Fail blog

This blog has failed. I have failed this blog. Last post is Feb. 2009? That is sad. That is a sad state of blog affairs. There's like, five or six blogless months in there.

Do not worry. This is the first of many failures.

For too long I haven't failed. I have spent most of my childhood and all of my adult life carefully breaking down experiences into the smallest imaginable chunks, and then following through on the least risky. I don't know when I started this bizarre way of living, but it was long, long ago. I remember I was 11 or 12 and talking to my dad, and said I had come up against a wall with something (archery? It was probably archery. Why do we teach kids archery? Archery is practically worthless. "Hey son, I'm going to teach you how to shoot a bow and arrow" "naw that's cool I'll just go to the supermarket like everyone else"). Anyway, there I was, totally sucking at archery, and I was like, "I've hit this wall with archery. I'm not going to get over it, so I'm walking away" and my dad was like "That's up to you. But you cannot do that too much, or you'll be surrounded by walls, and that's it." And I nodded, of course, but in my mind I was like "Yeah, whatever. We'll see how many walls I can walk away from. I can walk away from any challenge. They haven't built a challenge I can't avoid."

It's like 15 years later and I finally feel closed in. Look at me: a day job I am sitting out the recession in, a play I've been writing for years I am content to one day hope might be produced in Pennsylvania, a house I'm moving out of, a degree I don't use, free tuition credits I don't use. Zero failures. Doing a-okay. I am a beacon of routine shining atop a mountain of mediocrity.

This blog - this fail blog, if you will, if the maker's of that other fine blog don't mind - will now begin to chronicle my spectacular failures.

Here's the deal, chumps. Life is big and violent and noisy. It will break your bones, bruise your heart and whack your neck with a bat. With a bat, that is right, a freaking bat! Your instincts will tell you to hunker, your muscles will insist escape. But you cannot do that. It's inexplicable - the only response to such pressures is to reach further, to do more and to fall from greater and greater heights. This is something you already know and I already know, but which I cannot drag myself to do.

So here's the project: a chronicle of tries and fails, and it starts with this blog, which has failed already for a few months, and which will fail again, but that's the hokey pokey, friend - that's what it's all about.