Portmanteaux

1- Expressionisthmus: Life on a Thin Bridge

I’m turning 30.

In the grand scheme of things, thirty is young. But I’m also dramatic, much to my wife’s chagrin. So bear with me while I write about the end of my life coming at the end of this month, and if you feel so inclined, entertain my drama as I recount the path I’ve taken to get here in a few short passages while I mourn the death of my first youth.

When I was about three, our family dog who was (in dog years) about a hundred years older than me was taking a nap underneath our office desk and I crawled down to play with him. Instead, I startled him and he woke up a little blind and a little deaf and bit this stranger who trapped him. After my stitches, I grew up and now I own two of my own who are (in dog years) just a little younger than I am and they are sleeping peacefully beneath my office desk, happy to be here while I write these words.

When I was about six, I went to the bathroom for a little time to myself, and ended up falling asleep on the toilet for long enough my mom grew worried What she found when she checked on me, was a young man who had a lot on his tiny plate sleeping on the porcelain. She took a photo, and showed it to everyone she could. After my legs regained their feeling, I grew up and my mom took another photo of me, asleep on their couch for Christmas two years ago after the presents had been opened with my wife in my arms, just as busy as ever.

When I was about eleven, my best friend got a really cool grey sweater with a silver phoenix on it that everyone loved. The new girl in class, a blonde we both wanted to pay attention to us ended up giving him more and we got into a fight. Well, it wasn’t a fight. We said some words to one another and when he tried to walk away I jumped on his back like I thought I was King Kong and he was the Empire State and brought him down onto a patch of rocks that cut up my knees, then he started fighting back. He won. After the scabs healed up, I grew up and attended his wedding where we danced and drank and celebrated his marriage to a woman who did not entice us to fight one another. (But probably would have liked his sweater from sixth grade.)

When I was about thirteen, I was dancing in the living room with my friends and in an attempt to dazzle them with my dance moves I jumped from the top step of their landing and kicked in the air to land on my knee, shattering it into tatters. It swelled to the size of a small watermelon before I told my parents what happened. After the surgery, I grew up and I don’t jump much, anymore, but I still like to dazzle my friends with showy moves, most often at weddings with my wife.

When I was about fifteen, I went on a four A.M. walk with my friend’s girlfriend because she and I both agreed we needed to exercise more. On that walk, she confessed to me that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with my friend and I told her I didn’t think that was a good idea, that we were going to start a band and we wouldn’t be home enough to have a life with, among other, crueler things. They were married a few years later and I stood at their side during the ceremony. After they had their first child, I grew up and even though we don’t talk anymore, I still think about them when I pick up my guitar.

When I was about seventeen, my friends and I went to San Fransisco with our school choir for a competition and on the first day we all bought matching yellow V-necks and ukuleles and sang songs in the hotel hallway for the girls. We won the competition that weekend, too. After I had to throw away my ukulele to have enough room in my bag for the flight home, I grew up and have regained my voice enough from years of smoking to sing again without being winded. The V-neck doesn’t fit though, I stopped takin 4 A.M. walks.

When I was about twenty, I poured Cherry Pepsi into a red solo cup of Blueberry Ciroc which my friend lovingly dubbed “Ciroc & Roll” and hammered down so much with him that I passed out in the host’s bedroom at the foot of the bed while another party goer got lucky two feet from my head on top of the bed. After I vomited the next morning “hangover cure” across my friend’s driveway, I grew up and see him every day at our office job where we still get to remember the old days.

When I was about twenty two, the restaurant I’d worked in for four years closed its doors. We rummaged through all of the tools we used every day, and took them for safe keeping in our own houses. All of us moved on after one last party in the building and it was taken over by another group to become an Italian place, which I started at to continue the legacy. There, I met my wife just before the restaurant closed. After the haunted building was picked clean and reopened as a seafood joint, I grew up and find the same joy I used to find in the kitchen of that building, in my own kitchen, cooking for her.

