Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Don't Worry, Be Happy...Or Not...Whatever....

It's been a little while since I've updated this blog and I've been wondering whether I ever would again. I don't say that facetiously. I've been thinking about scrapping this thing.

I've been told several times lately that my posts are too negative, or too raw, or don't make sense, or just generally make people worry about me. Let me tell you this now, once and for all, I am not sitting at home alone in a dark room with a bottle of whiskey playing with knives or out pounding nails into walls my forehead or whatever else those of you who are scared for me may think is going on. Yes, things have been...we'll say strained...lately, both personally and professionally and there is still a lot of shit to shovel, but I've moved from the backhoe down to the bobcat and am in the process of shifting once again to a regular hand shovel. I'm a little ways out from moving down to the garden trowel, but I'll get there.

My road has been redefined rather brutally in the last couple of months, but I know where it points now and I'm actually looking forward to getting moving. I don't know how everything will shake out, of course, but I'm no longer concerned about that. I've set what wheels in motion that I can control and I've accepted the fact that others will just have to be watched and not interfered with.

So that's it for now, and while I know that this post has not exactly been a ray of sunshine, I do hope it explains a few things so you can all stop worrying that the next blog post will be ghost written, pun intended.

I'll check in again after Wildflower, though there's a decent chance that my race report will read "Drove to Lake San Antonio. Didn't race, but still limped home." Such is the way these things go. Until next time, and there will be a next time.

Monday, April 6, 2009

So I Can't Sleep. Again...

I tried to do some real writing to kill time, or hopefully make me tired, but it didn't work, so I went back to reading. Killed The Gate House, by Nelson DeMille. Okay if you're already a fan, but not his best work. So I moved on to Fates Worse Than Death, by Kurt Vonnegut. In the interest of full disclosure. Vonnegut has been one of my favorite writers since high school, so it may not be a shock that at the beginning of chapter two he wrote something that I found to be brilliant. Here goes:

"If a maiden sits on the ground in a clearing in a forest where a unicorn lives, they say, the unicorn will come up to her and put its head in her lap. That is the best way to catch a unicorn. This procedure must have been discovered by a maiden who sat down in a clearing with no intention of catching a unicorn. The unicorn with its head in her lap must have been an embarrassment."

Now we know the best way to catch a unicorn, but to catch it doing what?

That's all. Now I need to find something to knock me unconscious. Perhaps a hammer...