a simple man

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.