Three: Only in the Game

 Okay, so, here's the deal with the deal. I wasn't going to post today -- I posted the other night and the habit with SWP lately is to just forget about it for another month or so after each post but I got caught in the vortex of the past and needed to say something.

Lately this blog has become just a bloody drag. Like anyone else, especially I assume anyone my age, I do have my downer moments where I reflect on the past but it's become problematic that these are the only moments that are seemingly being reflected in the blog. 

Yeah, I do engage in recreational nostalgia. I open timehop every day (gotta keep that streak going) and I listen to records from my twenties and I sometimes read this blog or my old Tumblr just for a hit of what the highlights are, but thank god I was pretty unvarnished in those days about how crummy a lot of my life was overall. I don't get nostalgic for the life I had, I get wistful for the twenties I wished I had while they were going on, but didn't because of circumstance and my paralyzing personality crises. I certainly didn't have the TV sitcom experience of hanging out with the same close-knit group of people every day for ten years -- I don't know that anyone does -- and my dating life was one deflated balloon after another. I had low self-esteem, a job that, while I liked it, didn't make me like myself (because it was low-paying, low-prestige, and going nowhere) and couldn't make my dreams happen despite trying everything I could think of that was in my wheelhouse. That was it, that was me, and it sounds incredibly sad to lay it all out there but it is.

I'm better now. I have my problems of course, but I am a capable, functioning person with an identity and a good job and enough time for some hobbies and a wife whom I love sharing my life with. She's not the Ramona Flowers type I probably secretly coveted and always went for, but she's the Mel type I needed, and I met her right on time, as time was running out on sowing my wild oats, which (again) I hadn't had much luck doing. God help me, I really am happy, and if I get a little down, it's probably because getting myself down is a weirdly amusing leisure activity. How perverse. And funny, in a sad way.

Yeah, I'm not young -- and I didn't feel young when I was young so I'm starting on the backfoot anyway -- but I'm not out of opportunities. If I want to make something happen so badly, I ought to. I do think I have a fear of success. I think I want greatness but I recoil at the struggle and potential for disappointment that would come from seeking it, so I pick safer, low-risk options like my little hobbies. Oh well. You know, there's food on the table. 

And I want to be a dad because I would like there to be a little person who is my mark on the world. That I made from scratch and instilled values in. I'm deathly afraid of what that's all going to mean but I still want it, and we're trying.

There's still some time to get some writing done so I'll leave it there because I powered through and said what I wanted to say. I'm doing my best to see my mid-30's as my New Prime.

There. Now I can feel better about turning my attention to my writing for an hour or so before I wake Mel up and we go to Nonna's for lunch.

Keep on Rockin

Scotto