i'm behind schedule. i should have had this entry written already. i should have been a published author by now. i should have done something revolutionary by now. but, what are schedules to we pathetic, atheist outcasts, we few, we sad few who can't be bothered to live our lives like the rest of you, cheering on wars and lamenting one group of dead strangers rather than all of them

of course, that's just another excuse in a whole line of them i've got. it's what i do

i dropped out of college not because i couldn't take it anymore but because a paperwork mix up screwed me out of my grants and i couldn't afford to keep going, not because i realized then how completely unnecessary to my life to come college would be but because of things beyond my control

i lived for years socially alone, off to see movies all the time on my own, hiding in books (written and read) and television, no friends to speak of, not because i was socially inept but because i didn't need them, because all that jazz about how humans need companionship was a bunch of bullshit...

that's got to be it, right?

i've got a wife now, three kids, no more excuses in theory. but, i've ingrained my own supposed ineptitude in my head so far down, it's hard to let go. i throw in an excessive amount of movie rentals and a new interest in and knack for cooking and complicate things further. i try my hand at a daily comic, twice, and that goes nowhere (though there were some great strips among the many examples). i run this here blog, to an audience i could probably count on one hand, and i linger on message boards and waste time online, putting off my real writing time each day (even as i look forward to it, oddly enough), and i wonder why i don't have time for more exercise than i can manage to squeeze in, why i don't have more time to coach my son in some basic knowledge and reading skills, why i have no time at all to get any of my old manuscripts reedited and submitted to agents or publishers of late

it's all the same old tired excuse. multitask enough and, on some level, it doesn't even matter if any of the tasks are ever complete. do some of the tasks really well and the rest are diminished in importance, seemingly

and, i didn't even mention obsessing over the world's politics