When I was about twenty four, I was scared I wouldn’t live past thirty. In order to combat that fear I stayed up late and had frequent dinners at a local casino with my best friend, into the late hours of the morning we talked about life and love and our relationships. It didn’t stop until I moved out of my home town. When we finished unpacking, I grew up and realized thirty is barely the beginning, still. I go to bed much earlier now, though.

When I was about twenty nine, I sat in bed with my wife and confessed I was suffering with depression. That I had been considering suicide. I wasn’t planning, but I was wondering. What it would be like if I weren’t around anymore. How much easier life would be for me if I wasn’t around. A few days later, I confessed the same thing to some friends, and I decided I would write about it. I did, and the release of those pent up feelings began the journey to healing. After I accepted that I wasn’t going to make it out without some kind of therapy, I grew up and started doing the work to make myself better. To heal.

I still am.

It takes a lot of work going from bad to good, and it’s not as simple as moving in a straight line. It’s the opposite, in fact, but it is a thin bridge, I think. The path toward healing and self betterment, despite how much I thought I knew about it, is not as simple as a few kind words about yourself and taking a brisk walk every day. It is those things, but no part of the process should be discounted.

We are all souls moving from one little place to another little place and the grand lesson of life is not in our accomplishment of those tasks, but in our enjoyment of life along the way.

Life will never be perfect, and it will never be easy. Hell, I’m turning thirty in thirty days. I’m basically ready to be put in a home, but dammit if I didn’t enjoy getting here. For all the good and the bad I’ve seen, I’m only getting started.

The world is as big as it is small, and it’s all about how you can mange the waves.

2 - Sentimentalkative: Orating Sorrow

I like to write out my feelings.

I spoke about waves earlier. Back in the day, I had a saying I would repeat to myself and my friends to remind them that life was more than just the culmination of moments that made is happy or sad.

“Small Waves, Big Ocean”

This was a reminder, no matter how difficult things might turn out, in the grand scheme of life they are just tiny waves in a vast, ever expanding ocean. Despite being on the tatters of a life raft afloat in the middle of nowhere, I still feel that way. The world is big and our problems might be big too, but we don’t have to succumb to them. It is always better to fight.

It’s one of two things I like to think I’m known for. I’m a fighter, and I’m a talker. Both of those go hand in hand when I have strong opinions about something. Given my predisposition to go to war over nothing at all, I’ve found myself hanging on to hurts for a long time. Longer than necessary. Long enough that it prevents my ability to heal.

Everything in life is a matter of perspective. The small things to us aren’t small to our children, to our pets. The stones we throw at one another could crush an ant. It is right to be afraid of things. What was a harmless word to you a decade ago might become something today that cuts you deep. We are an ever changing, evolving people.

Despite knowing I was changing every day, adopting new memories and learning like a machine, I wanted to catalogue as much as I could. This was born from the weekly posting on my now retired blog. I’d written it with the intention of helping others, but ended up recording hurts and let downs of various sizes. Despite how I spun the words I was saying to make it sound positive, it wasn’t always as such. I’ve got more to touch on about my old habits and mannerisms later on. In the meantime, I wanted to talk about the habits I made for myself.

The last three years or so, I’ve been trying to get myself adjusted. As a known hater of “New Years Resolutions” due to their inefficiency you’ll understand my surprise when I started writing Resolutions for myself around the end of 2019. When I made my collected list of things to cover, I was looking at my mood during the day to day and made the decision to write down the events of each day just before I went to bed.

Recording the events did little for me, though on the particularly bad days it helped ease the pain of whatever wound was causing me trouble at the time. I recorded them all and logged them in a private database which, at the end of the year, I planned to review to see what my overall condition was during the year.

None of these attempts lasted longer than a quarter, and in traditional Polar Bear King fashion I found myself reviewing the contents of the notes every few months in a state of melancholy for the way things “used to be.”

I’m obsessed with the past. It’s a blight that marks my writing even today, having difficulty writing about the moment and not about what used to be. Tangled up in histories while I battle depression in the moment I found that recording my thoughts to review later was a suitable way to have my cake and eat it too. It enabled me to both experience my frustrations, and also live in the past.

