Adjustments

I'm not alone 'cause the TV's on, yeah.
I'm not crazy 'cause I take the right pills every day and rest.
-- Jimmy Eat World, Bleed American

Just a few adjustments I've made recently:

Taking a hand-full of pills morning and night religiously.

Learning to cook for one again.

Having a set "bed time" (usually, still working on it).

Rediscovering the true art of belching. Not the wimpy little burps mind you. I'm talking from the diaphragm, throat relaxed, booming off the top of your esophagus belches.

Listening to the music that I want to, when I want to.

Being comfortable at home by myself (with the TV on, yeah). I probably walked around Wal-Mart and the Mall more in the first few weeks of being on my own than I ever did in my entire life before that.

Making new friends and realizing that some old friends are weirded out by me now (I'm not as troubled by this as I thought I might be, it's caused me to realize that some of my old friendships might not have been as healthy as they might have seemed).

Generally, beginning to accept who I am and to get over myself.

New Beginnings

There is something intoxicating about new beginnings. The yellowed and dim page filled with eraser marks and interlineations ripped aside to reveal a bright clean sheet. Of course, as one gets older, the page beneath the one you just tore aside carries the impressions from the prior page -- dim reminders of hasty notes written in a powerful hand. And, of course, there are some notes that you want or need to carry forward with you. That list gets longer, and longer, until a 'fresh start' is rarely the blank page of earlier years.

I find myself now with a fresh start in some sense. Tomorrow I begin a new job, and really a new profession, although the new job is based upon knowledge gained from my old profession. The indentations of the law have dug deeply into the next page for both weal and woe. The indelible ink of my three sons seeps deeply through the pad of paper that is my life, never to be forgotten no matter how often I tear at the pages. Once I thought the same was true of my wife, but now time will only tell if this is so, or if my marriage is another set of deeply inscribed indentations from the page before -- making it difficult to write fluidly on the new sheet of paper but otherwise the ghost of a hope that died unfulfilled.

New beginnings are intoxicating, but they are a young man's heady drink. The older we grow, the less we taste the wine of new beginnings and the more we taste the dregs of what might have been.