Tag Archives: ramblings

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Late Night Ramblings

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Sometimes, I feel as if every decision of my life has been wrong.  I question going to college when I had the opportunity to run a fairly successful business my father owned.  Instead of a mountain of student loan debt, I could possibly still have that business.  I question attending Memphis.  I question studying writing.  I outright regret attending graduate school.  All of these decisions have hampered my professional career and left me little more than a second class citizen in a nation that only rewards greed and corruption.

I married the wrong woman and then compounded that mistake by staying in the marriage much too long.  I love my children and wouldn’t trade them for anything, but the marriage was a mistake and has hampered every aspect of my life to this day.  I also regret how I handled my divorce, conceding way too much and leaving myself with too few rights as far as my children are concerned.  I also regret not taking the first two years after the divorce, staying alone, and healing.

I question my decision to teach for Tusculum, to teach period, but especially for them.  Simply put, they are a terrible school that treats their faculty like dirt.  I regret wasting my youth on them.  I also question my decision to return to education after I had escaped.  WSCC is a good school, but I’m no longer happy teaching and wish I had done something else.

I question my decision to self-publish.  I can’t really say it’s amounted to anything other than a few good friends and a handful of good memories.  Financially, it was a disaster.  Given the opportunity to go back, I probably wouldn’t do it over.

In short, just about every major decision of my life has been wrong in one way or another.  I feel like a fool of the grandest scale and also feel like I can’t trust my own judgment.

General Posts

Monday Afternoon Ramblings

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Here is an update on the farm.  Over the weekend, I finished the new section of wall along the far end.  It’s not perfect, but it should be a decent improvement to the old wall that had gotten damaged by water, weeds, and pests.  Overall, the building is coming along nicely.  The flooding issue is nearly completely under control, and the outer wall should go up fairly quickly.  Even though I’m far behind the original schedule I had set, I feel pretty good about the progress that’s been made so far.  Right now, I hope to have the building usable in the next five weeks.

Once the building is in a usable condition, I’ll focus on getting the prototype operational.  The biggest obstacle to that will be buying all of the equipment, but one way or the other, I’ll make it happen.  It’s important to me to get the first unit off the ground and find out if it works efficiently.  If so, things may begin to happen quickly.  If not, then I’ll figure out what direction to go.  The most important part is to have the prototype working so that I can know whether or not I’m on the right path.

General Posts

Thursday Afternoon Ramblings

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I’m at and have been facing a crossroads in my life.  I feel it every waking moment of each day.  On the one side, I am a capable teacher with 13 years experience and a solid foundation for how to run my courses, so the job is not difficult in the sense of day-to-day class preparation.  But with that experience comes a feeling of burnout, of having been overworked and exhausted by the system well before my prime.  While I’m good at the job, it no longer fulfills me in any substantial way.

Then, there is the writer in me who feels stifled by the day-in, day-out grind of the system.  My creative side yearns to run free and create novels full-time, but the reality of our current economic conditions makes that aspiration feel like a distant dream unlikely ever to come to fruition.  Breaking through in this age, just being noticed, requires constant promotion and exposure.  Even then, the monetary reward is rarely worth the effort.  It’s a sickening, maddening feeling to have a modicum of talent for something but to feel as if there is no way to make a living off of that skill.

And then still, there is my third path, the one I feel calling with the most urgency and highest sense of importance.  I want to farm.  I want to build a self-sufficient, operational farm that at the very least can provide my family with sustenance if the whole system implodes, which every day feels more and more likely.  Right now, this is what I want to do more than anything.  This is where my heart is pushing me, and when I have the time to work at the property, even toiling at hard physical labor, I find a peace and tranquility hard to describe.  I simply feel as if I am where I belong.

I do know that no matter what, I will finish The Brotherhood of Dwarves series.  I owe it to my readers, my friends, and myself to complete books four and five.  Beyond that, who knows?  I may choose to continue writing, or I may not.  At this stage of my life, I truly cannot say.  There is another story I want to tell, but I’m not sure if it will ever be more than an idea.  Only time will tell about that.  What I do know for a fact is that I must choose a path and follow it because standing at this crossroads and pondering my proper course cannot last much longer.  I have to move forward soon.