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When it all catches up

I’m feeling a bit melancholy tonight. You’ve been warned.

I glued the phone handset to the base – it hasn’t been used in quite a while so I thought that would be best. I’m not feeling well and when that happens, everyone calls and wants to do something. Only on a Friday. I had no less than three invitations, all of which were declined due to my feeling less than 100 percent.

Tomorrow I will remove my brain. It seems that’s the only way to find what I want. Someone is going to read this and be overly critical. I will blame the medicine I’m taking.

Do you know in Britain there are no Pharmacists? Over there they call them “Chemists”. Isn’t that wonderful? There is a large amount of vernacular the Brits use that we don’t and vice versa.

It’s almost Christmas. This time of year always gets me down and I think I know the reason why: no fresh air. I’ve been cooped up in this house for a few weeks now with the same stale air and dust mites. I have traveled out a bit but not enough to rejuvenate my spirit.

I think that’s part of what working does – it renews part of your spirit while breaking the other part down. It’s like the layers of skin that die off only to be replaced by new skin cells. There’s a cycle to it.

At some point in my life I need to find out what “Liquid Smoke” is. I hate ending sentences in a preposition. If I remember correctly you’re not supposed to do that in sentence structure. I’m sure if you read enough of my posts you’d find all kinds of typographical errors and incorrect word usage (i.e.- ‘of’ when I meant to say ‘off’).

I keep trying to make a wish list of items that I’ll need to purchase when I get a job. I then suddenly think of something else and whatever it was disappears like smoke in the wind. If I need it that badly, I’m sure I’ll think of it.

For some reason, I have been doing a lot of reminiscing about my music lately. In my house cleaning, I have stumbled across a cache of tapes that were made many moons ago that can only be described as ‘experimental’. It’s funny to remember the time and place when all that music was made (and I am stretching the definition of the word ‘music’ – trust me). Some of it is outlandishly funny, and in some I hear an honesty that one rarely hears in music these days. I hear the acorn that became the – well, mightier acorn. I haven’t quite reached ‘oak’ status.

I hear the songs grow and it makes me think of how much I’ve grown. It’s like smelling something your mother cooked when you were child and all those quaint memories come rushing back to you. You remembered youth. I can definitely hear my youth on those tapes. As I grew, so did my music. I’ve always felt like my music was like my toothbrush – private and something only I would use.

There are parts of me that want to send it out into the world and see what happens. Those songs are like my children and all I want to do is protect them. The problem is that I don’t want to be hurt by them. I don’t want others to judge them harshly. I’m not tough enough to take the criticism. I don’t mind them hanging around my neck – they don’t weigh a thing.

I read back over my blog posts from this past year to see where things went wrong. Maybe I don’t want to see it but I can’t see it. Maybe it was the biggest mistake to leave my job of almost 17 years but, at the time, I thought it was the right thing to do. Truth be told, I still think it was the right thing no matter what happens from here.

It’s hard to hear stories of their successes based on information I gave them. It’s hard to see things come to fruition knowing that I put the wheels in motion. It was hardest to see my replacement win “Employee of the Year”. All the while, I wasn’t bitter about any of it.

I guess the best I can take away from this is the knowledge that this year is almost over. I could never have predicted this would be my lot at the end of the year. It’s hard to make a fresh start at things when everyone is waiting until the beginning of the New Year.

To end this, I’ll quote Col. Sherman T. Potter (of M*A*S*H): “Here’s to the new year. May she be a damn sight better than the old one, and may we all be home before she’s over”.

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