I’ve had this website for a year now, and I thought that it would be appropriate to look back over the past 365 days and ruminate on how much (or little) progress I have made. Since leaving my job at Blondie’s Pizza, I have written hundreds of thousands of words (some of them readable), and have put out two ebooks for sale on Amazon (earning me tens of dollars). I have been employed by two corporations, though my opinions of corporations have, at best, remained the same. I have wavered between inspiration and apathy, though now I may have found my muse. My son is growing into a little man, despite my firm belief that he will always be a little kid. The world seems on a course for self-destruction, though history has taught me that this is nothing new, and that things are always darkest just before the dawn (except when they are not, because things usually begin getting brighter just before the dawn, as that is, in fact, how dawns work). Perhaps it would be better to say that I hope that we can stick it out until this fever breaks, and we, as a nation, and as a species covering this globe can get over our petty hatreds of one another and our collective hard-ons for things that go boom. There are plenty of people whom I would rather never see or hear again, but to entertain the notion of snuffing out there lives because I have a problem seems just the tiniest bit… self-centered, at the very best. Maybe it was my childhood spent upon the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise, but I had sort of thought that we had the potential to be better than this.

Cops are shooting people and never asking questions, and we are bombing countries and then refusing to clean up the mess. Corporations are (still) people, and yet the people who work for corporations on the bottom rungs are frequently treated as less than human. Concentrated money in the hands of a select few has bought and sold the soul of the very world, and I don’t think that it will get much better until we have come together as a species and decided that enough has been enough. Actually, it seems that most of the problems we are facing could be solved by people realizing that they do have agency and can make a difference, if they would only take a moment to stand with their fellow man and shout up to the heavens that they will tolerate iniquity no more. Of course, the problem with that revolution is that the whole system is rigged specifically to disperse the most abused across all days and hours to keep us from uniting and discovering that we still had a voice. But when you’ve got to work two jobs just to slow the descent into insolvency, there’s not a lot of time left to speak up for yourself. I think my generation may have waited just a bit too long to voice our opposition, but this group of youngsters who is marching along behind us may be the group to do it (though they still need to get the hell off of my lawn). They aren’t bound by the realizations that their dreams are those from a long past time (having been sucked dry by the generations which came before), and have, instead, come up with new dreams, and made them into a new reality, finding a way to be true to themselves and yet still finding a way to fill their bellies and souls.

I have met some people who have fundamentally changed my life. Young people. People who reminded me that I myself had once been young. My gut reaction is to pat them on the head, and regale them with all the tales of failure to which my life has been a testament, but I know that I would have known better when I was their age, and that they just might find a way to actually make it happen. Who am I to shit upon their dreams, just because my own have soured? And hell, I’m a writer. The longer I am forced to wait until I find success, the better I will be when it finally happens. I may not understand everything the kids are saying, but I am still young enough to learn. That was the reason I first dreamed up Uncle Walt Enterprises, Unlimited (which is why this blog is called The Vaults of Uncle Walt): I wanted to try to find a way to nurture dreams which would otherwise have been abandoned. Who am I to tell someone that their dream will never work? Am I Morpheus (not Laurence Fishburne), that I may dictate dreams to someone who isn’t me? I used to believe that if I just tried hard enough, the whole world would soon be mine, but I have learned over the years, that time was not quite right.

Everything that’s happened to me has made me better as a person and as a writer, though I don’t know that my younger self could have understood the necessity of living for the experience. Of course, back then, I also believed that if you loved someone enough, you could heal all wounds, so, there’s that. But I feel that I have waited long enough. I’ve uncovered a new muse, and I plan to utilize this newfound inspiration to get momentum on my side once more. Who knows? I might actually do something this time. All I know is that I want to write. There is something in the air that is whispering sweet promises that this will be my year. Three dozen chances I have had to be the man I’ve dreamt of being, and now it is the time for me to finally meet that man. I started this work last year when shame of inactivity prompted me to make some positive life choices, and I hope that I can carry forward and finally make something happen.