Current location:	Falling Down
Current mood:	anxious
Current music:	Scarlett Johansson - Falling Down

Falling Down

Yeah, I know, I haven't written here in a bit.



Part of it is that I've been really busy. I don't know quite why it is, but there are times when the very living of life just feels like it's all closing in, like in one of those rooms in the movies, where the walls are somehow inexorably pushed in towards the subject. MacGyver could have figured out how to stop it with string and some tape, but I never can, and instead, my response to it all is often to just disappear mentally, and not engage any more of my faculties than necessary.

But that's just it, I can only retreat just so much, because I have all the grownup responsibilities that come with the raising of kids, around which most everything seems to revolve these days. And don't get me wrong, it's not that I resent it, really, because I don't. I do get frustrated at times, but it's thru my kids that I've experienced the closest thing to joy in years, and I wouldn't give any of that up willingly for all the tea in China. (BTW, does that make any sense? I mean, do they still raise all that much tea in China? And does anyone want it? Don't the Chinese drink their own tea?)

My girls are like two stars in my firmament, and even when they frustrate the helloutta me - and they do - they are still two of the loveliest and most amazing creatures God has ever permitted entry into this Earthly kingdom, and I marvel daily that I've been allowed to be their Daddy. Still, in spite of all that, there are days when I just want to just go away and hide, to retire with a journal or laptop to some cabin in the woods, like some latter-day Thoreau on some latter-day Walden Pond. When I get like that, I just want to write and write and write in a valiant attempt at purging the dreck that causes stenoses in my mental and emotional arteries, but I can't do that: I have to stay engaged.

I think my curse is that I think too much, feel too much, wish too much, want too much, and I can't seem to ever entirely shut it off. It's like I'm doomed to ponder, to wonder, to long, and to regret both things done and undone. Others can just turn on the TV or the iPod and drift off, but I can't seem to do that. It's like I'm Cerberus at the gates of Hades, with at least one head always on guard, but it's so consuming, and there's not really any end to it. That probably sounds like I'm full of myself, but I don't mean it that way, and I'm certainly not saying it's always good thing.

See, I have a high IQ, but I've never really done much with it, and in that sense I've just stumbled through life, a bundle of wasted potential. I've managed to get an education, hold down a job, marry and raise kids, accumulate some assets, and I'm thankful for it all, yet I'm never really content, and I've always felt like I didn't measure up, that I've been running on empty, or the wrong road, or something. I've just always felt like I was on the outside looking in, like the prophet Mo', getting to see the promised land but not being actually allowed to enter. Or maybe like being in some restaurant in a foreign land, where I can actually almost recognize the menu, but I can't read it, and therefore can't order. But am I really any different than most? As Thoreau proclaimed, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,' and I can't imagine I'm that much different than many others, really, but then again, Browning said that '...a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?”, so what do I know?

Indeed.