The rare and occasional visitor to the eye of paradox will note that I have been absent for the most part from my own blog. Ironically, this is not because I have nothing to say. Quite the opposite; I have too much to say and too little time to spend on writing any of it down. That is my reward for trying to improve my education and hold down a steady job.

It underscores the problem of trying to do what is expected of you. I am expected to find my place in the world in spite of the fact that there is no place for me in this world. If you broke me up into bits and pieces, there is some place in the world for each of those parts.

Unfortunately, whenever I have tried to fit in somewhere, the world has tried to chop away at the parts of me that stick out. Since I have never found much more than a finger hold anywhere, the effect is more like people stomping on my fingers while I dangle from the edge of a cliff. Needless to say, I’ve done a bit of falling. I smash on the rocks, pick up the pieces and climb back up again, but for all the work that entails I do not make a lot of progress in life.

I have to be fair, there are always a few people willing to throw me a line. My family usually gives me enough slack to inch my way up the cliff and find another fragile finger hold. My friends often hold out a hand and I can make it safely onto a ledge that seems stable enough, if still a fair climb from the top of the abyss. I was even able to reach and hold out on such a ledge entirely on my own for a couple of years. I completed the courses for my AA in Business and found a decent paying contract job.

I want to hail these as accomplishments, but I feel as if I could have accomplished more in the time I have sacrificed in the process. In the absence of any coherence of body and soul, creativity is my sole satisfaction in life, and these commitments offer no creative outlet and leave me no time for the creative outlets I’ve tried to develop online. The frustration that this causes tends to turn anything I try to write into a complaint; since I prefer not to complain, I simply do not write and months or even years pass in silence.

It makes me miss the days when I had no job and no decent place to live, but enough time to at least type down my thoughts for future reference. Now, I can truly appreciate not having enough time to think. Compared to that, not having time to organize my thoughts, to apply them to stories or simply explore them in a way that a typical reader might be able to follow, no longer seems like as great a problem.

The real problem is, I do not know if my thoughts can fit into this world any better than I do. After all, they were inspired by the circumstances of my life. I know a few people who believe that I do not fit in because of the way I think.

I try not to put too much stock in my thinking, though. To me, what is really important is what I can understand. That is what motivates me to write. To me, that’s where the magic and mystery of life are found, in understanding. So… I’m not dead yet. I still have a lot to say. It just might be a while before I can say what I want to. Until then, I will post what I can; I will post things I’ve already written, back when I wrote things down simply to get the ideas out of my head.