These are the thoughts of a Texas transplant in West Michigan who makes his living as a newspaper reporter by evening, and a struggling novelist by day.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

the interloper

i've not felt this good in a long time. wednesday was spent on a high, which is a contrast to tuesday, when i was so low, that low doesn't even begin to diescribe me.

funny thing is, i don't know what caused it. the day started fine. i got up and did the usual. i made into work. then...

well, as the day progressed so did my mood. it plummeted. and it kept gong and going. a keep chasm, man. so shitty.

i get home and nothing really changes. i'm still feeling shitty. poor dawn. she had no idea what was wrong and i couldn't begin to tell her because i didn't know. we exchanged few words in the night time hours. i slept very bad. waking, sleeping, waking, sleeping. and yet i woke up fine wednesday. i wasn't even tired or sleepy, which i should have been.

i can't atribute my mood to anything. being that my birthday's coming up (actually accordin to the clock, it's here now), and my dad's not around for it. no call from him or mom passing him the pohone. i guess maybe that had something to do with it. but i know there must have been other things.

i can't articulate what those things were. but it's gone.

the way i'm looking at it, maybe i needed a day to let those things in life accumulate, compress them, then click delete. bam! gone. much like files on a computer. perhaps i'd accumulated many bad things over time and it all came to a head tuesday, cause, man, i was feeling real bad.

either way, no one really knoticed except dawn and she and i are good. i'm glad no one really noticed at the office. of course, i'd put on the happy face, or simply the face.

oh, by the way, before i forget, happy birthday, hoss.

Sunday, April 20, 2008

the wheel in the sky

we were driving back tonight from some friends' house and the journey song "the wheel in the sky" came on. there were some comments about how good a voice steve perry had/has and i wondered if randy jackson was fat when he was with journey (yes, i would ask something stupid like that). then asked dawn about the song, and she said it was about time just going on and things happening as time goes on.

it got me to thinking about stuff and life and age and such.

on thursday i will turn 37. no, no, hold back the applause. it's quite ok.

over thepast few years, when i sit back and think about how old i am or going to be, i draw a blank for a second. i have to go back and mentally plug in the current year with the year i was born and come up with the correct age. i never had that problem. i've found that as i move on, i just forget how old i am. perhaps because it really doesnt' matter. the point is is that i'm moving on i years, not stopping, unless i die. so regardless if i'm 37 or 50 or whatever, i'm still simply moving along and going with the flow, a small being in a universe that is expanding, making me even more minute with each microsecond. and yet, here i am, writing this, able to think it, peruse it, and write about it.

bullshit? probably. however, still, mindblowing.

anyway, back on track. time does keep going. to quote a alan jackson, "time marches on."

this will be my fourth birthday living in michigan. my eighth since i've known dawn (in one capacit or another), and the sixth birthday since we've been married. i'm three years from completing my fourth decade in this life. quite an achievement, since three decades ago, i couldn't fathom much else than being a kid living day by day in a ranch, coming from school, playing or pretending around the ranch. now, those days are long gone. a distant memory somewhere in the horizon.

this will be my first birthday without my dad. i will miss talking to him and his making a joke about my age. he'd reverse the numbers and we'd laugh if it made me longer. he'd have a good one over this year. i'd be 73 (older than he'd be if he were alive).

i was thinking about him today. dawn and i were sleeping out in the living room and i woke up and our neighbor across the street was working on his yard or something. he was whistling a tune, nothing recognizable. but his whistling reminded me of dad when he's work. he's be walking or doing something and whistling along. i don't particularly enjoy hearing whistling; it kind of drives me nuts when i hear people doing it. but i never did mind when dad whistled. it was calming. i had forgotten about that part of him until this afternoon. i do miss those notes.

"the wheel in the sky keeps on turning/ i don't know where i'll be tomorrow."