See, I like to write my feelings, and I grew up with the mentality that art was intrinsically linked with pain. There could be no artist without the suffering and the few who were without day to day struggles in their lives were not truly living the “artists experience.” This of course, is malarkey, but you couldn’t convince the version of me who made it through 2016 of anything otherwise.

Those habits continued until this year, when the clock struck midnight and we entered 2023, my long list of changes didn’t involve, for the first time in a while, a daily journaling routine. I elected instead to take more time to do things I loved. To write more, read more, eat better and take better care of my pups. All of my resolutions from the year were pieces of my life which had slipped away during my extended depression.

Each of them replaced with self sacrificial glorification of my pain.

See, the problem with being Sentimental and Talkative is that eventually you run out of people to talk to about your sentiments. Sooner or later, all of the time you spend with long winded paragraphs explaining “Here’s the thing about my feelings,” or, “I think I figured out the root cause of…” all winds up being white noise sooner or later.

I realized how frequently I hit on the same subjects without actually making the moves to fix them pretty early on into the year. Constantly battling something I refused to actually change, I talked about it and when talking failed I wrote about it.

I started journaling my feelings again and surely enough, I would write it down, forget and be reminded a few days later when I happened upon the note in my phone or computer explaining the symptoms of my sorrows.

To make sure I explain this before closing, today, I do not think the practice of journaling is inherently bad. What I think is the failing is the manner in which it was practiced. If all we do to combat cracks in our mind is to write down what is leaking through those cracks but don’t use that understanding to repair ourselves or understand our feelings, what good are they?

The act of sailing doesn’t come from a force that we can use to directly push the ship across the water. We must maintain the mast, lead the sail and pull the anchor. It is all necessary for a ship to move when the wind pushes, and you can only go when the wind allows. To maintain any one aspect of a sailing ship is helpful, but all in all, doesn’t help you to make any forward progression to where you might hope to go.

If you release the sail, it can tear. If you leave the rope free, it can tangle. If you don’t pull anchor, you won’t go anywhere.

In the same way, recording my sorrows at the loss of someone to work through them with (in a professional sense) did nothing beyond leaving me still wanting to be healed but without the tools to heal.

All of those little things help, they do. Writing your feelings out, going for walks, drinking more water, not letting yourself spiral. They are all necessary. But what is most necessary is to keep sailing, even when you are only on a dinghy or a scrap of wood.

The waves are smaller than they appear, I promise. All you can do is to work out what you can do until you can call for the coast guard to help you home.

3 - Samaritangled: Talking to Yourself, Through Yourself

The process of healing is not linear, and it is not illuminated by any signs or lanterns. It is a long, curving, twisted road and sometimes you double back into places you already were.

Have you ever been camping? Out under the stars and all the beauty of creation it’s easy to lose yourself. Back home there is a canyon my friends and I would frequent. Every year, two to three times we would go out and camp beneath the stars getting drunk and telling each other stories, living with one another in moments that we knew would pass too quickly to hold on to forever.

That feeling is like healing. There are a lot of things like healing that aren’t really it.

This is one of them.

I’ve got a long history of looking on the bright side of life. Somewhere back there in my memory I can pinpoint the moment I felt the change, but in the years since it has become a story about a sandwich I didn’t pay for. The crux of everything I’ve done since that moment was reliant on external factors. Things I consumed, music, movies, etc. I filled my life with things that made me want to be a cheerful, kind person. Then, I regurgitated the things I’d consumed to great effect.

Those were the kindest, most fruitful years of my life. There is no doubt about that. Even still, I have changed much in the decade that’s passed since I created a new version of myself and here I am once more becoming new again.

I think life is a long cycle of dying to who you used to be and growing anew, with each season comes new hardship and those things that forge us must break away the rot and the ruin in order for us to become something better, assuming we want to.

Out there in the chaos of life we can find sparks to ignite within us new realizations. As if everywhere all around us an invisible fire is burning, never to go out, waiting for us to notice it. To get through the muck and the mush of a life lived at all is a worthy triumph itself, but to become a good person on the way is a sentiment deserving of song.

