Life in progress

Category Archives: Life


by 8 Comments

My Poetic Paper Route

It’s cold and damp outside. The snow is melting in all the wrong places turning the earth that was churned up beside the sidewalks by the sidewalk plows into mud. Said mud is running in dirty puddles down every conceivably available square inch of concrete, and where the sun doesn’t touch the mud is an icy sheet. Every day before noon I walk these muddy sidewalks delivering the local newspaper. I don’t do it for the money, I do it for the exercise – at least that’s what I keep telling myself. Most of the time I think I just do it because I’m masochistic, especially on days like today.

However, as I was trudging up the hill on my street today, an inch deep in dark black mud, I realised I am living my dream. I write in the hopes of one day distributing my words to hundreds of thousands of people. What am I doing now? Admittedly, I only deliver 16 daily papers (and 124 flyers on Thursdays).

One day, when I’m a bestselling author perhaps I’ll be able to look back to my life now and say, ‘There I was, doing what I’ve always wanted to do. I spread the written word’.

Poetic, isn’t it?


by 2 Comments

Ch-ch-ch-changes

It’s funny the way sometimes changes in my life come all at once. It’s like the moon, or some other force out there in the universe has shifted and made everything seem different, even though it all looks the same. Although I am just a speck in the grand scheme of things, I am affected.

I strongly believe in the concept that everything is connected. Everyone is connected simply because they exist. It’s a bit of a frightening thought that I might be causing someone harm at any given moment. But then, if I live my life right, surely the majority of the time I must be spreading happiness, or at the very least causing someone to think more deeply about how not to make the same mistakes I did.

Anyway, back to the changes. In the past twenty-four hours my son has gone from hospitalized to sitting in at the computer at home, watching The Price is Right on Youtube and screaming as though he just won a car. A good friend of mine lost his job. True, neither of these changes are about me per se, but both affect me. However the biggest change of all: I found regret. Not just the regret I feel when I discover I should have bought that bag of milk yesterday because today it’s not on sale anymore, but life-changing regret.  The kind that I can’t go back and change. Not with all the forces in the universe.

In the grand scheme of things I’m a speck. A shifter of the universe.


by 5 Comments

Sad but True

Ever have one of those days when you haven’t had any sleep the night before, and you’re just about to finally fall into bed at 9:30pm and you get a phone call from a customer you deliver the newspaper to (for a stunning compensation of 11 cents per day) to let you know that your eldest son didn’t deliver their paper today (and neither did you because you spent the day in the hospital with your youngest son) and all you want to do is cry?

I wish I could say me neither.


by 1 Comment

Life does that sometimes

I realise that in posting a serial story I have created for myself a certain responsibility to my readers to keep it up.  Unfortunately, life.  You probably understand. It doesn’t always revolve around the internet.

So, I’m writing now to say I haven’t forgotten about my story (Boy Series – One through…) and neither is it finished. Nine is not the dot dot dot.

Not that I’m assuming anyone cares.

Are they crickets I hear?


by 3 Comments

Forty-something and still growing up

What is it about my life that at what should be my bed time I start acting like a teenager? I know damned well that I’m tired, and yet I refuse to do the sensible thing and go to bed.

I think that maybe it’s the quiet which lures me into wakefulness. When it’s quiet I can concentrate on writing. At night I don’t have to worry about the phone ringing to tell me someone has been misbehaving at school and can I please come and pick him up.  During the day I’m so worried that my creativity will be interrupted that I would rather procrastinate by playing Bejewelled than run the risk of starting and having to stop. Then there’s the fact that at night I can act like an adult: having a child who refuses to play silently by himself (and by that I mean if I don’t play with him he screams at me until I do – long story) is hardly conducive to sitting down to a peaceful cup of java and a pleasant read.  Oh, and wine of course. THAT I can enjoy a glass of after the kiddies are safely tucked away in bed.

After all, isn’t being a teenager all about wanting to grow up? Yeah, I’ll bitch about how tired I am in the morning…

Maybe I’m not really grown up after all.


by 2 Comments

Invaluable

The most supportive people in a writer’s life are the ones who understand when it’s time to *whispers* go away.


by 1 Comment

Whatever am I doing here?

It’s a question that is asked by everyone once in a while, by some more often than others: what in the world am I doing here? And oh how we struggle with the answer!

My answer for the moment is, I am here to write, to please myself.

How about you?