Taking the Time

It has been some while since I have settled into a chair, opened the pages of this particular book, and written something I didn't remove mere moments later. Even thinking about posting here caused me a pause, caused me to look over what had come before (two years past) and consider carefully what my purpose was.

Didn't take long to find it.

This isn't a journal, not in the sense of my needing a place to safekeep my thoughts, or some sort of rambling cry for internet fame; the first just isn't entirely honest, and the second gives too much credit to my vague imaginings that a wandering reader may find it to their liking and assign some value to it. I have other projects for that.

This scary set of would-be records are experiments in writing. They're attempts at crafting a voice, and use the life of the writer as nothing more than an at-hand material that makes the process go more smoothly.

What voice is that? I think that the title of the page and the cute little lines scribbled beneath it may give an indication. Every day is an trial of some sort, and every person should have the opportunity or the occasion to act as the adventuring archeologist to the metaphorical artifacts life leaves in its wake.

So I will write larger than might be needed, find the danger in the dull or the madcap in the mundane, for my own amusement and mental health. Or, I'll try in any case. It has been two years, and I can't say I know what tomorrow will bring.

I can not say what tomorrow will bring.

Boring or bedazzling, I do like that fact.

Warning: Dangerous and Irresponsible Threats to Our Children!

Who Will Think of the Children?

With the ever-present threat of the present generation descending into madness and chaos, why has no one stood talk to fight the modern fascination with pirates? This cultural threat, known to those few who have kept up with the well being of the young as "The Bucaneer Invasion Of The Children's Hearts" (or BIOTCH), has long been ignored.

No more!

It began with the supposedly innocous Pirates of the Caribbean movie from that hive of villainy, Disney. They knew what they were beginning! To think of it, glamorizing the profession of Henry Morgan, Blackbeard, and William Kidd! Rape? Pillage? Rum-swilling?

And just what sort of reckless behavior is it, anyway, to show zombies doing those things? Imagine if some poor child thought that he could shove items in his rib-cage with no ill effect!

But that was just the beginning. Then the previously unnoticed Talk Like A Pirate Day started getting national attention. Well-known, trusted, journalists began to lend credence of a day whose entire purpose is to twist the beauty of the english language into self-parody in an attempt to honor the righteously hanged ruffians of two centuries past.

Where, I ask you, is the consideration for society as a whole that was once so prevelant in the fourth estate?

Now, in an age where violent pirate attacks once again threaten our very way of life and walk about our streets there are those who would make a game of the pirate life! And not a farcical look at the pirate life, with true pirates as the villains, like the Gorilla Monkey Island games. Oh no.

At least Disney once had the decency to show pirates for the ruthless, murderous, drunken fools that they were, but now they wish to put the players in the boots of the thugs themselves. Buy a ship, get a crew, drink up all your parents' rum kiddos, we won't tell!

If only Disney was alone. But no, there is an even more historically accurate "game" (if a muder simulation can be called such) where you can conquer whole ports and sail the actual seas. The Pirates of the Burning Sea they call it, when it's not the flames on the water the players (and their parents) will be needing to worry about!

With these threats on the horizon, and new attempts to arrest the attention of the unwise striking at us every day, it is up to the right-thinking and moral of us to make a stand against these dangerously (and strangely) influential villains!

Please write to Fight BIOTCH and support this worthy cause! Fight the pirates!

Who Teaches the Teachers?

How often does the average person remember an opinion or bit of knowledge they once held, so long ago, but swept aside without realizing it as time went on? How often, then, does that opinion or bit of knowledge seem somehow deeper and more fresh than current perspective or understanding?

Every so often it does one good to learn again the most basic of facts, just in case you left a few things behind in your hurry to grow up. Every so often, adults should watch Sesame Street.

Seriously.

The Notably Absent, Forever Gone, Mr. Hooper

Thumped

Here I was thinking that I'd worked myself up. Running like a champ, if champs were chumps, and doing some weights. No chance some punches and kicks were gonna wear me down, so going to the fighting class I've mentioned felt just about right.

Thumped.

I was worn down by the warm up, umphed by the knees, knocked by a stray elbow, out of gas from the punches, and bruised by the whack-my turn-whack of kicks to the thighs. Hell and damnation I am sore today. Sitting on a shortened break and waiting to give my last test to those wayward adolescents, I do make sure to keep that left leg shifting before it gets stiff enough to send me limping like a man twenty years older.

