Sick...and Inspired

My head is occasionally pounding. My neck and shoulders are tight, and intermittently killing me.  I am in and out of sick this morning, enough to roll over with the alarm at 6:30am and say, "not today." That's enough to take a sick day.  I've got them so...

I'm considering a chiropractors visit...a nap...a few ambitionless hours...rest.  I could blog, but that won't exactly loosen up the neck and shoulders.  I'll most likely do it anyway...this nefarious addiction of mine.  There are days I consider sharing less, and days I shudder to think who reads this thing, and then there are others, like today, when I just shrug and blog on.

It's funny, I recently had a very uncomfortable blog moment, sitting in a room with several gentlemen who couldn't comprehend the idea of my blogging, and who quite possibly only know the activity by name only, and it struck me how immediately judged I felt.  It also whacked me hard how unmasculine the practice seemed to be interpreted as, which is strange because I've never felt like a better man doing anything.  Their judgement was quiet and reserved, but I shrunk a little to fit their interpretations and I wasn't proud that their gazes left me a little undone. That humbled me a lot.  They weren't overly critical, it was just that I knew that neither would ever...ever...do the same, which made them no lesser or more, just different, but all the same...undone.  For the first time in this blog's existence I questioned myself.  It was fleeting, but there it was.  Why do I do this?  I'm sure the answer has changed over the past four years, but there was the lynch pin...four years.  I have friends who I like a great deal whom I haven't known for four years.  I have many things in my life that I've never known or invested in this intimately, and so there it was...a new reason for blogging on.  It's been so long, so many stories and photos and feelings.  There's no question why I do this.

I feel very strongly that as a society we rarely do anything together anymore...not the least of which being succeeding or failing together...or attempting to understand one another, or changing in full view of the people you know best.  I've seen it happen here.  I've watched as people make comments and then fade back into the rest of their lives...changing nothing...doing not a single thing differently...wishing, hoping, waiting...and nothing except new blog posts to shift their faces into smiles, or their hearts to action.  I am still, after all of these years, isolated in this ridiculous endeavor.  Only my friend Jason attempts to build a similar bridge between himself and the world that he lives in.  I get it.  Some people are private. Some people are busy. Some people just aren't like that.  Hilariously, it's not about blogging, it's about living out loud, and this blog is just a simple medium to kick start that exact thing.  I just don't see a lot of vibrancy around me, and that upsets me.  I want everyone that I know to feel the sunshine on their faces ALL the time...not some of the time...ALL of the time.  I know some brilliant, beautiful, incredible people, and I'm watching them die every day.  Dramatic?  I don't think it is.  I can name you half a dozen people whose lives collapsed and were rebuilt these past few years...and another dozen more who are living with decisions they occasionally regret...I can toss onto the pile another dozen who wish, on a regular basis, that there lives looked differently.  I blog because I want to spend every day trying to make my life look differently, and that starts with awareness, and then bleeds into action, and woven amongst all of it is communication and expression.

I felt judged that day, and then I felt embarrassed that it even affected me.  I do this because I want you to know who I am, and how I feel, and what I love...and I love this.