The real warrior is always ready to embrace true peace.  In these rough times, it seems to me, there's a lot of embracing that remains yet undone.

I’ve worked—how many?—30 or 40 days straight now.  At a 60 to 70 hour clip a week.

Here’s how my time (hours) breaks down:

60 to 70   work

35 to 50  sleep

10 to 20 writing/reading

10 to 20 online (all activities)

15 driving

10 social

5 to 7  running

3.5  bathing/bath

2  eating

On the other hand, I incur time savings by watching virtually no TV, utilizing no measurable minutes for engagable sex (geez…it sounds almost timelessly spontaneous?), devoting no time to boredom, and surrendering no time to non-productive depression (I keep my depressive moments productive, in other words). 

What keeps me going?  A dream of a better tomorrow.  And the running.

Yesterday, I snuck a half hour run in just before the cemetery closed.  I actually quit the job I was on “early” so that I could get that sliver of a half hour in.  Now in all my experiences in the cemetery, I’ve never been ‘spooked’ or really frightened. But if I were ever to be, yesterday would have been a prime time for it. For it was a chilling slippage I encountered—mid-30s, damp, drizzly with intermittent blasts of frozen rain,  and eerily darkening through twilight into night.  And fallen leaves were rustling everywhere about as a result of the whistling wind whipping them up.  And nary another soul beyond myself was much to sight.  But the dark towers and grand mausoleums all about seemed to me, nevertheless, commotive with lifeless motion, restless with the lack of life.  And I started imagining spirits rising up from the shadowy unseens to challenge me.  And I even envisioned a 2-ton bronze angel ornament on one headstone that I passed breaking away into animated flight and sweeping down to whisk me away.  And I thought to myself: “If any of what the better part of my imagination is strangely and unusually tendering were to really happen, what would be my response?”  And I assured myself that I would stand and fight.  Ha!  I would fight death itself and dare to win—and what a battle that would be! 

But no attack was forthcoming.  I think the ghosts fear me.  I really sense that I frighten them.