A draft from a year ago that I didn't publish

I wrote this last April.

The musician was my friend Jane Thatcher, who had stayed with me while performing a concert at Birdy's the previous night.

I was about to be unemployed in two weeks, and I was scared. I guess I got embarrassed to write it because it stayed in draft form for a year.

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Spring is slow-coming to Indy this year. Or maybe it's right on time...how quickly we adjust to changing weather patterns. We've had the bikes out only a couple of times, and cooked on the grill only once. Yesterday there were sleetflakes in the cold air. On good days, I'm noticing the pink blossoms on weeping trees, cascading to the emerald green grass. If I wake up clear and not foggy, I'm hearing the birds who have come back from winter break. I'm waiting for the day when their song will sing me back to joy.

But lately I've had this dread. This sense of dread is causing a sense of dead. Deadening. Of my senses. I don't want this.

I'm thinking about the dreams I dreamt for this year. Wondering if they will come true, or more specifically, if I will make them come true. I can, you know. My dreams were merely goals, finite goals, such as "see X in concert," and I have complete power over things like that.

I thought this would be the year that I spent my time ingesting and observing.

I was talking about dreams, the kind we dream while awake, with my musician friend yesterday over coffee yesterday morning. Morning is the best time of day to talk dreams. Sometime after midnight is the next best time.

There was a time when I believed that my life had simply not caught up to my dreams. It was only a year or so ago, maybe longer. I've always been pretty silent about my dreams. Secretive. Protective. I don't tell people much. I realize it's because I don't spend much time entertaining and incubating the seeds. I know they're in there, but when I can't even make it in a small town like Indianapolis, it is hard to actualize them or think of them with much detail. The little glimpses I had were just that, flashpoints, lightning bolts, fireflies in the distance.

But lately I think I'm living like a pothead except without the pot.

No ambition. No desire. I write this to shake myself from this slumber of dumbness, deafness, and muteness. I think it comes down to something far more egregious...No belief.

I'm writing today to me to change that. To get behind the wheel and hit the gas.

And be okay not knowing where I'm going.

Because I don't.

Professionally, emotionally, or otherwise.

I am suddenly experiencing serious doubt about my professional future. I've been doing excellent work the past six years, an asset to my team.  Except I've been doing it in this bubble of a giant corporation that has its own laws, language, customs, and citizens, and is surrounded by a fortress. I'm feeling useless to the outside world, and I feel it's my fault for not trying harder to get out on my own terms, except I was happy here and would have stayed indefinitely. I'm having trouble shaking it, and I thought I might shake it by admitting it.

45.

"Forty-five and fuckin' fabulous!"

That was one of my dreams for this year. To be that age and that description.

Except right now, I'm feeling "forty-five and fucking irrelevant."