It is easy to find joy and peace when you are fulfilled, but from experience it is even easier to find those things when you are inundating yourself with nothing but positive affirmations and content which espouses the importance of a kind word. I was the king of kind words and shows of affection for a long time. I’ve been the herald of secret joys just as I have been the biggest bummer this side of the United States. It’s easy to be both in short spurts.

What’s hard, is balancing the good with the bad.

Back in 2016, when the restaurant I worked at closed its doors for good I had a conversation with my manager at the time who moved on to become a counselor at the college. We talked about our futures, what we each desired from life, and we talked about love over the backs of a few cases of booze. During that conversation, he told me something I wrote down so I wouldn’t forget, and then, because I wrote it down I promptly forgot.

“Love is Stability.”

In my youth I preached a doctrine of love and happiness, but through clever turns of phrase and long winded justifications, what I was actually trying to get across was the idea of joy. The difference between the two being that happiness was a fleeting, frail emotion which came about in the space after someone does something nice. Joy, on the other hand comes from within. It was what I wanted to aspire anyone who read my work to reach toward in order with the tall order to love everyone they met.

I still believe those things, I always will. The thing is, is that when you are tangled up in your justification and your explanation of everything like the meaning of joy and love and the purpose of our existence, it’s hard to just simply be.

I’ve found since then that I am less happy in my day to day, I don’t have little moments of good feelings that chain together from sun up to sun down and I don’t have the urge anymore to preach to my friends about the importance of being happy.

On the other hand, I’ve found myself more joyful than I used to be.

The thing about joy is that it isn’t constant. Sometimes the world beats you down and drags you out and sometimes you can’t get away from that.

Sometimes you can’t be conquered by the world and nothing can beat you. You’re nine feet tall and bulletproof and no matter what happens you are indestructible.

Then,

Your wife’s windshield wipers stop working.

You can’t explain why, but then you crumble. All that strength you had a week ago evaporates in the middle of a snowy afternoon while you bang your knuckles on the frame of her car trying to dismount a broken linkage and you wonder why is it always like this?

But it isn’t. It’s never, ever always.

Life isn’t an always kind of thing. It is a sometimes and then, sometimes, it’s a long time of banging your knuckles on the cold metal frame of the engine bay while you freeze your fingers trying to remount the linkage and then, it clicks and you realize it’s held. You tighten it all up and you start to grow. Five feet to six as the car turns on. Six to seven when the wipers work the first try. Seven to eight when you tighten the nuts holding it all together and then eight to nine and indestructible as she takes it out for a week and tells you everything is working right.

Then,

Back to four feet tall when she comes home and tells you it isn’t working again.

You grow and you investigate and you put more marks on your bones and eventually you figure out the reason and you learn that right now, maybe you can’t fix it permanently. Maybe there is some part of you that wants to be rid of the entire project, to throw away the car and get a new one with working wiper blades. Sometimes, you know that’s silly. Throwing the whole car out for one simple fix isn’t the answer and would cause more heartache than just figuring it out and doing what you can to fix it until you figure out how to make it permanent.

That’s the other option. To tighten the nuts holding it all together and get back to nine feet tall, but don’t forget nothing is ever really bulletproof.

Everything in life has a point where, after enough bullets, it’s drop. Some things only take one. Some might take the entirety of Lockheed Martin and I’ve realized in the last decade it’s my goal to be the latter.

That’s my strength. That’s the thing I learned after years of pretending to be happy and getting beaten down.

Back in the day I was tangled up in my desire to be the champion samaritan. I was obsessed with bringing light and life and joy to everyone I could, and after years of trying I realized that my lamp wasn’t lit and I was small as a spider & lost in the middle of a bramble patch.

But we’ve been growing.

4 - Arachnomad: The Spider's Rental

I wasn’t always afraid of spiders. I’m still not necessarily afraid but I do give them a wide berth now.

A version of me who is no longer me would pluck them from the wall, or floor, or packing box and deposit them somewhere safe. In the bushes outside they would be removed from my presence and didn’t need to be smashed to bits. That was until I became the me that I’ve since become, and it no longer feels like I have the time to move them.

