Category: Captain’s Log

All my life I’ve been telling stories.

I remember when I was a little kid, playing with LEGO. I didn’t even own any proper minifigures yet, so I made my own. Being a huge fan of Star Trek and Star Wars, I built my own X-Wing and bridge of the USS Enterprise. I then populated them with my brick-built people.

I didn’t build the ships to have the ships, I built the ships for my LEGO people. I built so that they would be able to travel on adventures. I built to tell the story of those adventures.

These days, all grown old, it is no different. I have all the LEGO I can build with, and many minifigures. But I still am trying to tell the story of each tiny character.

I started to collect 3.75″ Star Wars action figures about 10 years ago. Using primarily two stormtroopers, I took well over 100 photos telling the stories of Kyle and his brother Kyyle.

Today I have several Black Series 6″ troopers and want to once again embark on adventures with them and tell the stories of these new troopers.

My next foray into the world of telling stories is with puppetry.

Once, again, as a child, I was part of a puppet team. I had a wonderful crocodile puppet and did several shows with him. I even wrote, produced, and performed my own puppet show with a monkey puppet that I got for a birthday one year. (I still have that puppet in a closet somewhere.)

Those were simple hand puppets, and made for children. Now I want to get into full size hand puppets, the kind with rods controlling the arms. Eventually I would like to build my own puppet. Until I am able to do that, I thought I would buy one, so that I could learn the craft.

Regardless if LEGO, action figures, or puppets, I just want to tell stories. I have written many short stories, and will continue to do so as inspiration strikes, but I also love real live performance with gesticulating fur and ping pong ball eyes. Something about bringing that to life excites me in a way that LEGO and stormtroopers do not.

For now, though, that remains a dream until I can save enough money to buy my first large size puppet. I have picked one out on Amazon that I would like. I just need to be able to afford him. (If you would like to help with that, you can send me an email to see how.)

No matter what, I will be telling stories. But I cannot wait until I can use a puppet! I even have a name all picked out…

I am writing this using the WordPress app for iOS. I want to see what the experience is like versus writing on my laptop. Any difficulties should be attributed to that, if you please.

I haven’t written here since March, aside from the two poems I just published. My blog is titled “down the dusty road” but it seems to have fallen by the wayside.

I used to write a lot, as you can see if you explore my archives. Lately, at least for the few years since I was regularly writing, I’ve been in a funk. I think that no one cares what I have to say; I think that no one is listening.

For me, that can be a creativity killer.

To break out of the funk is simple: write. That’s why I am trying out the iOS app. To see if I can make it simpler for me to send my thoughts into the world. Welcome to my experiment.

I am a huge fan of Adam Savage, the maker and former Mythbuster. He is constantly talking about making, about adding something where nothing was yet. My writing is like that: I am crafting content where none was before.

And I’ve missed it greatly. I know that something has been lacking in my life. Depression sometimes knocks me down; life gets busy (I got married this summer!); and days slip by. But here is my promise to myself: I will keep going. I will write. I will create. I cannot control who, if anyone, stops by, but it must be for me that I make. To fill my creative voids. To fulfill my urge to make.

My part is simple: make. Your part is simple: read or don’t. Ignore or engage. Appreciate or not. I hope you read, engage, and appreciate. I hope I can add positively to your experience. But that is not in my power to control, nor should it be. All I have to decide is what to do with the whatever I’ve been given, to quote Gandalf.

So no more creativity killer.

No more wondering if anyone is listening or that no one cares. I make to make. I write to write. If you read, then great!

Thank you.

If you do read my blog, if you do find this in the wilds of cyberspace, leave a comment or email me and let me know. I’d love to hear from you.

**(by the way, the experiment was a success! Typing long form on the iOS app is damn easy and satisfying. Knowing that I can take this anywhere and write anytime is a huge boost. Here’s to ya, WordPress app developers! And thanks.)

The door creaks open, and the light behind me breaks into broken shafts illuminating the darkness ahead. Swirls of this and bits of that dance in to and out of those bright beams. A thick layer of dust lays upon the floor, undisturbed and thick, like the blankets of cosmic clutter that litter the moon.

