Oh you’d be surprised.

Hey! I just realized I’ve achieved my dream life! (The realistic dream, the one without the live in pastry chef).

Ask me if I’m happy and content! Go on, ask!

I’M NOT! HA!

I’m  one  episode of Jake and the Neverland Pirates away from punching windows, not just for the satisfaction of destruction, but in the hopes that the cleansing pain of dicing my hand will give me fresh perspective on my life.

WTF man. This is all I ever wanted. A really good husband. Two nice kids. A writing career, doing just what I want, when I want, for real money, on the upswing. Small clean town. Friends. Everything is coming up Milhouse. (True, I can’t get the mail without doubling over in back pain and shortness of breath, literally telling my daughter to “go on without me,” so my health is not great but at least that problem has a clear category.)

I’m still finding ways to be unhappy. I’m a truffle pig, snorting out tiny stinky wads of precious misery. What the hell is my problem. (rhetorical!)

My comfort is the knowledge of how miserable most over-thinkers are. How many great writers and painters and music makers ate a shotgun or walked into a river with rocks in their pockets.  My genius is yet undiscovered, laying secure under a lifetime of prime-time sitcoms and snack-cakes, but I am certainly an over-thinker and a writer. We’re built to spill, us.

We have to  think all the time, think fresh stuff up, and figure out how to perfectly arrange it in an endless chess game with ourselves. And then, most difficult, we have to present it so that everyone else likes it – so we can have their approval. Cuz we need that, or we would dissolve into a cloud of neglect and fall to the floor.

I keep meaning to make this blog topical and impersonal, (“HERE IS MY OPINION ON JUSTIN BIEBER! THERE ARE MANY ASPECTS OF THE CIVIL WAR THAT ARE NOT WIDELY CONSIDERED! I PREFER KNIT TO CROCHET AND HERE IS AN AMUSING ANECDOTE AS TO WHY!!”) cuz more people would like to read it that way, but I just can’t yet. I have to purge. Every now and then I have to vomit up the bile that’s accumulated just by my existing, from my habit of drawing everything tired and low and unhealthy up into myself.

And thank you for holding my hair back while I do it.