It is so much easier to execute them where they stand, and I wonder in those moments when I became so obsessed with how much time I could save in order to get from A to B.

The older we get, the shorter the years feel. With each passing year, our perception of time grows fat with experience and as a result the coming years seem shorter and shorter. A week of hard work when you are fifteen is much worse than when you are twenty-eight, by then you’ve already been working full time for a decade.

I wonder if the spiders in my house feel that way.

In my most recent, and shortest year to date, we moved into a new house which was riddled with spiders and had a (small) mouse infestation. Our move was decided for us because the house came with a yard for our pups which we could finally let them run and play to their hearts content without needing to be out beside them.

Among the chaos of the prior year, moving into this house was a new start. With a new space and a slowly healing mentality I thought it would mark the start of something new for me. It did, but not what I thought.

Instead of being the dramatic escape from mental turmoil I craved, it was instead the catalyst for my sudden fear of arachnids and home to a sink cabinet we don’t use because I’m too lazy to clean up the mouse poop.

Our dogs are happy though, and I think that matters.

What’s more, is that the house did help me but it didn’t happen at all as I’d imagined. In the new place I rededicated myself to things, and made plans for projects I’d not made before. I took to decorating with my wife and I celebrated our collection of plants. We started practicing with our heeler to leave him out of his kennel all day and sometimes he poops inside and sometimes he doesn’t and he’s learning like the rest of us.

Some of us didn’t get the training we needed.

In the grand scheme of things, since last spring, the world is entirely different to me than it was before. In my journey from a crumbling seaside getaway to a mind flooded by my doubts and anxieties, I’m learning to swim.

I have the spiders to thank for that, to some extent.

We’ve been at the new place for a few odd months now and I’ve still been wary of the spiders rooting around our cabinets but I don’t seek to destroy them like I used to. I think that’s a positive change, but it echoes something my wife has said to me time and time again. She likes to tell me I’m a “black and white dude” as if I can’t see the grey area between things. A sentiment which I’ve long disagreed with.

I look for endings and beginnings in everything. I don’t need to look for the middle, I’m always living there. But when things end it’s exciting and sad. It’s a time for growth and for change. Its a sign from some outside force that it is time to move on. It is a thousand crawling spiders telling me it is time to move on. When things begin, it is a refreshing exchange. It is a new morning of sunlight over the basin. It is my heeler holding his bladder through the night until one of us can let him out. It’s a sign that it is time to get going.

When the world tells me it is time for something to end, I let it. When a friend decides to step away and leave me plainly wondering why our relationship died, I rarely have sought to pursue it further. When someone forces themselves into my life and works to be a part of mine, I allow it because that isn’t something I’ve ever been interested in controlling.

I cherish the people in my circle. I always have and always will, though, recent discoveries about myself have led me to understand the method in which I’ve built my relationships in a new way.

Boundaries are hard, especially when you are me. If I encounter a situation which makes me uncomfortable or uneasy, I don’t want to set the boundary because I don’t know how to do it plainly and gently. On the other hand, when the moment has passed and I am no longer uncomfortable I have no need to establish a boundary because there is nothing to bind.

This isn’t exceptionally healthy behavior, but hey, I’m roughing it with no therapy out here. You take what you can get.

This mentality has permeated nearly every aspect of my life. I stopped smoking cigarettes officially when I met my wife. I started vaping to maintain the nicotine addiction. I stopped vaping when a vape exploded in my mouth. Now, four weeks out, I’m using pouches to get a smattering of nicotine while I anxiety spiral about the state of my health in a world with dog water healthcare options.

For years I refused to call things “finished” unless I felt like they were finished. Adamantly I believed there would be some kind of sign telling me that such and such phase of my life was over and I could move on in peace but that is quite simply not the way life works. I have spent years chasing endings and beginnings and all the while letting the stuff in the middle get muddy.

