Day: November 19, 2021

There are moments in your life when you realize that you cannot go back; that you’ve stepped on to a moving train and nothing that was will ever be as it was again. From that point forward you have to decide what you want the future to look like. The past is gone and the seeds that formed that past are less and less relevant as the days pass because you made a choice in a moment and that choice is now everything. I made a choice. I made several and they added up to put me deep beneath the earth in a place that time forgot; a part of New York proper once known only to the Lenape tribe and a sacred place deep below what they called Manahatta.

I’m here because I was hired be a Naga to look after a man, who turned out to be more than a man. I still don’t entirely understand who or what he is, but I know that he’s in danger. I am in danger as well, though it isn’t because of him. I killed a gangster, largely because I was having a bad day, and that is going to blow back on me eventually. This is how the world works, you know. You make a choice and it leads to another choice and so on. Eventually you’re left to figure out how to assemble some sort of life from the wreckage of what you’ve wrought or you decide that it is too much to go on and you do what so many others do. you stop moving. You cast yourself into the fires of forgetfulness. You jack into the matrix 24/7 or you fall out of a normal life until you’re just another squatter on the street panhandling to make ends meet, focused on the singular idea of survival because that is so much easier than trying to live.

I don’t intend to fall out in either of those ways. I don’t intend to take the other way out either. I’m not dying any time soon. So, what I am going to do is finish this job, get paid, and then try to decide what life looks like after that. Sounds easy enough right? Well it isn’t. There’s still the pesky little problem of the corporate manhunt for the man I was hired to protect, as well as the dawning realization that once we get to the surface, I have no idea what to do with him.

I’ve been thinking about myself in the long term sense of value of life and living. It is a truly hard conversation to have, because I struggle to see myself as a person woh truly has something to give to the world. I haven’t been writing and it is a real question if I ever will again. I realized that I wanted to coach more than I wanted to write and I moved on from coaching in pursuit of a different focus in life. What do I really care about? My partner and her happiness, my family (kids primarily), Video Games, Coaching, Football, and Writing. That is it. I’m not writing. I am not coaching ever again, I observe football on a limited basis because that is how it should and how I want it to be here (don’t want this house to be all about football). I play games daily and it probably consumes one to a max of four hours in a day (mostly two flat). So, what else am I about?

What else do I want to be about? Nothing more than checking stuff out. Going places and learning about them, I suppose. I don’t know why people have to choose to be about something (though I have clearly chosen to be about games). I don’t believe that choosing to be about one thing defines a life. I don’t really even know how to or want to define a life. To me a life is exploration and repetition. We do what we do everyday and it becomes our life. So, what does that mean for me personally?

It means my life is waking up with my partner, going off to play games alone or occasionally with the kids, writing for ten minutes, grading for an hour or two, maybe actually teaching that day, watching football one or two days a week, and spending the rest of the time trying to figure out what a life with my partner should look like. This life as it is leads to a mountain of sadness.

Some Thoughts:

1. I basically abandoned that bloganovella. I left it deep in the New York underground. I have to go back and rescue it.