One thing that's occoured to me lately is that love is like Pandora's Box. Only bigger.

When you love someone, all your shit comes out. The bad and the good. Usually, the good comes out first, so love starts to get tested when the bad shows up. But eventually, it all shows up.

So there are things we do to grease the wheels. Tiny lies. Minor apathies. Lots of conversation. Porn. Red wine. Friends outside the romantic one. 'Friends' outside the romantic one. Vacations. Gifts. Etc, etc.

Sometimes, you have to go back to the box. Opening the box again usually means there's more inside. More good. More bad. The prospect is always daunting.

It also means that when someone doesn't want the love that you offer, what then? The box is open. You can't stuff it back in. What has been released is now out there, and now you've got to live with it.

I think about that, because I have to go back to the box sometimes. It's never quite empty, of course; you always have hope inside. Hope is a bastard sword, though...sustaining us through the rough spots, keeping us in places we should leave, you have to take the good with the bad.

4/07
I've been thinking about writing again. Not that I'm ever not thinking about writing, in some manner, but when things go wrong in my life, or I have a hard time, I tend to process those things through stories. However, those stories usually are short, and represent an alternate universe, if you will; one where the ending of the story is what I wish it was, instead of how things turned out.

This isn't always appropriate, since the other people involved in those stories can probably figure out who they are, and what they represent. Let me rephrase that; it's fine as long as those stories are for me, but when they get put out there into the ether, then there are times when I'm exposing people I know to the outside world. At some level, they're going to have to forgive me for that, and at another, I need to try and safeguard them.

Which leaves me stuck, sometimes. I have the story, and I can't or won't write it because I'm not sure how the fuck to get it out there without putting someone's ass out. It just seems like I need to work out a better way to do things.

Of course, the alternative is not to write at all, and that leaves me miserable.

So I try to write fiction, try to wrap things into a weird world that let's me talk about things without directly addressing them. But when I get stuck...well, I get stuck. It would be easier if I didn't have a job, of course, but isn't that true of everything? I'm well aware that the world doesn't owe me a thing, that it's up to me to make those little, continuous decisions to keep going and writing. It's just goddamn hard sometimes. I don't want to do it.

This clash isn't new. Every writer, painter, moviemaker...people who want to make art struggle with time committments, money, relationships.

Then again, when I'm able to hand something to my friends and get a kudos from them...well, that's pretty much one of those moments that makes life worth living. I don't know that I'm going to ever make commercially viable art. Hell, I don't even know if what I write could be considered art on any level.

However, just reading this, I realize that someone else's judgement of what my writing is really doesn't change or mean that much, in terms of whether or not it is 'art'. Really, it's just work. Either the work is done well, or it isn't, and maybe someone likes it, maybe they don't, but that doesn't mean that I'm working through the process that allows me to produce something I like, as opposed to sitting in the cube all day, waiting to get the fuck out of there.

I know I'm easily distracted. This is part of the problem. I know that I'm a little bit of an action junkie (I want to write the fight scenes! or actually, if I could write the slow scenes, and then have the action scenes be a mini-movie! Ooo...that would be cool.) But the nice thing about the Universe is that if you're open to things, signs come along and put up the signposts to help you move on.

So I'm going to keep writing, at least for today. You build your dreams one at a time, ya?