I had a nice chat tonight with a friend who is a published author.  True, his work is only available for purchase in the UK – some weird tax ruling has yet to be put in place, I think – but still, published.  He’s a super guy and chatting with him brought back wonderful memories from elementary school and junior high, when life was young and bright, a newly-pressed penny, and one was optimistic and bold or timid as the case may be; when traumas were all of the made-up sort (in retrospect, obviously); when the weight of the world was not yet yoked around your shoulders, immense, solid, visible even when you shut your eyes, peripherally omnipresent, soundlessly pulling you down to earth and dust.

Chatting with him also reminded me that I have short stories floating around and I need to carve out the time to put them to paper.  I think I recently mentioned I have thought up a new story – but  it’s not a story until I write it down.   Then it’s a bad story.   Then I edit, and it gets better; then it gets submitted, and rejected, and I edit again, and it gets a little better; until finally some publisher, drunk on wine or reeling from a bad day, accepts it at a flat fee of $75 to be published in the Rural Vermonter Quarterly; to be read by seven people, four of whom are Facebook friends of mine.

Then, as a published author, I can develop a drinking problem, a penchant for shotguns and sayings like “birds on the wing”, and start flame wars with editors who reject my magnum opera.

But! – get published first.  The cart goes after the horse, the better for the cart to realize that the path can oft be a shitty one.

In other news, I’m being asked to look at a new change in my life as an opportunity.  I suppose that this should be the default attitude, right?  Every change is an opportunity, a chance for growth, for learning, for perspective – but right now, part of me is still very firmly rooted in a Never-Never-Land of the past, where I’m dueling Captain Hook to taste the drops of water left on deck from the splash made when 2009 was dropped overboard.  I have to shake that sort of thinking, and move on to more positive terrain.  It’s an incremental journey at best, and like a good game of chess, full of reversals and board positions that are better or worse and uncertain outcomes and hundreds of opportunities to make the right decisions.  Unlike chess, however, it doesn’t really matter who wins – black or white – because here the object is merely to get to the end, to put in the time, finish the game, fold up the board, breathe a sigh, and move forward.

Today I went to the Seattle Marathon Health and Fitness Expo at the Westin and picked up my race packet for tomorrow’s 5K.  It was only sort of a madhouse, with tons of vendors and relatively few freebies.  I should have taken photos – I’m a curator of my own experience, along with the rest of you, after all – but forgot.  Tomorrow morning I line up with the other runners and will have a post sometime this weekend describing my experience.  Wish me luck!