Another day older and deeper in debt

By Carl

It really does feel like toting sixteen tons, this past year.

My thanks to Katrina for noting that, indeed, today is my birthday. I got the greatest birthday present I could have imagined... well, almost but it was very close... precisely a month ago:

So thank you all for that.

It's been an odd year, to put it very mildly: skin cancer, plastic surgery, a crazed mother, MRSA, an economic collapse, an election, and 2009 has already thrown down its marker to try to top this past year.

It's not going to be pretty, not for all of us, not for the world, and not for me personally. That's not to say all news is bad, of course. We did elect Barack Obama, which tells me people across the country are waking up after the Bush years and realizing we just threw a party we could neither afford nor could keep away from the punch bowl. Now comes the hangover, but in hangovers can come some good, like making a note not to do that again.

And we won't. For a while. I hope the next time we do something this stupid, I will have shuffled off the mortal coil. It seems pretty certain that will be the case. I recall growing up with stories of the Depression, so the generation after mine probably skipped those stories and now they'll have their own to tell their children and grandchildren. Figure at least a half century before we allow human avarice to overcome our sense of mortality.

Most news, good or bad, is an illusion. As the saying goes, it's never as good or bad as it seems. In all good news, there are the seeds of its own demise, likewise in bad news the seeds of new hope. All births result in death. All deaths, in births.

Forgive me. I'm a bit melancholy at the moment, but as I face a few facts -- I have more days behind me than in front, we have for the first time elected a president who is younger than me -- I'm struck by how lingering and looming my mortality is, and how little I truly have accomplished.

I've not finished writing a book yet...started a dozen or so and even have one outlined to completion, but never finished one. I've not run for public office to truly try to help people who need it. I could, but I won't because I have too many skeletons.

I feel underappreciated.

Not by you guys, no way. Not even by the trolls who fester and pop up every so often here and in other places online. My "family" here is wonderful, and I love you all for that.

I feel underappreciated by myself. At my very core is this interior monologue that's saying to me "you can do better, so why won't you?"

Indeed, why not? To quote RFK: "Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not?"

I dream the dream. I ask the question. Yet I find myself lacking the strength to carry out the answer.

Funny thing about it is, I'm a hypercompetitive person. I was the kid on the other team you never wanted to play against, because I would find a way to beat you for my team's sake. I was the goalie who could lose his mask and glove and risk breaking his wrist to catch a puck, or the quarterback who limped out on a bad knee or broken toe, all of which I've done and all of which I'm paying the price for now. So why not for me?

Enough introspection. Where's my fucking cake???

(Cross-posted at Simply Left Behind.)