Ode to a Journal
Every human provides a service, if only in the message of their lives.  I live a rather unique existence in that I am a former teenage parent in the last years of kids-at-home parenthood.  Further, I am a full time single parent.  Finally, I am a dad.  But wait, there’s more!  I’m fucking interesting!

My service is this unorthodox diatribe. New York City powered by a giant windmill.

Seriously, this is how I keep the good ship Taranaki afloat. I didn’t sign up to fight the toasters. I didn’t join the aristocrats. I got laid off from my last corporate job, busted my ass on construction gigs for a summer and became motivated to do something. This just happens to be what I do. You work at CenturySoft. I write. Just press the green dollar button and we’ll both feel really, really good.  And my teenage children and I can keep eating.

But that’s not all.  I have some… issues.  For starters, I use emacs, an archaic computational environment, much like my skull.  It’s what does it for me.  I grew up with WordPerfect.  Did my best work in that editor.  Quality.  Even got accused of plageurism one time by my seventh grade english teacher, Mrs. Williams.  And I still look proudly to my fifth grade magnum opus, “Herbie Knickknock’s Wonderful Adventure.”  It was a bitch to type back then, too.

So if I haven’t convinced you to send me money through rhetorical legerdemain, perhaps the size of my VARIABLE will convince you.  Yes, I’m a trained, educated computer programmer.  Ok, you’re right: I should be able to take care of myself.  But that means advertising, right?  Or more construction and exterior painting?  God forbid returning to dilbert.  Curse my conflicting values.  They’re meaningless and arbitrary, right?  So why do I value a square deal so much? But do I really?  Mostly I just want to play music, to write, dance, sing, paint — to create!

For a moment consider my position as a peaceful man amongst a fairly rough lot of folks.  I don’t even know a single person outside my immediate family who is a non-smoker!  Well, the same can hardly be said for myself, as my son will attest to having busted me smoking two days in a row.

Yet adults cannot be corrected in the same way that they seem to think their kids require.  What they deserve may indeed seem to be what they dished out, but then our society will have solved nothing and only more deeply ingrained the fears which likely manifested these behaviors in the first place.

Therefore the solution for the adults may likely be similar in character to the solution for the children.  What is working for the kids seems to be love and respect.

I called this a covenant because a covenant is an agreement that is always kept. The making of this agreement is also the keeping of it, therefore a covenant.  Love and respect is a covenant that I’m keeping.  I swear by the hearth, without and within.

So why pay for yoga?  Why pay for anything at all if it’s more work to pay than to not pay?  Work perhaps even in the form of undue time away from family, transportational overhead, lost meals together, the time I was able to spend writing the preceding covenant.

Ah, now to save the file, close it, and let it slide back into the meaningless bitspace.

…and dammit I know this doesn’t have a very clear point.  It’s an ode anyhow.  Wordpress (where I cut-n-pasted it from emacs) says its 596 words, too.  Thanks a lot… I fucking hate computers.  Give me a pen and a journal any day.  Visibility then becomes a more tractable issue, far fewer buttons.  Tags? Um… categories?  Yeah, some superior system we’ve got here.  I gotta get out from under all this UI now.

These past months I have been embarked on a quest of sorts, to find that which I am most suited for and to establish a means of fulfilling my obligations by means of this discovery. With that aim I have followed a path that is no path, pursing nothing exclusively and indulging in the exploration of many curiosities. Though on some levels this path may have began lifetimes ago, for the purposes of this most recent iteration, and for this story, my journey started with a trip to southwestern Utah to soak my soul in the vastness of the desert.

Though many obligations held me to the city, the need to reconnect with what I now view as my soul’s home had finally become too overwhelming to be put off any longer. The catalyst of this trip was a pair of women that I had connected with online though Twitter. They were on their own journey of discovery, a cross-country trip which began for them only a couple weeks earlier in southern California and Las Vegas respectively. We agreed to meet in Moab and see where our paths took us from there.

I arranged my city life to go on without my direct assistance for the weekend, perhaps longer, and packed my car too richly for the purported weekend voyage on which I was embarking. A cooler with a week’s worth of food, gear for climbing and backpacking and a spirit of open ended exploration were what I took, and my excellent friend and canine companion of nearly ten years was my only traveling mate.

On the way out of town and for no conscious reason I reached out to many of the members of my family. I called my brothers and father in Richfield, sat down with my mother for coffee and conversation, and even stopped to see my grandmother and her husband in Price, Utah, on the way to Moab. I had originally anticipated leaving very early, but a snow storm the evening before and a series of last minute parental obligations forced me to leave later than anticipated. I accepted my first lesson of the trip and allowed the journey to progress without hurry. I drove the speed limit, stopped where fancy inclined me to, and let my thoughts reflect the peacefulness and magnitude of the country around me.

From this point, I began to notice the occurrence of frequent meaningful events and coincidences. Just before entering the canyon which led to the pass between the Wasatch range and the northern tip of the San Rafael Swell I received a phone call from my ex-wife, who informed me that her more recent abusive ex-husband had been jailed that morning for breaking his probation by committing yet another assault. The judge stated her opinion that his behavior appeared to be dangerous to society in general and ordered him to be imprisoned immediately. For both my ex and myself and our children (and probably many others who had the misfortune of crossing this man’s path) it was a moment of relief over ten years coming. I entered one of the most dangerous stretches of highway in America with a feeling of lightness delightful in that I hadn’t even been aware of the weight I had been carrying.

After lunching with my grandmother and her husband, who had the previous evening been visited by paramedics due to her difficulty breathing, I shared my love and gratitude and completed my trip to Moab.

Now take a moment to focus on your own breathing, and I shall concentrate on mine.  In one breath the magnitude of an entire lifetime is divided into ‘past’ and ‘future’, at the top of our in breath where polarities reverse themselves, an infinite universe exists, and in our entirety we become unified with Now.

The telling of a tale, even the true expression of a brief experience, can be an enormous task. The synchronicity of my journey, the seemingly accidental connections I made, the impeccable timing which allowed me to witness moments of utter glory in the universe, leave me humble before something which is clearly greater than myself, and grateful for the grace with which I can embrace this miracle of which we are all a part. The remainder of my journey is comprised of numerous as yet unwritten tales, yet the gifts of confidence and opportunity with which I have been bestowed will propel me to eventually share them and continue to expound on the theme of uncanny synchronicity and universal goodness which rests with me, warmed near the hearth of my heart, held up by the lodge pole of my able and confident spirit.

Namasté

Thank you, @Ghennipher, for helping me get my first WordPress blog up and running.  @Taranaki is in your debt.  Namasté.