The room? This blog. Unkempt, silent, waiting. Quietness now shattered by paragraph and thought. Life, depression, business and busyness – all, inch by inch, closed this door and locked it tight.

Wetness coalesces in my eye’s corner until critical mass ensures a well that breaks the dam releasing an ocean in a tear, crawling down freckle and into beard.

I miss this room, this blog. A space of my own, to write and reflect, and send little nascent parts of myself whirling across the hyperspace of cyberspace. I miss these little bits of me, scattered behind doors my psyche has locked and left bolted around me. Some, I’ll never access again, their treasures hidden for an eternity in my mind, never to be discovered by another. Intense Sadness sits there, her hand caressing each door in turn. A tactile love you are not forgotten she whispers. She looks at me with my eyes, and I turn from my stare, unable to bear the fact that some part of me locked these doors and threw away each key, leaving me to comfort my own fadingness with just a soft touch upon rough wood and flaking paint.

A repeated refrain echoes in this room, as I look over posts from ago, sitting now piled in corners like old cardboard boxes, their sharpie labels faded: “I stare down the barrel of my own mortality….” It’s my voice, a line I wrote once upon another age, perhaps in misery or mired in depression’s mysts. I believe it still. I stand now on the cusp of 32, wishing it were 22 again, feeling old without right, used without purpose, and so terribly tired. Weary. Worn. Done. Not from age, but from life. A life I never wanted, still do not understand, and yet that stretches out before me. I have decades yet to see, but not the passion to walk the road that binds them.

All I want to do now is reforge keys and throw open each locked barrier and spill my creativity in a loud, glittery, cacophony of me. I fear I never will. Even were I to be able to live an eternity, I don’t know this soul could endure it. I don’t know this soul will endure another night, interminably alone, let alone a year or more. Arms to hold me tight, lips to whisper love and plant love, and eyes to look into my wounded heart and pour healing…those would get me through, spark me into a burning ember that might outlast the fusing sun. Without? I am the moon. Dusty. Cold. Forgotten, without light of its own.

I hope this blog, this room, remains open to me. All the old familiar places… I’m leaving sooner than I want to, but these little sylabs I’ve strewn across the dust are all I have, right now. They sit, impossibly shiny, in the weathered ageness, hoping they, too, will not become relics to comfort spiders who sit in webs and grow old from hunger.

I step away, a fading footfall down a desaturated hallway, where at the end, a door remains a crevice into a further universe of possibility.

It is the quiet of morning and I am listening to one of my favorite film scores (Pirates of the Caribbean) and am contemplating life.

Last week, I was challenged on Twitter* to examine my life and discuss the intentional and permanent changes I had made in myself. Few things are permanent in this life, but some of the decisions we make can be. My father tells me of a time of in his life where, as a child, he decided to react a certain way to a situation, and that decision has stayed with him his entire life.

Intrigued I thought about it, and shot off a tweet, but want to examine my choices a little more here.

The most obvious permanent change I have made in my life are my tattoos. Barring painful and expensive reversals, they will be with me until the day I die. I have two of them, one on the underside of each forearm. The first one that I got, on the left, I lifted from the pages of a favorite book, the Silmarillion by JRR Tolkien. It says in the Elvish “aurë entuluva” and means “day shall come again”. The passage it is taken from tells the terrible tale of Hurin, warrior among men, who is fighting in rage-filled desperation against the forces of the Dark Lord Melkor. He is slowly being overwhelmed by the Dark Lord’s army, and with each smoking stroke of his sword Hurin cries out “Aurë entuluva – day shall come again!!” A battle cry that even should he die, the Dark Lord will not win forever.

This passage inspires me in my struggle against my own Dark Lord: Depression. No matter how dark and terrible the battle, day shall come again. Depression does not win! To companion the first tattoo, I delved into the Elvish and wrote a corresponding phrase “auta i kelomiâ” which means “night/darkness/the abyss is passing away”. Again, it is a battle cry for me against depression. On the one arm, striking a blow, “day shall come again!” and the other, following the blow with one of it’s own, “night is passing away!” For me, a powerful two-punch combo.

But what are the less obvious changes?

