Coming down

I’m not sure what it is about electrical storms that I find so engaging. There is something mysterious and powerful about watching jagged bolts of lightning rip open the night sky; something both intriguing and humbling. My oldest son is afraid of the thunder, as many children are. Strangely, I have never been afraid of storms. In fact, I have always been inexplicably drawn to them. I can remember as a small child making the midnight walk to the large plate glass window in the dining room of the home I grew up in to get a better view of the tempest outside. Sometimes, in later years, I would sit there at the table for hours, watching the rain pound off of the rooftops across the street and turn the gutters into a muddy torrent. As chaotic as a storm usually is, there was a peacefulness to them that I simply cannot explain.

That feeling has followed me for years. I have written about it before and have never been able to capture even a small part of what it actually feels like, and I won’t even attempt to do so now. I guess it may seem strange to some to have such an attraction, or even attachment, to a meteorological phenomenon. I would explain it if I could.

Tonight there is a colossal electrical storm going on right outside my hotel window. More lightning that I have seen in a long time. So what am I doing? Sitting at this computer, two floors from the top of what it the tallest building for miles. Darwinism anyone? Still, I couldn’t help but write something down, because that’s what you do when something inspires you and what is happening outside is nothing if not inspiring. For some reason, it makes me feel closer to home. Watching the violence of nature’s rage makes me think of my family, safe at home in our tiny house where my boys are asleep with their stuffed animals and glowing mobile of the solar system, and my daughter is sacked out, snoring, with her feet up on the wall beside her and her sippy cup full of warm milk from bedtime still clutched in one hand. Where the sounds of the city at night have faded to an indistinct murmur outside the window of the bedroom where my wife sleeps; exhausted, but happy that I am coming home to her tomorrow. Lightning or not, it’s the same sky out there watching over all of us.

Being in such a large building, I can’t really hear the rain even though it is pouring. Rainy nights seem somehow calmer; maybe even softer. I hope it is still raining tomorrow when I wake up.

Some glorious return

I have been debating what to do with this blog for some time now. I have seemingly lost the desire to keep it current, and consequently it has lost much of its relevance. Rather than making great and terrible promises to post daily, (even monthly might be a stretch at this point) I am wondering if it might not be better to just let it die.

It’s tough to write without a focus, and more and more often lately I feel like I’m running hard up against that big, brick, fourteen-foot-tall “I don’t have a focus” wall. Family takes up whatever time work doesn’t, to the point that not only have I stopped pursuing my other interests, but rather alarmingly I find that it has now been so long since I was involved with them that I find that I don’t miss them nearly as much. It kind of feels hollow, in a way.

Maybe it’s just the timing of it all. New job, lots of travel, ugly strike and subsequent month-long sejour in Regina, (of all places) and the suffocating advances of a certain day in October that will confirm what I already know to be true: I am getting older. Honestly, I’m OK with that, but it sometimes hits me in an unpleasant “you can never go home again” way that somehow makes me feel really crappy. By and large I’ve done pretty well with my life so far; hottest wife in the universe, great kids, good job that I actually enjoy, and fantastic friends. It’s just that sometimes you get to feeling that there could be something else out there that is just passing you by- something that maybe everyone else sees and whispers about behind your back, wondering how on earth you can be so oblivious. What is it? If I had any idea, I wouldn’t be writing this, would I?

Maybe this blog needs something to pull it into focus. More humour, more gravity, more humanity; more direction. If I had any idea how to inject any of those things into these writings, I would have done it months ago instead of waiting so long between updates that I forgot the password to my own Flickr account.

The long and short of it is that writing can’t really be forced if it is going to end up being anything worth reading, and lately I just simply haven’t had anything to say. Even this post, when it all boils down, is really just a poorly-worded diatribe about having nothing to post. Its one redeeming quality is that if you’re still with me at this point, I have managed to keep your attention long enough to waste between two and three minutes of your day before actually telling you that you’re a sucker for wasting your time reading this. (I even spelled out the numbers 2 and 3 in that last sentence so it would take longer for you to read them) Maybe next time you’ll think twice about checking back, eh?