So many stories, so little time...

Hmmm…so I already used the line about the dog eating my homework, huh?
This is another impromptu post; another one of those stream-of-consciousness diaryesque spiels I find I need to write every so often, just to open up my head and see what I’m thinking. Not that I feel the need to apologize for my absence — I gave up that guilt trip long ago — but I do need to explain it, to myself if to no one else.

I had been writing since yesterday, trying to complete my current series, which in all honesty, I believed had languished simply because I had become bored with it. However now that I've gotten back into the flow, it's coming along a just fine. Hopefully I’ll have something posted soon.

But what I’ve decided was the real source of my recent writer’s block is not boredom, but rather information overload. There is just so much going on in my life that I want to talk about, so much to reflect upon, I simply don’t know where to start. I just want to put everything else on hold, but my half-cocked obsessive sense of order just won’t allow me to do it. If I had my way, I would go on a week-long writing bender; drink a gallon of coffee a day and probably age ten years in the process, not to mention wreck my marriage while I was at it (Michelle and I had an interesting discussion about that, by the way, that I’ll have to write about at some point soon).

I always thought it was a cliché reserved only for the old and bent, but I can truly say now that I understand what my Mom meant when she used to say, “There just aren’t enough hours in the day.” There simply aren’t. I have no idea when somebody decided to speed up the clocks, but my days literally fly by now. It doesn’t seem fair. Weekends aren’t long enough. Vacations seem like weekends. I’m really starting to grasp my own mortality, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. However it does serve to be a wonderful impetus to write. There is truly just so very much I want to say. I simply don’t seem to have the time.

The primary culprit is my job. I have been placed in a position of such uncertainty, yet with so much opportunity, I dare not screw it up. I have been challenged by my new boss to step outside the box that I’ve been comfortably huddled in for at least the past five years. She has given me the permission to do what I’ve said I have wanted to do ever since I started working there, but had never found the support to accomplish. Now it’s up to me. Problem is, during the time I was complaining about not having the means, I allowed myself to fall so far behind on the technologies needed to accomplish these initiatives that I’ve been caught somewhat flat-footed. It's put up or shut up, and buddy, I'm puttin’ as hard as I can.

Every free hour I’ve had at work, in addition to a few nights and weekends, I’ve spent studying; scouring the Web for any tips, tricks, or tutorials I could lay my fingers on. I’ve made some strides, but I still have a long way to go, and not a lot of time left to get there.

Quite frankly, I feel my job is secure, but if I play it safe, that security may not last. What’s more, the prospect of turning fifty this year and possibly looking for a new job is not something I find particularly attractive.

Therefore my nose has been to the grindstone, each and every day. And those fifteen-minutes-that-usually-turned-into-an-hour here and there during which I used to write during the workday have now ceased to be. I know I had related that before, but now it truly is a reality. Now the weekend is my only devoted time in which to write, and even that has been challenged and will only be more so as summer and its clarion call of yard work reasserts itself into my weekly routine.

Music has also played a big role, both in its occupation of my free time and my exasperation over the inability to write about it. I’ve been to some fabulous concerts, musical plays and movies over the past three weeks that I most definitely will be writing about in the future. I would like to blend those stories in with some other as-yet-not-written remembrances of shows that I’ve attended as far back as the Fall of 2004, which never got written but for my entrenchment in still other long and emotionally taxing series that I couldn’t seem to pry myself away from. I know, I know; it’s a sickness. But it’s my sickness, and it’s a part of myself that I actually kinda like, so I deal with it.

And speaking of concerts, the story of the very first rock concert I ever attended (which was also a large part of the genesis for this blog), has been solicited to be a part of a new Rock Music retrospective on the Web by a music historian in the UK who found me here on Blogspot. Pretty cool, huh? I only received the e-mail from him yesterday, so I really don’t know where it will go — if anywhere — from this point. But again, it’s nice to know that there are indeed people out there who are reading. I’ll have more to say if and when it happens.

My marriage (Michelle and I celebrated our 27th Wedding Anniversary last Friday); my job; my kids; my aunts and uncles; my brother Alex; my music. I have stories in my head right now that I want to write on all of them. But time is not on my side. Guess I have to just get back on the saddle and ride as far as ‘Ole Paint will carry me, one story at a time.