All Work and No Play

As my new schedule stretches before me, vast and desolate as a sun-parched desert, I wonder what got me to this point. I wonder - but I do not turn to look. Because turning around to look implies regret, and if I regretted one moment of my past... well, that would make everything in my future seem hopeless, which is not what I want. So, I wonder about my past. The slip-ups, the oopses, the injuries, everything that scarred and forged me, everything that brightened the color in my own self portrait.

I realize that I had made certain mistakes; with money, people, my own foolish ideas and the like. But in the same vein I know that I have done so many other things right. For example - the abyss before me.

Of course the road will be long. And dull. And full of overbearing heat and itching sand, and an undying thirst. Of course it will have it's crap - but everything has a darker side. The trick is of course peering past it to the glimmer of hope that everything has tucked away in the folds of it's douchery. And if you think that's too hard to find, look PAST it to the good things that are surely coming.

My new schedule presents me with two things. Work and Sleep. Food is an option I will take before, after or in between while in the car, on my break, or in my dreams, which I have done before and can wrap my head around. But no play? For a split second I saw my own face in the splinters of the bathroom door, smiling maniacally as I hefted the axe for another strike.

I don't want to be a dull boy!

So I peer into the sands of the desert, trying to see something positive - and there! Coming off the dune pushed by the wind! Didn't you just see the shape of a dragon in flight? I did! And there! The night sky over this desert, so clear, starry, untainted by the city lights! And over there, by that wave of heat, was that an oasis? Surely despite it's desolation, there is more then enough room for an imagination to run wild out here in this void!

And as that hope leeches onto me, I decide to give myself a goal, something to see PAST the desert. And on queue, I see the mountains rising up in the distance, snowcapped and green based with a lushness of what can only be the shade that trees provide. And as I walk, though in the tiniest of increments, the Mountains begin to loom closer and closer.

I'm almost there. I can almost taste the water in the air before it is sucked out of me.

I'm almost there.

Oru