. Spinning .

This is just too funny.  A customer just left the shop and we’d just talked briefly but she said that I’m always so "bubbly."  Now the last thing I could ever be traited with is "bubbly."  Anyone who knows me well enough knows that morose, moody, even manic-depressive might be applied, but this lady, on each of her visits, must have just hit me when I’m flying high.  Not on drugs (though it might be a good recommendation) high, and not the high when I’m passionate and off on some crusade hanging on for dear life to a trusty white stallion high; but the nothing and nobody’s bugged me badly enough today high that produces at best, a willingness to smile.

Perception, it’s all in perception.  How we view others, how we see them, and how we through words can read and tell someone’s story.

It doesn’t really worry me since in the end, I think it doesn’t matter.  It’s just that I’m having a hard time going back to revise and edit at least two of my recent pieces or even open up the files.  It seems like I just don’t want to even look at them again.  I open Word and go instead to a folder of a friend and work on editing some pieces there.  There is no emotional involvement here.  It’s easier.

Maybe it is because I’ve been away from the format for a month or so, devouring novels and philosophy instead.  Maybe it’s because I’m feeling helpless or even hopeless or a new confidence in new yet unknown directions makes this need to turn my back on things that drain me of feelings extend to writing too.

Strange, to watch from somewhere else inside me, the closing of an era.

One of the finest writers on the weblog circuit is Ellie at This is My Body, This is My Blood.  She is a published author and her style is one of honesty struck through with humor and sensitivity that reaches in and pulls you into her life and her extraordinary way of looking at her world.

Ellie is featuring a workshop on journaling starting in June called Journaling From the Heart and if you’re interested in developing that voice that needs to share, and finding the words to put it into, this is well worth considering.  It is free (though donations are welcome) and the freedom with which Ellie lives her life is reflected in the guidelines listed on the website.  Check it out.

Bad poetry aside (I never bother longer than a day to rewrite poetry since it is only a release in which I think I’m cleverly hiding feelings beneath metaphor and thus eliminating some at least of the woe-is-me posts), I am facing that annual deadline once again of being cut off during the summer close of submisions.  This 2006 deadline represents the mother of them all.  The end of energy and passion put to a hopelessly unrealistic goal.

So I must polish up the couple stories that I have and send them off before month’s end I think, and for the last time wait upon the verdict.  I may still write short stories for my own amusement and just to get them out of the English Muffin nooks and crannies of my brain, and may work towards a novel or maybe just play around with Flash–but that will be it; passion having dwindled down while more urgent needs loom large as they say, on the horizon.  One of those needs is to learn how to function on Earth.  I had a great story working in my mind this morning, "Discovered–The Lost Dialogues of Plato" in which I’d proven life exists in other space beyond our own.  Important just to me, I suppose, since once again I have that feeling that absorbed my teens and early twenties that I just wasn’t from around these here parts.

For me, self-publishing is not an option.  I’ve done it many times already as editor of three magazines that needed fillers.  And with the many weblogs where I write, there is no longer any boost to ego seeing my own words lit up in pixels 1680 x 1050 on a screen.  Glad to have rediscovered reading, my time is well spent in that alone.

So maybe I will be posting lightly here and maybe not.  Most likely not since someone seems to have gotten their quarter stuck in my prolific slot.  2006 is a year of many changes that include discoveries I need make room for; necessitating I suppose the leaving behind of relationships and workloads that shall never indeed produce a single fruit of sweet and satisfying taste.