Here we are, nearly... (checks phone)... okay, more than 3 months post-publication, and I haven't given my blog the time of day in weeks. Don't get me wrong--I have all kinds of wacky, wonderful and oftentimes horrifying thoughts rolling around in this slightly over-sized noggin of mine, which are simply begging to be shared with the world, but actually formulating them into coherent ideas is... well, really hard.
For starters, life seems to get more and more complicated by the minute. For instance, as I sit and write this, I've just put a screaming baby to bed with her bottle, and I'm counting down the minutes until she drops the thing and resumes her general fussiness, and my one shot at concentrating for the next three-hour period will be shot. And in the time it took me to write that sentence, its prophetic words have already come true.
Sigh...
Add to that all the concerns which linger in the cockles of my mind--war, money problems, thieves (someone stole my trashcan. My trashcan, for Pete's sake!), zombies, turkey-hunting season being almost over, raising chickens--you can sort of start to see how life can just get away from you. I know, I know: "preaching to the choir" you say, but understand that adulthood hit me like a train this year. My thought was basically: "27 years old is, for all intents and purposes, thirty, which is, for all intents and purposes, the old 40, which is, for all intents and purposes, middle age, which is basically preparation for retirement, which is pretty much a short rest stop on the high-speed highway to death.
And the baby cries.
Everyone says they haven't accomplished X by the age of Y, where X = something they assumed would've happened 5 years before the age of Y, and Y = the value in years of the person's life span on the date this sentence was spoken. In my case, X = "become a famous actor and published author," and Y = "27."
And the baby cries.
Unreasonable, you say? I never thought so. I was always a pretty lucky fellow, and moderately talented to boot, so I thought breaking into the creative field would be cake. Suffice to say, without a solid plan, you can very easily find half a decade going by in practically no time at all. Not to rag on the institution of marriage, but Y also happens to = 5 years since the age at which my beautiful bride and I were wed. In August we will celebrate our 5th anniversary, which puts us in a minority, but that's sort of an issue for another discussion. Marriage has been a great adventure, and one certainly worth taking (as has parenthood), but financial struggling, health problems and overall busyness have led to more or less a stymieing of my creative drive.
I used to be a dreamer, in other words.
Don't get me wrong (again), I still dream, but those dreams now seem even farther beyond reach than they did when I was a wide-eyed 17-year-old with nothing but a future. A full decade later, I have accomplished a great many things, but try telling that to my expectations. I have, in a sense, traded some dreams for others. For example, I always figured I'd be married, but I never once thought I'd be married this well. My wife and I have had no major and only a few minor marital problems--minor being things like my habit of gaming a bit too much and her habit of over-scrutinizing my habits. We love and support one another, and she not only begrudgingly accepts the fact that I simply have to write and have to make movies, she openly embraces it and encourages, nay, insists upon me advancing and excelling in my chosen career. I could ask for nothing more in a spouse.
I was just about to say that the baby was finally asleep, but that would be a lie.
So, what is today's nugget of wisdom? Well, I've tried to formulate an essay encompassing what it feels like to be a 27-year-old man going through an early, mini-midlife crisis, to touch upon the unsettling nature of the state of the world, and to sum up everything in a hopeful and open-ended conclusion, but as you can see I've invariably failed. Life is about compromise. For instance, I broke down and bought a box of shotgun shells after having it in mind for a long time now to bag my first turkey with my 34 lb. recurve bow. I'm hoping the option of extending my kill range by another fifty yards will help alleviate the stress of failing to bag a gobbler back in the fall. Ironically, I'm less worried about zombies now, too.
