Autobiographical Random Nonsense Best Avoided By Readers with Discernment

Once upon a time I knew... everything. Well, everything that mattered. I knew the streets of my neighborhood, the names of my friends, and how to enjoy life. I walked, biked, tossed frisbees, even played a little ball with my best friend (poorly, but with a certain enjoyment). I read myths, novels, comic books, science books, and biographies. I prayed naively, without doubt and without pretense. I laughed and cried freely. I had parents, siblings, friends, teachers, and vague dreams of doing something in that distant time when I finally "grew up." I was in elementary school, and life was good.

Ok, so romanticizing childhood is a favored past-time of old people who feel they have missed the boat. I know just how whack my childhood was: I lived it, right? It was better than some and worse than others, but even then, I knew it was a blessing. A blessing that was dragged through mud and broken glass, a blessing that occasionally found itself lost in a metaphorical desert, bleeding and crying, but a blessing nonetheless.

I liked to draw as a kid. I was never any good, but I enjoyed art, especially in junior high. Painting and drawing, and, to a lesser degree, sculpting. Like shop class and home economics, art class produced something from working with my hands. Like most people, producing something tangible with my own hands was deeply satisfying.

I've always always enjoyed music. Not surprising, since most people I've met do. I have absolutely no skill in producing it. Strangely, in high school ALL of my friends were skilled musicians. One of my friends, a scientist-musician, once assured me that given my love of math, there was a musician inside me, but I'm still skeptical.

But there was never a question about my creative medium of choice. I've been writing for as long as I can remember. Not well, and not consistently, and (until the Internet) not publicly, but working with words, ideas, stories... has always been a part of who I am. At one point, in high school, I thought about becoming a writer, but even in high school, being "grown up" and making such decisions seemed far away (oh, silly dreamer! Methinks you needed a bucket of cold water and a swift kick in the rear).

It's odd, given the opportunities to write available to me now, that I don't. Well, not so odd. What keeps me from trying to produce anything of substance is fear. Fear that I have neither the ideas, the talent, nor the discipline to produce anything worth more than the self-published drivel that appears here. Strange, the ten-year-old me wrote a vampire story: pages of painful plot, silly dialogue, and stock characters. No fear, though. I kept it in a blue binder that had a Battlestar Galactica insignia sticker on the cover and spent hours on it: making changes, adding chapters, etc. Couldn't tell you whatever happened to it. It wasn't my first story, but it was the first one I remember working on.

Old people may romanticize childhood, and I am as guilty as the next codger. But maybe, in our defense, there was something romantic about childhood. Not merely the fabled innocence of childhood, the innocence being a necessary condition for the romance, but some largeness in our souls that, I don't know, for want of a better phrase, lived more than we do now.

Or maybe that's just more rose-colored navel-gazing. Dunno. I think of Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkien: grown ups who, I believe, kept a romantic vision that most of us seem to lose. In my best moments, I can almost see the grail, shimmering in the last rays of twilight, calling me West. Sometimes, I can sense Chesterton, just beyond the pale, like a Christian Obi-Wan Kenobi, urging me to take up my sabre. But usually, I just pay my bills and take my meds. And, that, as they say, is life.