I digress.

I’m 42.  Soon to be 43.

If I look down at my feet they aren’t there.  They’ve been swallowed by my stomach.  If I lean I can see them, of course, but you aren’t supposed to do that.  You are supposed to stand up straight and look down without leaning forward and be able to see your feet.  If you cannot you are medically over weight.  It isn’t a value judgment.  You aren’t a waste of a person necessarily.  You’re just over weight. 

When I was two I could do this – look down and see my feet.  Sometime between six and seven I lost the power.  Then by a stroke of magic I gained the power back at 15.  I kept it until I was about 22.  Then I lost it again.  For fifteen years after I struggled to keep fit and maybe push myself further to the point of actually being healthy.  But I never achieved foot sighting again.

I gave up a few years ago.

To be fair I did not just give up on my stomach.  I gave up on so much.  Exercise, religion, music, writing, reading, going out, praying, keeping my brain fresh, hygiene, advancing my dream career, keeping my actual career and appearing to give a shit.

I’m up to 172 pounds.  I’m 5’7” on a good day.  That’s 78.02 kilograms and 170 centimeters if you’re not American.  That’s a pretty bad weight ratio.  Not the worst, by American standards, but not good.

I only shave once a week.

I don’t stand up straight.

When I was 13 my friend Brandon and I found a dragon.  Some would probably call it a lizard or a salamander.  But it was a dragon.

We were digging deep into the ground on the side of a mountain.  We hit a place just right and a whole slab earth crumbled away.  There was the side and back leg of a brilliant orange and black dragon.  I had never seen anything like it before.  It was enormous, probably five long and two or three tall and it was protected by some kind of magical stunning spell.  We froze at the sight of it and it scurried away, digging deeper into mountain side.  “Don’t follow me,” I heard its voice inside my head say.

After the spell wore off we agreed we should go after it.  We dug for hours, but never found a trace of it.

That story is absolutely true with some embellishments.

From the time I was six to the time I was 14 I was a wood sprite.  My every free moment was spent in the woods and I was the master of it.  I knew where every vine and tree bridge was.  I knew where every bike trail was.  I knew where to find water spiders and I knew where to find turtles.  I wasn’t afraid of anything except loose dogs.

From nineteen to twenty one I was Hermes.  A slow Hermes, but a god of running.  I ran every night, four or five miles.  I almost had abs.

From twenty five to thirty I was the greatest songwriter alive.  I wrote about fifty songs.  I still like most of them and think the world would too, if only…

The week before I turned 33 I woke up absolutely certain that I was going to be a writer for animation.  I started this blog and I eventually drew the attention of an Austrian cartoonist by the name of Florian Satzinger.  He hired me to write a few episodes of a cartoon he was developing.  I got paid and everything.  But the world economy crashed and blah, blah, blah.

After the writing job fell through I pressed on for another year then lost heart.  I decided that if I could not find a cartoon to write for I’d write my own.  So I began to learn animation.

News flash: animation is hard af.

From 32 to 36 I was a home owner.

No one wants to lose a home.  But when you have to leave behind so much of what you accumulated inside that home...  To this day it hurts my hearts when my kids say:

I wish I still had a bike.

I wish we still had the cats.  (The cats were given to a good home with the promise we can have them back when we have a home of our own.  They were not left in the old house.)

I wish we still lived by our friends.

I wish we had our own rooms.

One of the things people don’t realize about the poor – when they say things like “the poor are poor because they don’t work hard” – which, incidentally, when they say this they are actually channeling the devil.  The real devil; Satan.  If you have said this, and I mean this honestly and without reservation, you were the devil.  You might not always be.  You might usually be a very nice man/woman.  But at that moment, you were an awful piece of shit.  And I think you know it.  But what you didn’t know, or didn’t want to believe, though you probably knew it deep down, is that if that person had your education and background, they could do your job. 

Yep.  I said it.  You aren’t that special.  It isn't that poor aren't working hard and you are in your lap of luxury simply because you do work hard - though I don't question that you do.  I'm certain you do.  It takes work to keep a job and keep a home and keep a spouse and keep hope.  What separates you from the smelly, grimy people on the street is nothing but a long string of fortuitous circumstances. 

The poor do work hard.  It’s hard to feed yourself when you don’t have a job.  It’s hard, the first time you do it, to look at food in a trash can, and decide that you can eat that.  It’s hard to ask another person for money.  It's hard if that person is a stranger or if that person is family; especially family that you've always wanted to impress and to make proud.  It's hard when deep down inside you, you know there is a successful person.  There is a genius.

But that genius has been trampled by one foot after another.  One humiliating defeat after another.

It’s so easy to give up.

You get tired of being the only liberal in Sunday school who believes in social programs.  Week after week listening to dicks of privilege say in the same breath that they believe in Jesus and that they should not pay extra taxes for welfare.  So you give up and quit going.

You get tired of playing devil's advocate for uber conservative friends on Facebook, so you unfollow them.  Soon you’re following no one.

You get tired of waking up early to work out, so you wake up with just enough time to get the kids ready for school.  And you promise yourself you’ll work out tonight.  But you get tired.

I started a book when I was 35.  It was good.  It was juvenile literature, but not simple.  It was like Roald Dahl or J.K. Rowling, I felt.  I had 26 chapters, but the book never wanted to end.  It just kept on going.  I tried to solicit the help of friends, but no one had time.  They got tired, I guess.

I digress.

Suffice it to say, I gave up.  On me.  At some point in the past.  A little bit here and a little bit there.  Until I gave it all up.

Last night I had a dream.  A very short, but terrifying dream.  I dreamed the planet was alive.  Not just alive in the sense that living things can grow on it, but it was a living thing itself.  And after a million years of tolerating humans the planet’s immune system had decided that people were an infection.  So the planet’s immune system did what all immune systems do when faced with infection.  It got a fever.  And the temperature began to rise to try and kill the infection.

I woke up disturbed.  I thought, what if I am nothing but an infection?  Just a nasty bacteria chewing away at the flesh of the world.  Doing nothing to make the place better.  Just chewing.

For the first time in years I prayed earnestly.  I promised God - whom I believe in, even if I’m not quite sure sometimes how to believe in him/her - I promised God that I would start trying again.

And so I will.