So, we’ve been invited up to the see the grandbaby, which is always a riot. Unfortunately, she cracked her head on a dresser and had to get a couple of stitches, so things may be more subdued than usual.

Poor baby. She’s such a sweetheart. There’s a purity in children that’s enviable, a pure connection to joy and other big feelings, a present ability to immerse oneself completely, that contrasts so nicely with those of us who have had all the joy so scraped from us that we’re little more than hollowed-out shells.

I pray for that kind of easy innocence, that easy joy.

I will never feel it again.

Target: 800 words
Written: 303 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: The Regiment, Farley Mowat
Comics: Postal 19-20, Think Tank: Animal 2, Samaritan: Veritas 1
Music: Our Love To Admire, Interpol

I don’t want to give the wrong impression. Saturday was my birthday, spent touring the local wine country with my family, and thoroughly enjoying it. It was a very nice day, and I would have no problem spending every weekend like that.

I’m not even particularly worried about my age.

I just look back at the length of my life and think… what have I done?

What have I contributed?

All the shitty things I did because I wanted to be somewhere else, something else? The courageless bluster?

It all means nothing if I haven’t actually backed up what I said I wanted with action.

That’s the thing these days; it’s so easy to fucking talk. To be outraged, to troll, to assert your betterness.

I don’t want to assert I’m anything better; I know I’m not.

The older I get, the more I find myself drawn to realness, to the radical acceptance of the situation, of not wanting to have anything to do with the pretense of others, the falsity of their projections, and most certainly, the epic spewing stream of diarrhea that is my own current state of being.

All talk, no action. No action, and barely even talk at times.

Wanting everything; doing nothing to get it.

Waiting for the dragon inside to finally take over and take flight, and praying it’s not actually a fucking dung beetle.

Anyway, there is desire to change; it hasn’t yet reached the tipping point to actual change. It doesn’t, as Amanda Palmer would say, hurt enough.

Still, it hurts pretty bad and a change is coming; there is an ultimate collapse, an upheaval, I can sense it.

A bottoming out, and endless fall, an impact, waited for and dreaded.

A final end – is it all worth it? Does it turn out all right in the end?

Or is all just shit, to be forgotten a few steps into the future?

Target: 700 words
Written: 595 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: The Elfstones Of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Comics: Think Tank: Creative Destruction 2-4, Symmetry 5
Music: Original Pirate Material, The Streets

Man, what a fucking waste.

Target: 700 words
Written: 336 words, novella: The Mungk

Read: The Elfstones Of Shannara, Terry Brooks
Comics: Symmetry 2-3, The Tithe 8, Postal 10
Music: The Original Broadway Cast Recording Of American Idiot (hey, we were recently in Rome, right?)