The journal is a mess.  When I built it, all I had was IE to test with, so it looks ghastly in Mozilla.  I will make it work, but it will take time.  All my journal pages are unique, and each will require some amount of attention to display as intended, and today I am feeling very sick.  So they wait. 

Doing a double at work today, despite wanting to puke, because I need the money.  I wish I had something clever to say. 

Time to change.  Rather than simply leading to the latest blog entry, the index to my site will become a true index, providing links to all the pages that have accumulated here at burgwinkel.com—many broken, some embarrassing and all true.  The blog, in it's most recent deterioration and excess, is now located here. 

Well, now.  Twice in two days.  Isn't that a bit too much?  But like I said in the last entry; if not now, then when? 

When did I become a writer?  I never did.  So why did I pretend to be?  I will try to know. 

The hard part is really the simplest part of all.  Just start something and don't give up until you finish.  We don't make miracles; the miracles were made at the same time as you and me.  They were made back at the big bang, at the start of time.  All we have to do is find a hope or a belief, an art form, a passion, a desire which stands out from among all else that is within us, and love it without surrender.  We have to hold onto that love no matter what storms it raises in our hearts, no matter what terrors come that make us want to run, and no matter what imposing doubts appear that make us want to give up and walk away.  The hardest part is simply sticking with the thing we love long enough to allow the inevitable miracle to finally arrive. 

The first thing I always do—after walking away in frustration, or running away in fear from the thing I love—is to say that the love I abandoned was never a true love to begin with.  It is an easy out, if out is what you want.  I say, 'I never really loved writing, or journalism.  Or words even, for that matter.'  And a little part of me dies, right there, at that moment, because I know it is a lie.  I am nothing but that which I love, and I possess nothing but that which loves me.  This is a hard truth to know.  It drives me into direct confrontation with all that I have ever feared and hated.  It requires me to abandon a lifetime of tricks and schemes which I have used to at least assure survival, though not miracles.  And like some time warp, confronting this truth puts me right back into that childhood moment when the rage began, the moment when I decided in a furious, hate-filled tantrum, that I would not participate.  Ever. 

A wise friend once told me that when a child has a tantrum like that, and angrily rejects everything and everyone, that child needs to be shown a way back.  A child left abandoned to cope with his rage alone learns to live in fear and never learns how to come back.  He lives outside the wall, and every day that wall gets higher and more impenetrable.  He imagines what it would be like to participate in life and, whenever necessary, he pretends to do so.  But every time he pretends to be alive, he knows it is a lie, and a little part of him dies. 

I can't afford to allow many more parts to die.  I need to either find a way to break through this wall, or I need to walk the other way, whatever that may mean.  So far I have implied that genuine life exists only on the inside and I must go there to truly be alive.  While I am waiting for the wall to open up, I pretend that I am already there.  But I can leave the pretending place.  I can turn away from that wall and I can make a life for real—anyplace. 

I don't feel like writing, but if not now, then when?  I am a little hungry, probably from the effects of the two martini's I nursed all evening, one each from the two bars I visited in Springfield Massachusetts tonight—or last night; it's now 3:00 AM.  I have a nice glow.  Dinner was much earlier, at the Miss Florence Diner, a place called 'world famous' by others I know who had been there in their youth.  I will certainly not soon forget my visit there.  If Vincent Canby can give an outstanding film like Desert Hearts a bad review (which he did in 1986), then I can justify praising tonight's visit to the Miss Florence Diner beyond what the product and its presentation deserve. 

Good food, and not expensive, especially considering the environs—the eclectic and sometimes exorbitantly priced dining establishments in the Northampton area.  Northampton Massachusetts, of which Florence is a part, is a kind of landlocked Provincetown, except it is a college town with youth who are there for reasons beyond merely the advantage of their age, and it has clean water.  Otherwise it is at least as tolerant and accepting an environment as one can reasonably expect outside of Vermont.  And it's not far from there, either. 

Tim, a Saggitarian, with Leo ascendant, can be overtly charming, gregarious, and immensly enteraining.  My friend Tim amazes me with his capacity to spontaneously engage total strangers in fascinating conversation.  Maybe these conversations with total strangers are only fascinating to me because, if not for Tim, I would not engage in anything more than monosylabic exchanges with, say, a couple from San Jose encountered in a leather bar, or a waiter.  I would learn nothing when meeting new people without Tim present because of my own fear and timidity.  I not only would learn nothing about new acquaintences when I am absent Tim, but more importantly, I would learn nothing about myself for my reluctance to explore a new encounter.  The clear pools we probe in our explorations of another reveal as much about ourselves in reflection as whatever we might uncover in the depths. 

There is, hidden within each of us, a subtle and delicate thing.  A fragile flower, perhaps.  Or an intricate crystal of ice.  Whatever its metaphor, it is the gentlest part of our humanity.  It is exquisitely responsive to contact with every other living thing.  It is eager for such contact, though for the sake of ease, I often pretend otherwise.  Some of us, who keep these delicacies of our soul deeply hidden, endure decades of agony because we refuse to allow others to ever see the trembling ecstacies—or the delicate catastrophies—they might inadvertantly cause.  The thrill and excitement of contact with another soul, however mundane the circumstances, sometimes causes us to overburden such tenuous links.  After all, we each have vast amounts to tell one another, and even more vast amounts to discover.  Sometimes, hiding it all is easier.  But it always hurts a little to hide. 

I didn't hide so much tonight as usual for me.  Bouyed on the lifting waves of Tim's gregariousness, I dared to make some ripples of my own.  Disparage my feeble excursion if you will, but I committed to two things when I did it:  To write this entry when I got home.  And, as gently as I know how, to give acknowledgement to that hidden part in you, and in me. 

Blessed night.