Already Missing Friends but Savoring a New Stride by nRkangel

NRKANGEL'S BLOG

nRkangel

Already Missing Friends but Savoring a New Stride
Monday, August 16, 2004

46 days left...

Happy Monday! I'm feeling a little charged today thinking that the 46 days I have left are really more like 34 working days! Yeeee-HAAA!

It's really hard to believe how much writing time I've missed recently. I sat down a couple of times to blog only to let myself be interrupted by work or life. It's gotten to the point that I start feeling guilty whenever I've got downtime and I'm NOT writing.

Today however, I told myself that this blog entry gets written even if I have to blow off all the work that I'm being paid to do. (That sounds sooo bad! Still, slacker-ism is not really in my normal character make up, so today is really a banner day of sorts. Call it a breakthrough to my inner child (or silimar non-responsible-type person.) I'd do the big grin thing here, but the guilt prevents me. (Part of me wants to put on somber clothes and till the soil or do something equally Amish to punish myself. Fortunately I don't ever listen to that part of me...)

Of course, I have a vaguely good excuse about how I'm using my downtime. Recently I've been hanging around with friends as much as possible before I leave.

On a side note, when we get people together it nowadays, the topic inevitably comes around to how long I have left up here. When I tell them, things get quiet for a few seconds, almost like someone's whispered "cancer" or something. I want to laugh out loud and say "Hey! It's not a disease, ok? It's just San Diego!" Only I don't want to risk the knock-on-wood, "isn't-it-ironic" kind of curse by saying that. So instead I listen to that loud, semi-hysterical fun-house laugh that goes off in my head dressed in Amish clothing. And biiig clown shoes. That guy scares me...

Anyway, I meant to catch up on writing this weekend, but my friends Chris, Dave invited me invited me along on their company outing on Saturday to go river-rafting a few hours from here. Of course, I went.

Thinking back, almost everyone I know up here is a result of knowing my buddy, Dave. He introduced me to the area and to most of the people up here I call friends. (I was best man at his wedding a couple of years ago and I gave the thank you speech to the people attending his father's funeral last December. In a way it's like we're brothers with all the thick and thin we've been through.)

All twenty of us caravan'd our way up to an old train station where we had lunch on a turn-of-the-century style train that took us to the launching point for the rafts. The train ride was kind of neat. Periodically people in period costume came up and down the aisles to chat and entertain. This was a good thing since there wasn't much to look at out the window but rolling hills and scrub. (If you let yourself, you could almost imagine that around the next hill you'd see riders on horseback plodding alongside a huge, drift of cattle.) Of course, the music being pumped into the train was some rastafarian regge as if things in life weren't surreal enough. (Maybe the cattle around the bend were Jamaican?)

Anyway, the river was about as slow moving as the train and meant for the (extremely) casual adventurer or company with kids in tow, like us. Naturally the inevitable water fights broke out anytime the boats got near each other. One guy without a watergun took a tupperware container that held cookies and dumped out the already waterlogged goods in order defend himself. (That tupperware won hands down for close-in warfare. One hit from his artillery was enough to soak you to the skin.) Fortunately the temperature was around 85F and the sun was strong and warm in the sky making the water more a blessing than a curse.

I finally got back home around nine or so (Dinner was at a place called House of Beef - emphasis on Beef - salad strictly optional). I sat down and toyed with the idea of writing while the good food and light dosing of alcohol had me ready to fall asleep at my keyboard. I actually ended up falling asleep by ten pm... earliest time I clocked this summer. (I hate going to sleep early...)It's funny how I love to sleep and I love to write, but I will do almost anything to avoid starting either

Waking up is a chore that I rank up there with mopping floors and cleaning out the fridge, while I consider sleep one of the greatest gifts God gave man. Yet, when it comes time to go to sleep, give me even the slightest excuse and I'll be up until three am. Most nights I find myself actively avoiding sleep. Typically I read (books, magazines, newspapers, the list of ingredients on the side of soup cans...) until my eyes can no longer focus and words become garbled and meaningless. Yet, I love to dream and keep a log of my favorite dreams that I add to whenever I can.

Writing poses the same dilemma. Sometimes I can write for hours writing until the day literally melts away. I always have something in the process of being written if only because ideas are like children - they never wait for others to finish talking before they start crying "Look at me! Look at me! See what I can do?" .

So, along with this blog, I have a personal journal that I keep at home. I also write my dream log and have a few longer projects that keep me occupied. I even have a special file called Bits and Pieces that I add to now and again.

I started the "Bits and Pieces" file a long, long time ago (like five years) as a repository for unfinished thoughts and ideas that were searching for a purpose. Looking inside that file is like opening a box filled with stray jigsaw puzzle pieces. They all belong to something, I just may not have found out what, yet.

Sometimes I'll add a phrase that sticks in my head. Sometimes I'll write several sentences, and once, I wrote a chapter of a story that I love, but belongs to nothing else. Of course longer entries typically move out of this file as do the bits that find a home in a larger work. That's the rule of this file. If what's inside finds another home, it travels onwards. That doesn't mean that the orphans left inside are less loved. In fact, they're more precious because they represent potential , whereas everything that's moved on is already living the life it was meant to. Does that make sense?

Sometimes I'll read what I've written. Mostly though, I like to leave it alone until I've forgotten about it. It's a favorite thing of mine to read something that I've forgotten, especially if it doesn't sound like I wrote it. I like reading that stuff best because it means that the part of me that writes is breathing on it's own.

And yet, the act of sitting down to write is as difficult for me as falling asleep. Why this is, I really don't know but it's enough to keep me smiling and shaking my head when I think about it.

Enough rambling. I know I'm making up for lost time, but this is getting ridiculous. It's almost as if I'm trying to make up for that time all at once! Sad as it may be, my wheels want to spin, but they're not touching pavement yet...LOL! (I can't WAIT for next week! I'll be vacationing in SanD and Rod's gotten our first reading all set up for next Wednesday! Damned exciting! spin,spin,spin! )

It's 8pm and I've been plodding through this a little bit at a time all day. I've been tired and blah for most of the day, not feeling bad or anything, just...lacking energy. Rod even commented on this when we spoke on the phone this afternoon. He asked if anything was wrong, but it was just the charge had run down on my batteries.

However! When I wrote the last half of this entry, I put on the song that I've listed below and found a little wellspring of energy bubbling like an icy soda happily fizzing in a tall glass of ice on a hot, hot day. It's telling me to go home, but not to miss the last colors of the sky on the drive back.

(Sometimes it just feels good to be alive. 45 days left...)

A Thousand Miles
-Vanessa Carlton

COMMENTS

Tuesday, August 17, 2004 4:31 AM

RHYMEPHILE

I have a small, palm-sized memo book I keep with me during my daily travels into and out of New York City. There are some amazing, weird things that happen, and I don't want to forget them. I jot them down in the notebook whenever I get a chance. I mean, where else can you see a tough-looking dude in a pink shirt, hat, and sneakers? Or a guy in a kilt?

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