it has been a while since my last posting. well, this is not really for my nonexistent readership as it is to chronicle the slow and strange changes that occur within me over time...

currently, i feel as though i am in a bad place. there are a few enormous stressors in my life, such that i feel i don't get enough sleep, and yet, i can never get enough done. i feel like a body of flesh that is meant to suffer between moments of respite; an unfortunate locus of -whatever- that is where blame and trouble tend to be drawn towards...

i envy those with a regularity in their lives, those who can sleep and who have interests that they are allowed to follow. they are real, integrated people, who have a space for themselves. i find that i am little more than disconnected snapshots, a life passed through a shredder, and the bits and pieces i find in the dumpster are what i try to put together to find an identity.

i envy those for whom life is a continual move towards bigger and better things. for me, the simple things still offend...

i love, i love, i love. love is that wonderful pull towards some other greater whole. my children, my wife, those whom i spend so little and diminishing time with, they are everything to me. the peaceful home we have established. and yet, i feel an alien to them at times, they are walled off from me and my unrelenting concerns... the stresses of life are sometimes blows to my chest and abdomen, and make my smiles with those i love seem forced, hollow, coughing.

i long to sleep. i long to forget for a time, just long enough to return renewed. but sleep comes rarely, and too shallow to allow me to drown and resurrect.

i pray to god in abject moments. i no longer forget him/her, because calamities occur in every blind moment. i feel suspended by a faith that does not offer respite, but continually stretches me to each successive challenge.

friends? do i really have any? someday, i will die, and leave people the task i left unfinished, to assemble some fiction of a self, and a narrative of a life, all dissatisfactory. they will wonder what to say. they will wonder what was missing now that i was gone, or, more precisely, what used to be present. i still often wonder what it is, who it is, that is present with each passing day: a certain reluctance, an inevitable tumble into the fray. that is all i really am, that is all i will ever really be?