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Another Year Over...

2007 was by far the toughest year of my life. I spent most of it outdoors, literally sleeping under the stars. When it rained, I got wet. When it was hot out I sweated. On a few nights late in the year, I actually shivered in my makeshift homeless guy bed. I turned forty in 07’. It was tough, but not as hard as I had imagined it would be.
It’s late December, another year is winding down and through the eyes of some onlooker it may appear that I have wasted three hundred and sixty five days, but I have to disagree. In the face of abject poverty I stood tall, and, forced to confront ignorance on a daily basis I fought the good fight to the end. I drifted through the year without a game plan of any kind, and rolled with the punches, lacking hope of even keeping my head above water, my best was only to stay alive. If I had any goal at all it was not to starve.
I’m Irish. If I have suffered, I have done it silently, as the Irish have always done.
07’ has also been my most prolific year as a would-be writer. I wrote and published (through the miracle of blogging) Confessions of A Peanut Butter Junkie, and to my surprise a few people have actually read it. I also found the time to write a few movie reviews, as well as a couple of book reviews. Finally I started on a novel. It’ s my first, and I typed the novel single space, so the sixty pages I have now is actually about one hundred and twenty pages in the proper format.
I read 24 novels, 2 novellas, 2 nonfiction, 2 plays, and 3 biographies, and I still have a week of 07’ left, and at the time of this writing I’m about finished with another novel, a real good one called Mortal Friends by James Carroll. I also read 11 graphic novels or comic books, and the best was called Elk’s Run by Joshua Hale Fialkov, Noel Tuazon, and Scott A. Keating. I found a previously undiscovered joy in comics, especially the artwork, that may never have materialized at all but for my lack of television.
I looked for and found peace where I could, and spent a great deal of my time rediscovering my love of books, and the joys of the great public library system. I also found out something brand new about myself, or maybe it’s I forced something new on myself, whatever the case I am damn glad that I did. See, in the past, I would only read one book at a time. I would slog through just one book, no matter what. In 07’ I said, what the heck, and at one point I had five books going at once. This was a bit much, so I have paired it down to two at a time, and I have come to regret all the years before during which I stubbornly read only one book at a time. It’s quite easy to follow the plot of more than one book, or enjoy one work of fiction while simultaneously enjoying a work of nonfiction.
It has been a long hard year (my soul all but burst into flames when I missed out on the Halo 3 launch that I know I would have been a part of had my life not atrophied so horribly), but it has not been wasted time. Hey, happy New Year!

Posted by wonderboy67 on 2007-12-30 14:11:47 | Rating: