Write and ready.  Sometimes I have nothing to say, but that doesn't stop me, and I go ahead and say it badly.  Writing has always preceded readiness for me.  I try to stumble in writing first, so I won't be surprised when I fall.  

I wonder.  Would I be real today if I hadn't always had the luxury--or curse--of retreat into the gray matter, of escape into thought? My life has not been spontaneous, except by accident, and always I have been the spectator, never the player.  But, Oh! to play...  Can thorough absorbtion in actions instead of thoughts be better? The players don't appreciate themselves like we do from the bleachers.  They don't know--how can they?--the ecstasy of entering them from afar, and experiencing their performance, perhaps more acutely than they.  We fans exchange knowing glances.  Do the players even recognize the precious moment as they speed through it? They may be stars, but they can't fully participate in the game AND enjoy our perspective of distance from it.  So there.

'Player' and 'spectator' are artificial distinctions.  The game, really, is awareness, and we are all players.  Some better than others.  I am trying to think of something spontaneous to do.

There is always more to say than time to write it.  "I have nothing to say," is a failure of faith, a 'de-fiat', a contracture of the limitless human entity, easy to contain, but crippled in the reduction.  

What a bunch of crap.  Congratulations if you got this far.  Now I remember why I never did an online journal before.

A while back I gave my notice at work (that was the 'epiphany' mentioned on 99.11.10).  I retracted it because the plan didn't work out.  I work at a detox, and today a counselor asked to talk with me privately.  I was surprised.  I wanted him to leave me alone.  He knows too much.  

Jobs are what you do, not who you are, and people do them for a million different reasons.  Where I work there are lots of inefficient methods, broken systems, and generally lots that frustrates any effort to do a decent job.  During my 'epiphany', I realized my workplace was not healthy for me, and on break one day, I told Ron (the counselor) about it.  

Lies will kill you.  But we use them to avoid discomfort.  So, if you want to stay comfortable, don't ever be honest with a person of integrity.  You can be honest with anybody else; friends, family, lovers, clergy, or total strangers, and if they don't have integrity, they will never hold you to it.  They will let you resume your lies, no matter how self-destructive they may be.  But if you tell a person of integrity--someone who is honest with herself/himself, and has learned to stay as honest as possible in all they do--if you tell that person that you have identified a problem, they will never let you go back to pretending the problem isn't real.  

Maybe my plans for changing my life were not the best.  They didn't work.  I didn't make them work, or couldn't, or wouldn't.  But the problems which motivated my plans for change were real, and my internal issues, which I identified eloquently to Ron in the fervor of my epiphany, were absolutely valid.  But my plan to quit my current job, get a new job in two weeks time and move to Boston--in that order--didn't work.  That first flash was big, but the charcoal didn't catch, and then it started raining, and I wanted to go back in the house.  I was telling myself stuff like, staying in this job is not so bad, and I don't deserve for a dream like that to come true anyway.  Just when I had comfortably resumed my former blissful denial...

"Joe, can I talk to you for a minute?"