I suppose I should show my hand and tell you that the emotional dynamics of the days since we last met here have been nothing short of tremendous. Some of the lowest moments I’ve felt in ages were stood sentry before my every thought. That pitiful sense of failure loomed in a way seeming just shy of omnipresent. And how whatever destiny a younger man might have dreamt up are so far out of reach, and that isn’t even considering how regularly I live with both hands tied behind my back.

And yet, in those same sets of days, ideas of honorable pride and determined defiance held in the most resolute truth, especially with all the reasonably perceived circumstances that an otherwise mind and spirit would deem so unavoidable that pursuit of fight appears beyond futile. And yet, fight, I will. Because, fight, I must. I know of no other way forward, and even if I did, this will always be the path preferred. For without struggle, how could we possibly ever become some greater sense of ourselves that we’d all strive to attain.

Having engaged in some of the weightiest conversations us barely evolved beasts manage to wield, I could see how anyone may be dissuaded from engaging much of anything, let alone something so egotistically exposing and bold in vanity as this here writing habit.

Yet the need is still felt to arrive here again, and dig at some ideas I am certain can be uncovered even in the slightest. These weekly experiments are either what keeps me from going totally insane, or the last beacon of hope against a fate I would consider worse. That being becoming complete and total sanity.

For you see, it is these insanities that can regularly reward this here writing fool the sort of potent existential engagement that I so constantly crave. Weaving through the fevered and furrowed unkempt thinkings. Battling with the doubts and drives that are as inexplicable at times as they are so accurately acute. Pushing in some mock Sisyphic manner, against all the stones thrown down by forces beyond our control. And yet up the hill we push. Not for the need of getting anywhere, even if hoping to do so. But rather, to spare those below of the burdens that would certainly crush them, especially with the momentum gained without my energies keeping these gravities at bay.

Don’t get me wrong, I like my mind. Sure, it’s the only one I’ve ever known, but I get ideas and inklings about the minds of others and I am certain that I wouldn’t want to reside in many of them. For all the chaos routinely occurring about my neurons, that pandemonium seems like home. And even in those brief moments of calm clarity I never quite fully achieve, it is the excitable and enigmatic other times that bring about the sweetness that gets got when getting through all the philosophical red tape, with machete or other means.

It’s a funny enough thing, this life. How some folks you didn’t even know a few years ago exist so heavily in the current forefront that any soothsayer might turn in their license for having utterly failed in their predictions. Or how someone who barely resided in the peripheries of my attention a mere few months ago could come to stand so constant in the mentality of my every day. And how within all that, the ol’ reliable folks you’ve counted on for ages are always still there, even if only when beckoned in hours of great need.

If you know me, you certainly know my humor leaning towards the idea that this heart of mine is made of the most stoic and solid stone, if even existing at all. And if you know me, you might also be inspired to laughter knowing just how untrue that is. Not only does this tinman have a heart, it just so happens to bigger and brighter and more embracing than that of so many others.

I feel immense guilt in my selfishness, even when it is perfectly warranted. And the selflessness I constantly engage in is still something that I know to be self-serving, if for nothing else than knowing that the good I feel from helping others is the sustenance that I cannot live without. My humility feeds my ego. And my certainty of self is something that must be perpetually tested, lest it turn into some true vanity.

There is shame, knowing that I have at least temporarily let down someone who I know looks up to me. There is pride in the standing beside myself, even when the weight of woes would otherwise force one to yield. There is anger at the shackles so self-made, even if they are comfortable and honored and made of the finest gold. And there is peace in my own soul, even with never knowing the mind and heart of others you know you wish to know as well as anyone person might ever know some other person outside themselves.

But when at demise’s door, ignoring all the to-do’s and demands associated with my life at least unique among my peers, I always manage to find those pure perspectives that others inspire of a volition none other than their own.

Like when one of the sweetest souls you’ve managed to meet in your adult life grants his passion to uplift and inspire your own greatest creation to achieve in a way she might not have otherwise thought possible at this point. But it’s easy to see how that could happen, when you realize that a friend and your daughter are an iconic music performing pair. And with witnessing such an event, the feeling of missing out associated with being a young parent melts away in ways that even the night before might have been tearing you apart from inside to out and back again. Let them go out and hoot and holler and feel their fruitless desperation. By my allowance, and the idea of having the very person who introduced you to the very humorous tune that he played with the most iconic nine-year-old on the planet could never be anything short of what it was. Which was phenomenal.

Or how when in the throes of self-deprecation, the very same young man who you know at least on occasion looks to you for some sort of wisdom of guidance suddenly gifts you with the enlightenment, subsequently so obvious. That all those things I had listed as burdens and impossibilities, are the very same achievements that set you so far apart from so many folks that we know within a decade of my own age on either side of the timeline. As he reminds your humble narrator, that narrations are important. That how we choose to see things will dictate how they actually exist in ways that are so viciously potent. How that the same things listed off to claim as the limiters on life, are the very things that prove the uniqueness of your choices and standings, and how adversity can stuff it, because the odds have been beaten back again, and again, and again.

And how even if unrequited, as so often times before, that the fury of feeling is still so easily within the realm of capability when invoked with the proper inspiration, and is something that you are just as capable of as your were several lifetimes ago. If not even more so, knowing that the loss of such spirit is a fate worse than death, whatever the outcome is within those possibilities.

I wrote, not publicly, of being thankful for the spark of inspiration. Words I know were true, otherwise they wouldn’t be written. And how even in failure, I don’t hold regret. And maybe even failure is just a temporary state. Something that alters into another form for its place in your personal eternity. Or something that just simmers until the balance is correctly achieved.

But I’ll tell you this, dear reader. I will always choose something that is difficult and true, over the easy submission to falsehood. And that I won’t stop fighting for these beliefs, even if it ends in all for naught. Because it all does end in the abyss, no matter how much fist shaking at the sky we might engage in.

Besides, I am far from being through. Even within these three decades and change of living, I know I have accomplished more than what most ever get to in a lifetime. And I am nowhere fucking close to being done yet. So, stay tuned. Or watch out, if you even entertain the idea of standing in my way.