Taking It Easy

My last letter to this void came with Tax Day and how my Tax Day's feel different.

It now happens to be December 4th - fortunately of the same year. It would be a banal platitude to say that a lot has changed in that time because that's simply stating the obvious - the entirely expected, the cliché. Now that we all know how synonyms work I can continue. The ways in which my life continue to change remain unbelievable to those who are not me, but entirely expected from my position at the center of my universe.

Since Tax Day, ruminating on love lost lifetimes ago, I've kind of graduated the first version of college. I wrote a really long and depressing paper about how shitty economists and scientists seem to be at communicating about Climate Change (and you bet your buttons I will capitalize "Climate Change" as the pervertedly proper noun that it is), I drove across the United States, again, and worked a job I didn't ask for but couldn't say no to while learning to sail in the blissfully disconnected 3 hours a week I could muster given the aforementioned job; I went to Spain with my father in the hope of walking 500 miles at his side along El Camino de Santiago del Norte - and I failed as miserably as any oracle might predict for a tragic heroine of the modern age; I came back home. I cleaned out a barn in the middle of town and put my life's library, including my own journals and paintings and everything I've ever learned inside to create a studio wherein I could "figure out my shit." I was asked to illustrate pieces for a novel, then asked to speak at a group art and literary show, then asked to write a book and illustrate some more. Oh, and I think in some extremely fucked-up (but fitting) way I may have met someone that I may be falling in love with - but only because my attempted mission to walk across Spain went horribly wrong. I plan to tell you about all of this - I owe it to myself, because I know at least for the moment next to no one is listening. What a pleasure it is to speak to a nearly empty room.

All of these events across the past almost eight months probably come off as interesting - fascinating even. I wonder if that impression of my life occurs because as an observer they may in fact seem to be interesting or fascinating? I wonder if anyone wonders how I feel about every strange event that seems to knock on my door and ask for just a moment of my time? I wonder a lot of things about the world and my own position within or upon it, depending which version of "The World" we are talking about.

The only concrete understanding I have in response to all this time that's passed and the experiences that occupy its space remains that I haven't risen to the occasion of explaining myself to the world I constantly wish could understand me. I've put obstacles and responsibilities and accountability and otherness at the forefront where my actual healing or self-confrontation or personal sanity remains simmering (though now perhaps blackening) on a back burner in East Jesus Nowhere. The pins dropped on the cartographic record of my existence support the notion that I've somehow mastered this disaster called "living," but I have pages of journalistic evidence to the contrary. Being me is a Shit Show of the most Batshit Crazy degree.

So here I am; coming home to the only home I could hope to actually depend on; the temple of my body and the dungeon of my soul - myself and my body and my mind and my spirit. I have a few stories I'd like to tell.