This little ring

Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.
-Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens)

When daddy was a little boy...

Autumn likes to ask me about my ring. Every time she thinks of it, she'll start quizzing me with times I might take it off.

"Do you take your ring off in the Shower, Daddy?"

"Do you take it off when you go to bed?"

"Do you take it off when you wash your hands?"

Today she wanted to know if I wore my ring when I was a little boy. I told her that I didn't have a ring when I was a little boy. I only got this ring after I met Mummy. Mummy helped me pick it out. I said that Mummy has one just like it.

I don't understand how life can feel so complete and unfulfilled at the same time.

All I can fathom is - right mate, wrong time.

-len

The Host

I finished a book tonight called "The Host"

It was a remarkable book, and made me see a little bit of hope that I've been missing in my own life. I also watched a new show called "the world's strictest parents" - which I found very eye opening. This week it stuck two Aussie brats in a Pastor's home, somewhere in the bible belt (in the states).. Funny thing was, that home seemed awful familiar. It's the kind of home I scoffed at growing up for being ignorant and just over the top.

But a funny thing happened. I started longing to be there, as I watched. I began to miss the safety and structure. The opportunity to share and do things with one another. To live and love and listen. As sappy as it all seems, I think we all must need a little of that.

I reckon we could all use a little Faith, Hope and Love. Somehow I've extinguished all three.

-len

Where's the leadership?

Authority is a poor substitute for leadership.
-Luther, John

When he tells you, "I love you more than life itself," make sure he's not saying he'd rather be married to you than have a life.
-King, John Alejandro

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.
-Bierce, Ambrose

other memories

Every change in the place where you grew up is an insult, a run in the homespun fabric of recollection. - Terry Teachout

I've been exploring memories lately - vaguely recollecting moments that don't feel my own. Somehow disconnected and somewhat like a fantasy I once had. Unreal and separate.

I could retell the infinitely rare romantic moments lost in my fading drifting past. They are little more than skeletons of impassioned intention, tucked away in catacombs of sorrow. The vacuous gaps filled with fictitious and implanted memories.

-len

The Internet is so big, so powerful and pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life.

Every phase of my life, I seem to create a new blog to express it. This is my "Pissed at the world that I love so much" Phase.

I only have 5 hours of battery to write 3yrs of my life in 30 minutes. I know it's nowhere near possible, because I'm not really that good of a typist. I'm sure I'll have a chance to make up for the shortcoming tomorrow morning - that is if I remember who I am in the morning. 

My days usually start off well. Wake up from a lovely fantasy of my subconscious choosing. Sit up in bed with a faint recollection of warm cuddles and surprised expressions from the night before. It's relative bliss, this ignorance.. so I hold on as long as I can. I hold on to this vagueness and this hope. I imagine and I hope. 

And when she strikes at me. When my reality lunges out to prick me. She sticks me where it hurts. She knows me and she finds the best places to lay me out. 

I still believe that I married a dreamer. Someone who could live in a fantasy so vividly that it became everyone's reality. She had a spirit and a shimmer. She inspired me with innocence and charm even in her darkness. She's the kind that can make anything happen, if that particular anything had her confidence. 

But Confidence is dangerously rare, and reserved for her first family. But we are but her second, or more likely even her third. Her place in her world has no companion place for me. I am but a servant, forced to partake from the outside. And often enough, she - the same - must partake as an outsider. But she chooses to do this with her third family, us. She's made a conscious choice to live apart, separate from me. Separate from her third world embarrassment.

And I watch as the bitterness grows.

She traded us for control. By standing outside, she knows where she stands. No one can challenge, if she's out of everyone's reach. But neither can they love.

Maybe I pricked her first - perhaps I destroyed her spirit. Perhaps my shadows consumed that light between her own slender shadows. Fear on fear with no more spots to hide. Or perhaps it is unrelenting doubt, creeping in on the quiet times. A world surrounding her lamp, blowing it's flame in all directions at once or in none at all. I may already know, but I may never know. It may be all at once, or none at all. For everything that I know is flawed. Just as everything I do is futile.

Time for bed. 'night. 

-len

*Faith

*Hope

*Love