This isn’t a writ to say that I’ve changed in some grand manner, that I woke up this morning and my fear of spiders is abolished or that I’ve taught myself how to interact in a healthy way with my friends. This isn’t about how I’m no longer the man who wrote “The Great Spring” on the verge of a complete mental collapse. It’s to tell you that the Spring is still going, but it is better.

I’ve changed a lot since my last birthday and I am still changing, but I am still the same man I always was. Just better defined. More experienced.

Still watching the world for signs to change, but the longer I seem to live the harder it gets to see those signs. The world was never designed to instruct us on anything. One way or another, our youth was filled with signposts and guides and people who could help us and it was our job then to listen, and sometimes I did.

Sometimes, I didn’t. Those are the times that brought me here.

I don’t mean to the verge of erasure, either. I mean to the edge of healing. I’ve never been good at listening to instruction. Anyone who knows me half well knows I don’t like rules.

I like killing spiders, but I want to set them free.

The black and white of my being comes in the waves of what I present to the world. Sometimes I am all white and altruism, filled to the brim with the desire to help and to heal and to be a positive force in the world.

Sometimes I’m all black and shadow and self loathing with nothing inside but the desire to squash myself under my own shoe in the depths of the night.

The grey I am is the movement between those two places. Somewhere between killing the spider and letting it bite me before I drop it in our dirt garden out front.

Our first week in our new house, I killed three black widows and what I was fairly certain was a hobo spider all within a six day span. From then on I was suspicious of every crack in the wall and shadow in a cereal box, but my heeler wasn’t.

He fearlessly chases down every spider, centipede, bird and squirrel he sees. Even if they could hurt him, he doesn’t care. It’s in his blood. He loves the chase and the capture and what might happen isn’t a thought in his head.

In that way, he and I are both a little black and white. He chases and I chase. I chase memories and hopes and plans. He gets anxious around too many people just like I do, and he makes messes inside the house because he doesn’t have the training necessary to keep from doing it. I’m the same way, but my house is my heart and sometimes I listen to it too much.

Sometimes I don’t listen to it enough.

I’m trying to kill less spiders. I’m trying to set more boundaries. I’m trying to show the grey parts of me more.

It takes a lot of training.

5 - Bifurcategorized: Two Ways to Say the Same Thing

For years my gamertag was “Dicephalous” which, besides confusing teammates when they tried to pronounce it, is a word I rather fancied meaning “having two heads; two-headed.”

I picked it up from a song by one of my long-time favorite bands, He is Legend. (which as an aside, if you are a fan of heavy music and you haven’t listened to them you are shooting yourself in the foot.) It was the title track from their 2009 album “It Hates You” and was the anthem to much of my high school experience.

Eventually, the callouts were shortened to “Dice” because it was easier to say and didn’t frustrate the randoms in my lobbies. In a (not) surprising turn of fate, after I graduated I got into a table top roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder, which involved the use of dice of all kinds. Dice eventually became a staple in my day to day life as I planned home made content for my D&D group every night for weeks at a time.

What began as my gamertag eventually grew into my outlook on life. Everywhere I looked I saw two paths. The right and the wrong. Due in part to my religious upbringing I was no stranger to the concept of right and wrong. There was always a “right” choice and always a “wrong” one. Which, for a creative mind like mine materialized to my mind’s eye as a two headed dragon every where I went. Whichever head I severed would decide the nature of my decision.

When presented with a choice, I could enact the good or bad and I would have to pay the consequences of my actions. Sometimes those consequences were good ones. Buying flowers for my mother on mothers day made her happy. It was good. Forgetting to wish my friend happy birthday would upset him. It was bad. Every time I made the wrong choice, the other head of the dragon would laugh at me until it was time to make another decision and the severed head would regrow, once more expecting to be cut from the spine in a new game repeating on a cycle for eternity.

I previously spoke about “black and white” decisions, and this is in some aspect why I see the world as black and white. Severing the wrong head more often than not led to the recalculation of every decision I’d made up to that point. This didn’t matter so much when I was skipping class to get coffee with my friends, but it began to matter a whole lot more when I grew up and was pulling out loans to pay off credit card debt which absorbed prior credit card debt I obtained from buying Magic cards or paying for my entire host of friends to eat dinner with me.

