Happy Belated Birthday Amani! (The Detroit Zoo's Brand-New Baby Aardvark).It's 5:22am on Christmas Eve. I should be at my parents' house, asleep next to my wife with our dogs cuddled near us, but the roads were super shitty last night, so instead of braving the snow covered roads, I watched No Country For Old Men, and went to bed.
I was thinking last night, and a lot has changed for me in the past year:
-I quit the job I had for 10 years.
-My wife and I moved out of our "first place together", and got a "bigger/nicer" townhouse.
-I going to college full time, pursuing my degree, so that I can start a "career".
-My wife and I got a puppy a few weeks ago (we have a 3 year old Basset Hound as well).
-I now have a nice car, that my wife isn't embarrassed to ride in. (My wife isn't uppity, my old car was a complete piece of shit, that I sold for under $200).
-My best friend is now home safe from "The Iraq War".
-My little/bigger brother is home (and living with my wife and I) after being gone for 2 years
-My old band, Silence The Wake, is playing a reunion show 2 days after Christmas, and as much as I miss being in a band, and as much time as I used to devote to it, I don't think I have it in me anymore to devote most of my time, patience, and money into "chasing the dream".
Yeah, I'm sure a lot more has changed, and it may or may not be significant to "where I'm at" right now, but a lot of these changes flashed into my mind when I was outside smoking.
I've made sacrifices, and I've embraced change, in pursuit of "self-betterment", and truthfully, sometimes it scares the hell out of me. Things seem so topsy-turvy and uncertain at times, that I constantly need to unload these fears on my wife, only for her to reassure me that "we'll be okay". Each day I breath, I thank God, Allah, Yahweh, Buddha, Elvis... that I have her, that I have someone who knows me, who understands me, and knows that sometimes I stress the fuck out, for no reason, and that not only, "we'll be okay", but that I'll be okay.
I don't know where I'm going, and I don't know when I'll get there, but I know that when the time is right, that it'll hit me, that I'll know that where I'm at, is exactly where I'm supposed to be. Until then, to quote Johnathan Franzen in "The Corrections", I'll continue chasing the perfect cool.
Godspeed.
