Long Walks.

I took some time driving around Lee's Summit after visiting Dan, Jon and Dennis. I was pretty tired, but so much in the town had changed that I had to go looking at some of the places I used to haunt. Naturally, I passed near where my old collections job was and I had to go see. Did the place get leveled? Was it still there and open? I drove up and there was a corporate sign for another company there, but the building was just how I left.

I had forgotten certain parts of it, which I started recalling in vivid detail - things on the inside I remembered as I looked on the outside. I couldn't stay very long, I started to get a cross of anger and low level fear just being there. I just couldn't be there without thinking how much going through that job affected me even today. I feel like I was abused by it and forever changed, and I wanted to do something permanent and destructive.

So I left. I guess I may never settle things with that particular demon.

Arguing at Reflections

I am in Kansas City, and I am cold.


I'm here for a sort of "make up" visit, having missed going back to the Midwest and see my family over Christmas. The weekend after my birthday seemed like a good time, and the tickets by plane were cheaper than driving. I always forget that it's not really the cold of places with a real winter that gets to me, it's the constant cold. I can spend a couple hours out in zero windchill with minimal problems, but the uninterrupted cold toes I had when I lived around here were just godawful.  The cold just permeates everything and while you're not freezing, it's just relentless.

Right now I'm breaking a little bit from getting writing done to reflect about my birthday and whatnot. I turned 32 this year, and so much has happened in the past couple years with my life that I think I should probably get another tattoo. That's a leap of logic that makes sense to me, I think: tattoo = important milestone. I didn't do much in Austin for the birthday except a dinner at Treehouse with potentially too many people. You just can't speak with everyone at a 14 person dinner like you could if you had everyone over at your house lounging around. I got a bunch of various alcohols from my friends (and a model gun), and Kim sprang to help pay for the tickets to get me to KC. Not a bad haul overall. After bringing home the bottles and subsequently getting a few more on Thursday when people came over for the tabletop, I realized none of them were the shitty, nameless "please get me drunk quickly" sort of things I used to drink. And hey, the bottles themselves just look neat sitting on the shelf.

So I think, with that revelation, I realized I do actually see myself as an adult now. Not in all respects, but for a long time during my twenties, it was very hard for me to grasp how other people could possibly see me as one. I didn't feel very adult, and when people looked at me, I got the sense that they agreed with that. I don't think the past couple of years have really changed me a great deal, and the fact I dress a little nice isn't really the catalyst for this. I think it's just a slow, steady change - the kind you don't really notice until something makes you.

It's the sort of thing that makes me realize now is really the time I should be getting things I want in life done. I always felt previously not that I'm bad at things, but more like I wasn't somehow ready to do things like actually publish a novel or try to do a million other things. I just didn't feel like I was on the kind of "level" one should be to get these things done. It wasn't an age thing so much as the fact I know I'm intelligent and talented in a myriad of ways, I just always felt like there were so many people more intelligent, more prepared, and more practiced at things and I wasn't ready to contend with them. But the more I get through life, the more I realize that it's not true in a lot of situations. People are seen to have authority, experience, and merit because ... well, they throw their hat in the ring, and little else. I talk to people about politics and they have no real grasp on a lot of ideas but others see them as very learned on the subject. I used to reconcile that by thinking that I simply didn't have the whole story, but more and more I'm willing to believe that I do. And that story is sad. SO sad.

This is the year, I think. Not magically "my year" by some weird appointment, but just the year I'm ready to recognize that I did make it into adulthood, and now it's time to do something with that. Working with AEG again for the past year has really helped with this, I think. Getting back in the regular habit of writing and being relentlessly confronted with the fact that folks with much less talent, care, and maturity than myself get very, very far in all of this.

I dunno what tatt I'm gonna get, but it's on the list. The same list that says "Seth you have gone to the gym about seven times in the past couple of weeks, get the fuck back to it." The holidays and work load were fucked up enough to knock me off my routine, getting sick made it worse, and traveling isn't helping, but I definitely feel the difference. Time to get back to it, all of it, it seems.