Look at me, awake in the morning once again. I picked up a Red Bull on the way to drop my son off at school, and now I’m tackling my thousand words so I’ll be free to accomplish something else (anything else) during the copious amount of free time I’ve got lined up today. David doesn’t get out of school until half past two, so I’ve got literally hours to put towards something besides moping about, dreading the day when I have to face the outside world. I’ve got Pandora on, tuned to the Alice In Chains station, and I can feel something brewing in the burning storms of neurons firing back and forth across my brain. I don’t want to jinx it, but I may have stumbled onto the secret to my happiness (and financial stability). My wife is working the morning shift at her job now, a marked improvement over the hours she used to work before she took her vacation. Instead of being left to sleep, and waste away the day in a state of lethargic apathy, I have to put on pants and step outside the safety of my front door, tasked with delivering my only son to school.

I’ve been blathering on about using this blog as a warm-up for something more important, always reassuring myself that I would start writing when I was ready. I believe I mentioned in an earlier post (toward the beginning of December), that just as I was getting into a rhythm, and started going at full speed, the timer would be almost down to zero, and I would be faced with the impossible choice of work or genius. Well, the clock is winding down, and I haven’t done anything even remotely creative during these past several weeks of indolence, and sooner or later I’ll need to get back working for The Man. At this point, I’m running out of time to get started before it’s not even an untenable decision, but rather a unceremonious sliding back into a quiet whimpering resignation that I simply do not have the will by which I can succeed. But not today, dear friends. I will not face any inevitability beyond that which I’ve known in the deepest secret chambers of my heart (figuratively, for sure, as inspiration is rarely found within a muscle) since I was just a boy (the same age as my son is now).

Maybe that’s why I’m having such a hard time understanding him: by that age, I’d already had my moment of clarity, and had begun steering my life toward that goal. I see him lost, foundering with no purpose, just bouncing from want to want, carried along by eddies (insert Douglas Adams joke here) sweeping him in circles and disorienting him. I understand that I’m not the best the role model, as I’m really a man of last resorts. I tend to avoid both the stitch in time, and neglect the nine that I’ve failed to save through inaction. I don’t make plans, aside from grand sweeping gestures toward intent, and I definitely sweat the small stuff. All of that combines into a Voltron of decisiveness when my back is up against the wall, and the biggest decisions of my life have been made with a clear head. When the moment comes for me to answer whichever challenge has been thrown down, I can calmly look at the options left to me, take a deep breath, and choose what’s behind door number three. Nothing confuses Fate so much a man ready to mix metaphors at the drop of a hat.

At this time I’d like to take a moment for a brief aside: I miss being able to smoke indoors. It’s not the weather (usually too hot or cold), or the fact that I have to put on pants to give into my addiction, it’s that it’s just so much more convenient to remain seated at my desk than to have to get up, put on a coat, and go somewhere else while the juices are still flowing. I know it would make more sense to just give them up, or at least switch to e-cigarettes, but that’s another set of problems. I have no doubt that someday I will have to give up smoking; I’ve seen too clearly what it’s done to people whom I dearly love. It’s just that I enjoy the chemical reactions from the nicotine (at least for the first smoke or two. After that it becomes more about withdrawal maintenance), and don’t want to subject my loved ones to the monster that I would unleash (which I still remember vividly from when my mother quit smoking almost thirty years ago) as my body fought to free itself of the shackles of addiction. Well, it would most likely be desperately fighting to tighten the shackles (the body being loathe to change self-destructive habits), but either way, it’s not something I’m looking forward to.

I can understand that my son has no patience for the busy work that his teacher sends back home with him (which will come as no surprise to any teacher who had me for a student), but the lesson to be learned with busy work (which I never took to heart) is that it is preparation for the “real” world: most jobs require some form of tedium and repetition, and the sooner you can develop strategies to keep your brain from atrophying, the better suited to survive the rat race you will become. And I hate to side with the woman who is “educating” him, but he needs to work on penmanship like I need to quit tobacco (doesn’t see the point, kind of painful, but ultimately necessary). I know that we’re living in a world of ever-present technological advancements, and that my two year old grandson can navigate a tablet computer easier than my wife (whose age is a closely guarded secret, integral to national defense), but I can easily imagine scenarios where my son might some day be without electricity, and need to communicate something through the written word.

And then there’s the issue of his reading. He can do it, that’s not the problem. It’s that he has no interest in reading. He just doesn’t see the point, when there are hundreds of shows and games and literally anything else he could be doing instead of burying his face deep into a musty book (or even brightly lit screen). As a writer, this is incomprehensible to me. I began reading at an early age, and have lived and died a thousand times between the covers of countless books. Sure, I still binge on Netflix, and indulge in a game or two on the Xbox (or on my phone), but I always make at least an hour or two available to lose myself someone else’s life. Maybe I was able to fall so deeply in love with the written word because I grew up poorer than not (especially on the Island which I called my home), and didn’t have all of the distractions that a better life has been able to provide. I don’t know. I guess I’ll just have to write an amazingly engaging book to draw him in, and keep hold of him until he can seek out other works.

-Tex