I have an image to maintain; not old.

Yet.

Right.

Climb Up

It's been a while since I posted, which feels strange. I was on such a good little roll, but it seems that such things aren't as easy to maintain as you'd think.

I sit here married now, which has both changed things and made them more "normal" than they were before. I've been wearing the ring six months since that summer day, and it's like the world has finally started working correctly; the future's uncertain as she digs the books and I do my best to teach kids that don't always wanna learn, but we've got a good life.

I'm walking the trail up-hill, and it feels good.

There's also the work to stay fighting fit, something I mean figuratively. I have to be clear, it seems, because a mixer of the martial arts I happen to know offered to arrange me a brawl should I ever want to step in the ring. A year from now, I'm thinkin' maybe, but right now is a big no.

Running every day, is a goal. A short way from home there works a former Israeli Special Forces instructor who runs a school that will work you to the bone and then train you in how to break them; only if absolutely necessary, of course, for varying definitions of "necessary." It's tough, it works, and I should go more often.

It feels good to be in a healthy way.

At the bell I'll toss out that I have just about finished work on a high-flying action book, a roleplaying game for those perking ears, that combines Edgar Rice Burroughs with Conan and Flash Gordon for fun effect. It's shaping up well and will be traded for cash both on-line and off before too very long.

Winds Blow

So I return to the keys, and I don't mean I'm playing piano.

It's been too long, I know, since I've written with anything like regularity. Maybe I'll fix that, maybe I'll fail, but there are more important things under foot than my love n' hate affair with the rambling word.

At the moment, anyway.

A married man now, as I feel compelled to note, sitting out a hurricane was a different style of adventure than it has been in the past. Less the lone sailor in a sea of wind and rain, or perhaps the boy who waits out the thunder living dangerously in his tree-top fort, I was more the man hunkered down behind a glass partition and doing all in his power to merely watch the danger pass him by from a safe distance.

Let there be no confusion; little in the actual details changed from previous times to this one, but having companionship as I did made it a distinctly different experience.

Katarina, it would seem, proved to be a more dangerous dame once for her second-in-line than she was for her first love... I have at least one friend on the now-battered coastline, and I wonder for the safety of he and his even as we speak. My home went without power for the majority of three days, while he may not pass through unscathed, and the disparity between these situations is not lost on me.

I can only wish him well.

That's all I have for now, but there's a chance that the bug has bitten me again... perhaps this place will see a quick dusting every day or more.

We'll see, right?

The Creep

Time is all about perspective.

This isn't deep, it's not new, and I'm not saying it for you. I am saying it to you, but not for you. I'm saying it for me.

Time is all about perspective.

It seems, to me, like years are starting to slip by. In the golden days of my teens I was lucky (or so it'd seem at times) if an hour slipped by, and when months began to creep out the door two at a time during my college days I was quite shocked.

For several months now I've been trying to plan the next few years of my life; you know this because I've mentioned it before. Plans change, break, twist, and shift... but they're good to have, if for no other reason than to measure how different the future can be from the ideas that rattle around inside our heads. That's not what's at issue here.

The point is that, despite that planning, I hadn't yet had The Thought that has prompted me to run around in metaphorical circles for six poorly-planned paragraphs; I caught myself thinking of how damn quickly the four years of my students are passing. I actually thought to myself, "Next year my first class will have become Juniors, and then it's only one more year. Why did I think highschool was so long?"

That's a scary thing to think, giving all sorts of perspective on my future, my age, future attempts at education, and the people that have had those thoughts as they aged before me.

I close a chapter of my life in the next two months, but it's a chapter that's run on to cheap pulp novella long ago and is already over in everything but name. Is it 'Chapter Three: After the Diploma,' or 'Chapter Four: Now For the Happily Ever After'? I don't know.

But I do know things are always changing. You can see it in the papers, on the streets, and on the little bits of knowledge streaking around at the speed of light. People who complain that "nothing ever changes"aren't paying attention to the right things; they watch the horizon and get hit by the guy in the truck.

Change is the only way we have to measure time. And time is all about perspective.