My Blog...

sitting around

It is a good day to sit around the house in shorts and a t-shirt with greasy bed-head hair, drink coffee then somehow fall asleep during the Tigers game only to wake up in the bottom of the ninth to witness the completion of a sweep by the White Sox over my team. It is a gloomy Sunday afternoon.

Reading a few blogs on this site and a few others on myspace inspired me to write one of my own. But I am lacking something pretty major to be able to write a true blog, or basically to write anything at all. I have not been getting out much, you see, and it can be difficult to write about nothing. I don’t care how creative you are, if you’re not experimenting new things, or living a life in all three dimensions, which is active experience with yourself, others, and God (or yourself, others, and nature for Atheists), you’re not going to write a blog the way it is supposed to be written and you’re not living a life the way it was intended to be lived. When I say, “you’re,” I am speaking for myself. It is a defense mechanism that I use to shy away from the truth about myself. It is much more comfortable for me to quickly go from first person to second when I lay a direct attack on myself.

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” My inner critic likes to remind me of that quote whenever I sit down to write. I rarely finish a project; I’ll be lucky if this very one comes to a completion.

I have definitely stood up to live on many occasions. I have experienced a lot, which can come quite naturally for a naïve, spontaneous youngster like I was. All of my major geographical moves across the state have been decided in less than a week prior to the actual move. When I was 19, while on the phone with my sister, who was in her last year in the Education program at CMU, she suggested I come to Mt. Pleasant to live. Within three days my bags were packed and I was cruising up to her apartment in my 91 Olds Nighty-Eight excited and ready to start the next chapter of my life. About a year and a half later, on a drunk summer night back in Marshall, I drove home, ran up to my room, grabbed all the dirty and clean cloths I could carry and threw them in the back seat of my car and then sped south down I69 until I had to pull over near Indianapolis to get a few hours of sleep. When I woke up, I filled up with gas and decided to go southeast for a while. I ended up on the border of West Virginia, and stayed there for a few months in a Holiday Inn parking lot then a roach-infested motel room after Holiday Inn security kicked me out. I knew that it was time to go back to Michigan after I got fired from my Subway job and ran out of money.

When I got accepted to NMU (which isn’t hard to do), it wasn’t four days later when I packed my little Prelude up and headed north until I got to Mt. Pleasant. I went to a bar there to take a break from the road (I wasn’t too bright), and ran in to some old friends. Turns out they were having a party that night. After a long night of drinking I got back in my car and trudged my way north, finally making it to Marquette about 16 hours later.

When I arrived, I stunk. I was greasy and still very hung over. I had a little hope, though. I was starting a new life. I didn’t know a single person in the town, and it felt good. After finding my dorm room, taking a shower, feeling good and all freshened up, I got on my bike and rode around the brand new town. It was a cool night, and I was lost in every direction I was heading. It felt good. While trudging up Third Street I decided to park my bike by the steps in front of Vangos and have myself a cold beer. After three or four beers I rode around Marquette lost and buzzed until I found my way to the water. I sat on a rock somewhere by McCarty’s Cove and smoked a few cigarettes, then got back on my bike and guessed my way back towards my new home. But The Wooden Nickel came in site before I was to find my dorm and I don’t recall ever making it back to my room that night.

Two years later, a few days after deciding I was going to stay in Marquette for the summer, I was heading south again in my newly restored, piece of shit Prelude. I stopped in Petoskey to visit some friends on my way home. My visit lasted throughout the summer.

That was about four years ago. And now here I am sitting down trying to write.