What began as a simple two headed dragon became a Hydra and I couldn’t discern one right decision from the other. This is no fault of my parents, and I want to be clear I don’t blame them for it. They didn’t do anything wrong, but what I’ve learned about myself is that due to the dual nature of good vs. evil being explained through theological teaching from numerous guides in my youth, it became “obvious” to me that there was a clear right (good) and wrong (evil), but it was not obvious how to discern what was correct or incorrect.

Experience, supposedly, is the best teacher but what good is the experience if you don’t see the consequence to gain the experience before you make the same decision a second time. Using credit cards to finance hobbies is a perfect trap because when you are young and poor, you can buy all of the silly things you want until you turn thirty and are burdened, sometimes crushed, by the decisions of your youth and all you had to go on were the stories of family or friends who went through it too.

I experienced it firsthand and I know if I were to tell the younger me what he’d eventually have to go through, or more specifically, what he couldn’t get to do when he was older it wouldn’t have made a difference.

Still, when we can see the consequence and gain the experience immediately it is easier to discern the correct choice from the incorrect. My first Valentine’s Day with my wife we got off work, had dinner together and watched a movie and then she was getting ready for bed. Assuming she wanted to sleep, I went to play games with my friends. She said she didn’t care so I did and returned to bed a couple hours later to her crying herself to sleep because she wanted to spend more time with me and wanted more from the day itself which I didn’t give to her, and she didn’t know how to ask for.

Every decision we make comes with consequences.

Historically, I’ve had decision paralysis due to not wanting to make the wrong decision. I fear more than anything the loss of opportunity to do right, because I didn’t have the information to make the most objectively correct decision from the host of options available to me. On paper, it might sound like a steady state of mind but just like being careless is dangerous, being too careful is dangerous in the opposite direction. It’s astounding how frequently I can make myself lose out on things because I am too afraid to make a decision.

This is extremely fatiguing, if you could imagine. I have struggled with this for most of my life because the objectively good thing to do doesn’t always feel like the correct thing. Every decision we make on this planet is grey until we make it. When we finally commit to cutting a head from the hydra, all we can do is hope a new one doesn’t grow in its place.

Don’t even get me started on how laziness factors in. I have been both profoundly lazy and more active than every single one of my friends and family members. I got back and forth between being unable to turn my drive to do things off, and being unable to get out of bed. The height of each side of the pendulum is mind numbing and therein lies my purpose for this entire writing.

The definition of a Portmanteau is both a large suitcase, and a fusion of two words which are fused in order to create something entirely new with the meanings of both. Motel, being a “motor hotel” or podcast, being an “iPod broadcast.” Or, Portmanteauxiliary, being the extra baggage I am hauling around, or the fusion of two words to support one another and make something entirely new.

I’ve longed for most of my life to make something “new” — my inspiration for my universe was to create a universe in which multiple novels could relate to one another, twisting the fates of numerous characters into one garbled mess, displayed not only in literature, but also eventually in movies and music and television.

I was beaten out by Stephen King before I was even born.

They say there are no “original” thoughts, and I’m sure there is truth to that, but I’ve realized as I’ve crawled closer and closer to 30 years (and my inevitable death.)

I don’t care so much about being “original” anymore. I just care about doing right with what I was given. If the means I retire from writing in a few years after giving it a good national shake, then so be it. If it means I get to do the things I love with the people I love, all the better.

What I’m trying to say here is that the path we each get to walk is a bit like the dragon’s head. There might only be two roads before you, but there are hundreds more connected to it and the only way you’ll ever make it out of the woods is if you pick a path and accept the results.

Then pick another one.

Everything we do is distinctly separate from everything else, and still all lumped together. Paths connect, and split in intervals. The best decision might not always be the correct one, but is usually the good thing to do. But even then, who am I to judge someone for stealing bread to eat, or pulling themselves from long term relationships because they realized, later than they wanted, that the relationship was abusive?

Who am I to decide what is best for you or anyone else?

I’m a spider killer.