because I feel the urge to rationalize...

I'll tell you why I'm doing this.

The truth is this: I have no idea. Maybe I can convince myself here that it's a good idea.

I could never keep a journal - I'm too chaotic for most daily habits. Shit, brushing my teeth every day is struggle enough. I have endless amounts of resistance for anything that's good for me, anything I enjoy doing, anything that might benefit me sometime in the future. Things like surfing, playing piano, sleeping, waking up, cleaning my apartment, shopping, going to work (and actually getting my shit done), calling friends, cooking, telling people I love them, telling people I'm upset, etc. Writing, along with everything else on that list, I find to be a cathartic experience. Once I actually do it. Thinking about the things on that list for days, weeks, years, without actually doing anything about it produces quite the opposite effect.

Eight years of withdrawing incrementally into a fortress built out of drugs, alcohol, and neurotic ego control-freak bullshit left me in a sorry state. I only realize things like that now, after twenty months of slowly knocking down those walls and crawling back out into the sunshine. I'm learning once again how to be raw, vulnerable, open, honest, and it scares the crap out of me. Welcome back to the human race, asshole - now you get to feel. I couldn't, and still can't, hammer those bricks out on my own. Increasingly, I find that I need people in my life to encourage me, to point out my fucked-up thinking, to empathize with me, to laugh with. Sometimes I just need to be dragged out and slapped a few times.

Take playing piano for example. I love playing jazz, but left to my own devices I apparently have no motivation to sit down and play every day. So I started taking lessons again after a three year hiatus. When I've got to show up at my teacher's house for an hour every Tuesday and show some progress, I have a little more incentive to just sit down in front of my keyboard a few times a week and do it. And, like most things, just sitting down and turning the damn thing on is the hardest part for me. Then I can get into it and remember why I love it. But, even if I manage not to touch my keyboard all week, I at least have that solid hour on Tuesday of intense practice and excited, bubbling talk about tri-tone substitutions and diminished scales. I get giddy watching 'Stella by Starlight' turn into something of my own creation over the course of a few weeks. I leave his house every time feeling so fucking amped. A few hours later, though, that fear creeps back in and it just seems like that last thing I want to do.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah. So, I'm not an aspiring writer or anything. I'm not really an aspiring anything. I just want to be happy and sane. It takes work - to be true to myself and honest with others. It takes friends - to laugh and argue with, to put up with my bullshit, to be available when life starts to overwhelm me. Most of all, it's being revealed to me, my happiness and sanity are contingent on my usefulness to others. It's the strangest thing, but wrapped up tight in the smothering blanket of Self doesn't work.

What I'm trying to say, somewhere in this bramble of words, is that maybe having this blog will make me want to write more. I like writing and I usually get something out of it.

I don't know if anybody will read this ("nobody's going to read your whiny bullshit"; "they're all gonna laugh at you!"), but maybe somebody will get some entertainment, or relate to something I'm talking about, or in some manner find something helpful in what I've got to say here. Which is not much. I'm trying to have no expectations about this. I'll just write whatever, waxing by turns poetic, insipid, dry, insane, insightful, monkeys. Semi-anonymous honesty, ahoy! Why the fuck am I publishing this? Fuck it! *click*