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.