This is Post Number 2,300

There is something to be said for the catharsis of writing. I find that I have been so very busy with work that I haven't taken the time lately to decompress my thoughts and feelings and put them into words. This behavior is almost a complete shift to the far end of the spectrum from seven months ago when I was unemployed, unmotivated, and not working fifty-hour weeks for the first time in about two years.

I don't even like thinking back to those times. I will be much happier once I start forgetting that old life and focusing my attention completely on building the richer and more rewarding life I've always wanted but was held back from achieving for one pointless reason or another.

Writing, whether the topic is the past, present, or future, is how I remind myself of specific points in time: people, places, sights, sounds, and smells. I'll take a picture when I can, but most often I find myself wanting to document my comings and goings with a passage or two. It cements my thoughts for posterity, by which I mean when I have forgotten everything of value and beg to be reminded of simpler times. It must be of the utmost irony then that I waste so much text on something I so dearly wish to forget. This is the human condition, an endless pursuit of contradictions.

I vaguely recall lamenting here about the quality and condition of my sleep. I am happy to report that with the addition of the imposingly massive Schlafenstrasse last week, I have actually enjoyed going to bed early. I awoke with minimal trouble most mornings this week, and shambling into consciousness along to the elitist sounds of NPR issuing forth from my clock radio is almost tolerable. I look and act — for the most part — like a normal person.

Of course, I still have good nights and bad. The balance has shifted to more good than bad, due in large part to the blessed distraction that is my iRiver. Monk sternly lectures me that sleeping with earbuds in is A Very Bad Thing, but he does not appreciate that the alternative is unthinkable.

I suppose that my greatest fear is that all my work, all my efforts to improve myself have been superficial — that deep down I'm still a moody fat guy who sits alone in the dark and glowers at the world for not handing itself to him on a silver platter. I like to think that I reached what alcoholics refer to as "a moment of clarity". Perhaps that's not the right term. I like to think that I reached what cliff divers refer to as "you're suddenly not standing on anything anymore". I didn't just get the rug pulled out from under me. I suddenly didn't have the rug, the floor boards, the basement, or the cold hard ground underneath.

Chuck Palahniuk was right. Self-improvement is masturbation. It's only once we've lost everything that we're free to do anything. From that perspective, the ambitious career path I'm blazing and the frequent trips to the gym are less about making myself better and more about building a completely new person after knocking the old one down to the ground with a big heavy wrecking ball hung from a chain.

Of course had I to do it all over again, I'd do it differently. Every single step. I am growing content with the person I am becoming, but I am not completely thrilled with the path I took to get here. Some optimists would call it "making the most of a bad situation". I would call it "a relentless compulsion to kill everything I used to be".

I guess my second greatest fear after that would be being covered with leeches.

Today was a rough day at work and it's probably been the latest that I've stayed at the office in a long time. Gone are the days when I would be forced to put in face time until 9 or 10 o'clock at night then crawl home to eat, take a shower, and collapse into bed so I could do it all over again four or five more times in a row. I've finally found the beginnings of a work/life balance and it's amazing. Really. This is the best I've felt in a long time. Tomorrow I'm going to be doing a good deal of hazardous work, but I was (unbelievably) given a full week's notice that my services would be needed and could thus cancel all of my outstanding engagements for the day.

It's almost as if my employer respects me.

I know, kids. I'm scared, too.

Tonight I am terribly, terribly thirsty. I think I'm going to hydrate, take lots of ibuprofen to compensate for the over-the-top strength training that Monk put me through last night at the gym (gesturing with my arms as if I were hugging a beach ball is pretty much torturous to me right now), and contentedly retire to my huge empty bed where I shall once again drift off to sleep only but for the grace of a good distraction from the darkest and most primitive parts of my brain which, try as I might, have never given me a night's rest unaided.

Do I miss having a companion? A lock-step life partner who is the yin to my yang and the Laurel to my Hardy? You betcha. The darkness is never so black when there is someone there enduring it with you. I know I'm not ready to play that game yet because there's so much more that I need to fix of myself first. And then who knows? When I'm finally ready, I may start sleeping on one side of Schlafenstrasse just to get back into practice.