An Innocent Abroad....Or a Broad Innocent. Either One.

I didn't realize I hadn't written anything on this thing for a year. OVER a year really. Odd. I usually am pretty narcissistic enough to keep up with forever yammering away needlessly. I HAVE been, but just scribbling in my diary, not that it would interest any of you. I mean, that is to say, there are no mad orgies with Masai tribesmen, or Swedish proctologists. Nothing as gay as all that.

No, I'm pretty much where I was ten years ago, or wait, THIRTEEN years ago when I returned from Ottawa, pretty much penniless, sleeping on friends' couches, and looking for a job. Well, I am jobless again, but not penniless, I'm debt free and I have a lovely apartment. Aside from that material change, I don't seem to have learned much. Or if I have, it's written in code and hidden in the Lower Upanishads.

I seem to have been given a second chance to do something with my life, and to be frank, (O.K. Saucy, YOU be Frank...) or at least obtusely blunt, I am perfectly terrified and don't have the slightest idea of what to do. Or actually, that's a lie, I DO know what I would LIKE to do, but I'm terrified to try it. But I don't seem to have been given any choice. I know I can't do another ten or twenty years of a job I hate. I know I have to do something that I'm passionate about and love, a vocation really, and if I don't, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, (oh, what the hell, who would notice?) I'll go mad. Unfortunately, the things I love have all the material security of being a deckhand on a rowboat in the Nairobi desert. Not necessarily the fiscally safest of choices. And I am forty-two and three quarters. BUT. I've had a number of warnings from the fates to "get off the pot and start dancing, Muriel."

A friend of mine lost a child recently, another friend may have cancer, a few relationships of long standing have sundered, and the people in them have decided to live life for themselves for once. All of this has just reconfirmed the fact that a) life is short and b) you must do all you can in the here and now, and make the most of it.

So here we are Maud, on the verge of another chapter. Time to forge on forward. Where's my hacking knife for all that unseemly subconscious underbrush? Gosh, I sound like Livingston on acid. Wish me luck, Possums.