What this is all about

With a perfectly good web site, MySpace page, Facebook page, and a blog with enough hot air to balloon me across the sea, what the heck do I need this new thing for?

Because despite all of those tools at my disposal, I've fallen into an increasingly hard to escape pattern of, in a sense, not living my own life. I could try to list a lot of reasons why; psychology, personality type, nature, nurture, fears, relationship patterns, and so on.

But that would just be one more thing for me to sit around and ponder, try to solve, try to beat through understanding. Which is what my life, in a general sense, has turned into: one big puzzle that I've been trying to solve all at once through thought. Trying to line up every element of my life and psyche until, like a cheap special effect in some archaeological adventure, pieces magically click into place, tumblers turn, and the doors open to reveal a room full of gold, the end.

I don't want to knock my analytical skills too much, but they've been horribly misplaced. While I consider every nuance of what life is, what my role is, what things are important to me in abstraction, I neglect and take for granted all the people who love me. I let the days blur by, unlived, while I wait for a ship to come that exists only in my head. I let loose any control over happiness, and don't even realize how perplexed and saddened are the people I care for the most. And I've stopped creating. Art, music, poetry, writing, the machines all grind to a halt, waiting for the end to be figured out before the means.

My instinctive and very wrong approach to this--considered consciously very little, cloaked in increasing denial--has been to retreat from the fray, wait it out (wait what out, I don't know), let everyone else sort out their own things, and try to make myself ready for when destiny shows up, suitcases in hand, to whisk me off to what I'm actually going to do with my life.

Which, of course, is complete bullshit.

So in an effort to attack this hermit tendency to hide myself away, I'm willingly wading into that most mind-numbingly useless icon of our age: the confessional daily-routine blog. I have to deflate any sense of its greater importance upfront: it's not literature, it's not something I assume is interesting to anyone, and it's not really designed to be a part of the blogosphere. It's just something I think I have to do right now. So if it devolves into me expounding on the breakfast cereal I ate this morning, someone please stop me.

So long as I allow life to turn into a fog in my head, time will evaporate and I will lose people I love. I don't want that to happen. I think this will help, because it will give me a kind of outside accountability I don't currently have. I've managed to create an airtight system for my daily life and job, where everything is set up just right for needs I've made too simple over time, where routine becomes paramount. It's decorated with my notions of the people I love, but not the love, giving, sharing, opening that they and I deserve.

I hope that this blog becomes unnecessary. But until that time, I now have a witness to my days. I've done a pretty thorough job of hiding from everyone, and from myself. Here's hoping I can rescue myself.