Monday, June 20, 2016

You don't write any more

I don't write this blog any more.  Every now and then one of my parents reminds me of this, and they're right.  I don't, I'm probably not going to, but at least now I know why.

This blog started as a way to update my parents to what I was doing. This was back in the long long ago, in the far off year of two thousand and five, so the person who did that is almost unrelated to the person writing now, but I'm still using his name and social security number so why not take over his blog.

I stopped writing because somewhere around the age of 21 I started to develop a personal life, and that was, well, personal.  I didn't want people meddling, and I didn't want to spend my time telling my backstory to strangers so I just stopped writing.   Kinda.

I stopped writing in public.  I've had a half dozen physical journals that never quite became habits.  I bought a copy of scrivener and I've written most of an RPG setting while trying and failing to write a fantasy novel.   I have a lot of scratchy notes about two other novel franchises.  And of course I have all of the RPG stories I've 'written' with the help of friends and dice. 

These things were what they were, but what broke me from writing was grad school.  Grad school is a very expensive version of the thunderdome which left me unable to read or write for fun. After so many hours hammering words into my skull and vomiting them back onto the screen I was done with the entire practice. 

Only months later I finally picked up a book for fun.  I'm still re-learning how to read casually.  I don't know if I'll ever get back to writing.  I'm certainly not committing to it.  But I have these moments where I dream of being an author.  The cliche slacker dreaming of a magicpal far off world where they possess follow through.  And my dreams have always been a bit of a compulsion.  I know enough now to know that living the dream is a lot like living life, and that getting what you've said you wanted is a bit like a dog who catches a car, but who knows.  Maybe this goes somewhere.  No promises.

Monday

I think Monday is harder because the routine doesn't have momentum.  For a day, maybe just a morning, you get to see everything clearly again.  It breaks my heart to say goodbye to my wife knowing that our jobs will keep us from seeing each other for days.  Tomorrow it will be the same shit on a different day.  Today it hurts.

This is the heartbreak that society runs on.  Every Monday I hear the latest tragedy, the latest failure of our leaders, and I pass by the ever growing number of homeless people huddling against the elements.  It's normal.  We're all used to walking past the sick beggar without making eye contact right?  We get used to not thinking about it, used to denial, because we couldn't live with the reality if we had to look at it.

I work with the kind of people society denies, and I keep a very firm division between my work and my life.  Tomorrow it will be routine and I will be unphased by the horror.  Yesterday it was outside of my world and I genuinely didn't care.  But today is hard.  Because today I have to make the choice to look, to see the pain and heartbreak that exists around us all, and choose to wade into it and push back.  I don't want to, I never want to, but it is a calling not a choice, and it is the only thing that keeps me from being one more among the suffering masses that other people don't think about, the people I work with.