Dated 29-March-2005

I am beginning to have the feeling that I am no longer living my life but simply living. This is not to say that I don’t like my life, because I do; I’m comfortable, I’m content. However, my life seems to be becoming routine.

I have my job to take care of and the dogs to take care of and myself (with my personal trainer) to take care of. All these things while necessary are scheduled. I have a time and place to be almost every day. Moreover, the times that aren’t scheduled are usually spent dickering around on the computer playing “World of Warcraft”. Even the weekends are quasi-scheduled. I need to clean the house and do my shopping. I think I may even be filling my time with computer games to help avoid dealing with it.

I like to call myself a writer. I once heard that “…you have two choices, you can live your life, or you can write…” Why can’t you do both? And if you don’t “live your life”, what is there to write about. Shopping lists and meetings? Not everyone can be “William Carlos Williams” jotting down his daily life in verse on a prescription pad. If one has no life experiences, what can one write about?

I used to be the guy who danced in the dairy section and climbed the statues in parks and ran around making a general idiot of myself. It was fun. It was exciting. It was life. Now, I have “things to do” and less time to “just do things”. Is this what it means to be grown up? Is a mid-life-crisis simply the fact that you’ve become aware of these changes? In any case, it sucks. However, to try to grab it back seems fake to me somehow. It’s like being stuck between rock and a soft place.