Another year has gone by.

I'm still here.


Things are still the same.


I don't know.

Did you miss me?

Back again.


Really not in great shape this weekend.


There are a lot of reasons for it: the new schedule, the new job, the truly awful human beings who comprise about 20% of the students I am teaching, the passing of the days, Holy Cross and their money-grubbing bursar's office, the coming of the colder, darker days, and complete loneliness and isolation in my relationships.


Yesterday my phone gave up the ghost and my laptop died.


My car has 335,000 miles on it and its entering its last days.


Sean is starting to lose it, mentally. We've all known for years that we'd hit that day at some point and it may be that we are here.


I don't feel well. This Summer was miserable - hot and unbearably muggy almost every day. I didn't get out and exercise.


My new work colleagues are unprepared and undertrained and that's grating.


And then there's ever growing raw and gnawing pull from the mistakes of the past, the lack of awareness in the past, the wrong guidance in the past, the annoyance of me in the past.


I am pulled to that brief sight of my shadowy alternate life. I am gutted by the thought of things that could have been.

Nothing fits.

Forty years ago I made a wrong turn in the road. I didn't realize it at the time. No one realized it at the time. I didn't realize it until forty years later. And then it hit me like a ton of bricks and nothing has been the same ever since. There is no one I can talk to about this. There is no one who would understand. Part of me feels like this is some sort of giant cosmic joke. And part of me sees evidence that would support that idea, but just considering that evidence is a sign that a person is definitely not well. I have enough rage in me to destroy every single molecule in my life. This is the cumulative sum of decades of wrong decisions, with every single decision made out of a deep sense of doing the most right thing for the greatest number of people. That is not how to live a life.

Aaaaand... we're back.

   Caught somewhere in the middle of a vast desert. Just walking in long loping circles. It's been a strange couple of years.


    Kind of weird that the strangeness I've been experiencing seems to be mimicked in national and world events. Everyone seems out of sorts. No one seems comfortable in their lives.


   These are strange times we live in.

   I've come to some realizations.


   One - what I thought was just a short-term jog in my mental settings wasn't short term. It was a sea change. A mid-life crisis? Maybe. Weird that Tom hit the exact same wall at the exact same time.


   Two - a don't see it getting better, but I don't see it getting worse. I can conceivably see myself twenty years down the road feeling this exact same way.


   Three - there may come a point - I've toyed with it - where I just say "f it" and push all this aside.

IT'S BEEN A WHILE...

NOTHING MUCH TO SAY. Things are still pretty much the same.

Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then.

The years rolled slowly past
And I found myself alone
Surrounded by strangers I thought were my friends
I found myself further and further from my home.

That same friend of mine confessed this week that....

... he has hated his job every single day for the past 30 years. In fact, he says he knew he didn't want to be a lawyer from the minute he sat in his first class on the first day of law school. I was dumbfounded by this news and more than a little weirded out. The concept of hating what you do every day for years and years is bad enough, but to stay with it when you had a chance to bail at the beginning of the process? It gave me the heebiejeebies. So I called a second friend, also a lawyer, and relayed to him the basic gist of all this, keeping discretion intact. This second friend listened to my story, then revealed that HE TOO has hated every second of being a lawyer, from the day he passed the bar. I don't know about them, but I'm old enough to be seeing the end of the pavement ahead, and while I have plenty of miserable days at work, I can't say I hate it every day. In fact, there are parts of it I like pretty much every day. The idea of taking such a huge chunk of your life and spending it in abject hatred of what you do... and the fact that I know REALLY well two people who are living lives like this... it has really freaked me out.