Read At Your Own Peril.

It is 1:21 a.m and I can't sleep. I got up thinking maybe if I tried to write something I could bore myself to sleep. That was not an attempt at self deprecation for literary purposes, but simply a statement of fact. Sometimes my own thoughts bore me. They really do.

I started this blog thinking I might wow people with the force of my intellect. That's kind of a ridiculous notion when you think about it. Not that I am not intelligent, I am, or at least my family, friends and my I.Q score say that I am. What's ridiculous is my thinking that anyone reading my blog would care. That's assuming anyone IS reading my blog. Nevertheless, here I am typing away in the wee hours of the morning.

So, back to my thoughts. I'm thinking that I am not doing a very good job of thinking. Or maybe that I am not thinking at all or otherwise I wouldn't be up in the middle of the night typing on a blog that nobody reads. Instead, I would be sleeping so that I could get up in the morning and do something productive like, I don't know, trying to straighten my life out in some form or fashion. I have allowed myself to sink into an abyss of my own making. It started with losing my job, which was not my fault, but everything that has happened since has been controlled my me, and not very well I might add. I can go back and analyze what decisions I made along the way that brought me to this point, but that wouldn't change anything. I am at the point where I brought myself.

None of this stuff is important to anyone but me and the few people who give a damn about me. Not exactly the stuff you would write on a blog meant for public consumption. I have nothing to offer the public at large that is profound or thought provoking tonight. Just my own boring thoughts being typed onto a blog in order to put myself to sleep, or anyone else who might be reading it. Blah, blah, blah.

Hey cyberspace, CAN ANYONE HEAR ME? Didn't think so.

Life or Something Like It.

I have been thinking for a while about taking the blog down. In the last few months my life has become such a shadow of its former self that it has been difficult to get out of bed in the morning, much less take the brain cell energy to post any coherent thoughts. My unemployment benefits ended in January and I have no income at all now. I still continue to apply for jobs but I can't even get an interview anymore. I have managed to keep my internet connection up to this point, but I don't see how I can continue much longer.

I hardly get out of the apartment anymore. My only pleasure in life is baseball and I have concentrated solely on that. Wasting one single thought on politics only emphasizes to me the total breakdown this country has undergone and will continue to undergo. I could write a thesis on how I think we got to this point, but it hardly matters now. There is no going back.

The one thing that is still precious to me, after all I have gone through, is life. While my life is miserable, I still have it. I am not a suicidal person; I have always believed that as long as I have people that love me, I have to continue living, no matter how bad it gets. The preciousness of life was brought home to me even more when I received the news yesterday that a childhood friend of mine, less than a year older than me, had passed away of cancer. I had lost touch with this friend, but her death still touches me deeply. Someone I grew up with, spent countless precious hours with, no longer breathes on this earth. It can't get more final than that. Life ending is something that I have not considered or comprehended even amid all the failure and disappointment and total breakdown of everything I have known in my 51 years on this planet. I still breathe. For everything that this friend once meant to me, I have to hold onto that, no matter what happens.