I guess second to my obsession with all things Tolkien, which inspired the first permanent change in my life, the next has been a life long tango, that is, my dance with organized faith. Early in life, even before I was born, I was involved in a Christian church of varying types. After I was born, my parents insisted on taking me to church every time they went. This was a life long choice that was made for me, and as soon as I could make the choice for myself, I didn’t go back for about seven years.

Recently I started attending church again. I still do not know what exactly I believe for myself, and how much I believe it. People around me talk of love for God, or Jesus, or whatever you want to call the divine being, and that for me remains a mystery, but I understand a great deal about Christianity’s holy book, The Bible. Thus I have begun teaching small parts of it that I do understand, at least a little, and live the questions for the rest. I don’t know what my future with religion looks like, and whether this second trial will be any more long lived or permanent than the first, but despite that I think my life will always be entangled with the Christian faith. I cannot seem to escape it. It makes up a significant portion of how I think and my moral compass and predates a lot of the morals I have decided to hold that are similar to Christian principles.

Third permanent change I made in my life was finally getting treatment for depression, and learning to deal with the ongoing effects of my mental illness. Yes, I am not well, and this is rarely obvious. My sickness is one of the mind and not body. It effects me in various ways, and I have written about that throughout the years on this blog that you can find, but it is a Very Bad Thing and it keeps me from enjoying many of the things in life that others take for granted, such as the ability to enjoy things in life. I am much better off now than I was many years ago at the height of my suffering, when my wife divorced me and left me to crumble under it’s weight, but I will never be healed. Full recovery I understand to be impossible. My brain is broken in ways that can only be patched, not perfected. Each night it passes away as day comes again, but it always returns.

I don’t know what the fourth change means, and I don’t remember precisely when I made it, but it was long ago in my teenage years perhaps, but I stopped writing in lowercase, or cursive, and began to write exclusively in print capital letters. At the time I think my handwriting was becoming more and more illegible, and I wanted to make not only stylistic changes, but make it readable. Since then, I have tweaked how I write certain letters (depending on where they fall in the sentence or word) and have developed a consistent font that is all my own. Someday when I can get an iPad and an Apple Pencil, I will digitize my handwriting into a font. That would be fun. But it qualifies as a permanent change I have made in my life that was intentional.

Beyond that, I don’t know. Do learning skills count? Perhaps, if they are unique? What about changeable decisions that are made continually? I have learned skills, and I usually make the decision to color my hair, or get tattoos (and I will again in the future). What about life goals, do they count? I have decided to not accept the status quo and fight for justice and freedom to think, learn, grow, and exist as you are and wish to be. This drives a great many of things I say and do and how I interact with others.

I don’t know.

But that is enough for now, I suppose, to give you more than a tweet to understand the permanent changes I have made in life. Perhaps that gives you more of an insight into the complex individual that is me. You’re welcome.

*(@philredbeard warning: I earn my M for Mature rating)

Today is that day on which American’s stop, eat more food than they should, watch a damagingly physical game that bewilders the rest of the world, and give thanks for things they possess and events in their life.

As traditions go, it isn’t a bad one. I’ve enjoyed it every year of my life so far and this year is no different.

I sit here typing over a belly too full of turkey and fixings, watching a team called the chargers play some guys in stripes while some guys called the cowboys watch an oblong brown ball fly around, and think about that for which I am thankful. The list is long and distinguished and in no particular order.

I am thankful for family. They sit around me, and though the small humans are a bit too loud sometimes, I love them all. They are flawed, full of snot apparently, and of various sizes, and the kids aren’t too nice either, but then, neither am I, most of the time. We are human and wonderful.

I am thankful for my mind and my health. I have suffered from depression for a long time, but lately have been on the upper side of things a majority of the time. I still have days where I lose to the depression, but they are far between.

My car starts, my computer works, my Apple watch amuses me, I have two good jobs that I actually don’t mind working. I have favorite t-shirts and the luxury of my choice of shoes. I have a roof over my head, and floor beneath my feet, and four walls.

In all, life is good, and I am thankful for each and every part, no matter how I may complain on any regular day, or groan about work in the morning, or wonder if I will ever achieve my dreams.

I have much, and for that I am thankful.

What are you thankful for?