Pennies

Wow, November eh? At what point does an online journal become an artifact?

On my first post on TLS I gave out a super-optimistic surf report. I didn’t know where the idea of this place was going then, and as I’ve said a million times, still don’t know now. More than ever, though. At least back then I had room to feel it out. I don’t feel that anymore; the time to practice, to stretch, to figure out my best punch, that’s all gone now. The scary moment of life when the potential is no longer judged and the KO's are counted.

I’m not sure when, exactly, that moment happens. And I’d bet it happens at different times to different people. And also, I’d imagine there’s some talent based correlation on the potential/production algorithm.

It may be that it’s part of any adults character to understand where they fit on the continuum of what they can produce, and what they have produced. It’s probably some part of happiness as well: taking either joy or misery from what is, could be, was, and has been lost.

This place has been plagued by lack of eccentricity and dominated by business: exactly the opposite foundations that it was built on. I think before I post things on the TLS, or, more exactly, think about posting things. Nearly everything I write nowadays remains in my notebooks, or get published in a different outlet. And actually, the thing I posted back in November was just some fiction I’d written a good long while back. Three Years From Vegas is the last truly legitimate thing I posted on TLS, and I honestly think it should have been the last thing.

Above that piece, I posted some random self-satisfied critique (very similar to this, actually), that was bitter enough that I dredged some old fiction out of the Lake and threw it up here in a tantrum to cover it up. Things weren’t always so bleak and retrospective in this beautiful (corporately owned) place, but hell, nothing ever is.

My little dog Pickles is running around my legs as I write this on my Writer’s Desk; a place that was theoretically home to the offices of the Long Sunset when they appeared in the Florida Weekly. She’s a pip she is. She has satellite dishes for ears, and she’s tough. Way tougher than me. She’s almost one year’s old. For her birthday, we’ll get her a birthday cake.

My other dog Seabean passed away a while back. It was the type of event I would have posted about here, in the past, in a time when I felt the Id more strongly than I do now.

Seabean was more than the other dog though. She was the definition of a childhood, a gap in my logic not easily occupied by daily life, and more distinctly: she was a heartbeat between my brother and I. Something, some being, we we’re both intensely protective and intrinsically a part of. She lived to about 16. She meant this to me: http://thelongsunset.blogspot.com/search?q=winnie

That’s why I don’t come around here anymore.

History, life, nostalgia, pain, John Leguizamo as the Ghetto Klown, it all deserves more. I’ll give it what I have, and I hope that it's enough.