I'm still here...

The song says..."It's been such a long time..."

Another year has come and gone and so many things have changed.  Should I stay or should I go from the Home is something I ask every day.  I miss it here but there's a lot of memories hiding in the corners that just aren't what they used to be.  So much has changed.  The days are long and the nights are forever.

But I went for a ride the other day and that's good I guess.  Heading nowhere execpt somewhere.  For some reason, I remember the whole world smelled of apples as I went along.  Apples and old, musty summer; getting ready to finally give up the fight against the turn into fall.

As I often do, I took on the meanest hills I could find...still trying to out-ride my age and disposition.  It was hot and muggy and predictably, my legs once again gave out on the last big climb.  They're forever doing that and so I walked a while on funny shoes that were never meant for anything but pedals.  Slogging along pushing the bike and trying to get myself back together seemed like a metaphor.

It all gets a little hazy when you're walking up the road with sweat and the sun dripping down in your eyes.  The Man With the Hammer is nearby and he's laughing at your battle to keep your lunch where it belongs.  Everything hurts and the top of the hill looks like the end of the world.  Metaphors.

Eventually, the road flattens out a little as they always do and I can clip back into a wobbly semblance of a ride over the crest.  I'll have a sore throat from gasping for air but at least there's a chance I'll make it home under my own power.  I pick a dirt road for the last leg even though I know it'll rattle my eyeballs.  This only because I also know it tends downhill and there's not much left for another climb.  I'll take the shakes if I don't have to fight another hill.  It'll be almost dark now that the days are shorter but I think the driveway is possible.  Some things at least, never change.

The funny part is, I know I'll do this again no matter how much it hurts and keep doing it until I can't.  I don't know what that means but I know it's true.  And for now, I remember the smell of apples.

The End of Home?

So here we are.  And where do I begin?  Or begin again?

I miss tapping away on my old Wayward Home but so much has changed.  This has been a winter that seemed to never have a spring.  A long, cold season.

The long days and longer nights have taken some of the joy out of spinning tales and made the Wayward Home feel like it's not really a home so much anymore.  It seems like so many of the stories I wanted to tell have a different ending than I thought and putting my fingers to the keys and writing them down feels like saying fare-thee-well.

How do I begin?  Or how does it end?  Maybe it's time to shut the WH down and do something else.  Maybe there isn't much more to be said.  Maybe I don't know how to say it.  But then...I miss my Home and wish I could bring it back to life...even if it was a different place.  So how do I begin again?

It took all week to get this far.  Maybe with the slow, late arrival of a spring...will come brighter days...and a Home...or something like it.  Or maybe not.  We'll see...

The Blocks

I've been thinking.  A lot.  There's probably been about a dozen starts to this post but it never quite seems to get off the ground.  Maybe too much is flying around in my head all at once to actually put it in one place and have it make any sense.  Is it blogger's-block?  Somehow, there just seems to be a thousand little pieces of posts but not enough to make a whole one.  It's frustrating because writing has always been pretty good for what ails me.  Especially during the dark winter months when I always come down with the blues.  I knew I wanted to do a new-year post to break the ice (in more ways than one) but after one or two sentences...I kept deleting it and starting over.  I'm usually not one to run out of stuff to say so I'm a little confused.

My blogging friend Tim Joe over at TTPC said to just bang on the keyboard until something happened...forget what it was supposed to say and just say something...anything.  He's right of course.  That's how a lot of this thing has come about.  Just sitting at my laptop and something zooms through my head and becomes a post.  Unfortunately, not too much has been zooming of late.  But I guess I'll give it a go...

So much has happened since I last put anything up in the Home.  My previous post was anger at the hate and lunacy filling the world.  The one before that was anger at my world.  Somewhere, a lot of unhappy crept in.  I almost think that might be why I haven't written much...things feel out of balance.

I'm still running those all-night trains for a living which keeps me off schedule and kind of jet-lagged a fair amount of the time.  Time shifting has never been easy and as I get older, it gets tougher.  Days and nights aren't supposed to get all tangled up.  Someone once said that the worst thing ever put on a locomotive was a headlight and I'm inclined to agree.  That's when 0300 became a normal time to go to work for most of my career and 7 in the morning sometimes becomes happy hour.  I remember watching in wonder as a guy at an Allentown crew hotel had two Killian's Irish Reds with a bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwich at 8:00 in the morning one day.  We'd just gotten off duty and were grabbing breakfast before trying to get some rest in full daylight, knowing full well it would never happen.
"That looks hard", I said as I walked past his table on my way to pay my tab.  "Yeah it is", he said "but I'll sleep good."  Out of balance.

Then I look around the news every day and wonder.  I'm not going there right now but...what the hell happened to us?  I know that bad news and crisis' sell advertising and jack up the pageviews but come on.  Would it be that hard to say something good?  My Facebook page is the same way.  Conspiracies, rumors, hate and controversy have taken over a big chunk of it.  What happened to cat pictures and hilarious rottencards?  Everybody's sure we're headed for concentration camps or Sharia law.  We used to post about our friends and worry about being tagged in drunk/stupid photos, now my newsfeed is mostly political rants and dire warnings.  I'm thinking about just bagging the whole thing.  Out of balance.

Then there's what's right here under my own roof.  For now at least, the Wayward Home is not what it used to be and it wears heavy.  Let's just say that winter is here with cold nights and chilly winds.  I'm not sure when spring will ever arrive and change the weather or what might happen between now and then but there's a chill in the air that ten cords of firewood can't take off.  More of life out of balance.

Maybe if it would stop snowing and being nasty outside the back door, I'd feel some better but right this second, it just started spitting again and the big thermometer on the deck hasn't cracked 20 in days.  I think I need a ride.  Winter is always like this to me in some ways but this year seems like we're stuck in the Mother of All Januarys.  Just to be outside a while without having to bundle up like Nanook of the North would improve my outlook a bit.  Maybe.  Or maybe the sun will come out, the blocks will come off and somehow, someway, the Home will be home.