Back to jogging. I've started and stopped jogging so many times. Wish I could remember better why I stop time after time. But I'm not so great at recording my failures or remembering them. All in all not remembering all my failures in life may be a good thing. Maybe. But I guess I'd still, just barely, like to think not.

Now to jogging again, as usual I think, in order to sleep better. The pond digging reminded me, I think, of what a good thing daily exercise is, exercise that is, which isn't conventional weightlifting.

I live in suburbia not even a mile from where I grew up. Jogging in the area is a little depressing. First reminded of the paper route I was forced to have from 10 to 17 years old. The constant sleep deprivation. A very few nice memories. Remember wearing my walkmen entranced by music. Eurythmics, The Cars, Billy Idol... I recall one synthy instrumental in particular I had thought was by the guy who did the Miami Vice music. But I searched and searched and never found it. Finally tried to just recreate it, but I think maybe I need the specific hardware analog synths. Seems such a loss that no one is using analog hardware synths anymore...

Mostly though the newspaper route was just a depressing, ugly thing. Every single morning it was so hard getting up. Not like now, where I almost always just get up when I can't sleep anymore. Back then it was always force/fear that dragged me out of bed. Imagine 60 people angry that they hadn't gotten their newspaper that morning. Imagine my parents screaming at me as our phone started ringing.

Every single day, never a day off, for 7 years. On Saturdays I could at least come home and sleep in. A few years I wasn't forced to go to church and could sleep in on Sundays. But, I think the constant sleep deprivation--I needed so much more sleep than I was getting--caused sleep paralysis to run rampant on these weekend late mornings when I finished the route and came home and slept.

Waking up paralyzed wasn't much fun.

So I go jogging through the old neighborhood in the late night. Hate jogging during the day, hate to be stared at as I'm bouncing up and down, running much slower then I wish I was. So I go at night. I run out to the end of a long dead end street. The West Virginia hills going up high in the distance. Here still is a methodist church with a huge parking lot. I remember more than 20 years ago discovering they had put up a basketball rim in their huge parking lot. I went there and played on it a couple of times during the course of a week. And then came to find the basketball board taken down. Here I come by now, and still, more than twenty years later, the pole still stands, still with the supports for the board on it. The board clearly taken down because they didn't want some unknown kid hanging out in their parking lot.

More than 20 years later I'm still disgusted about it. Incredibly disgusted.

I get home and sit on the wall of my pond and rest. All three cats come running to be with me. I sit here out in the open where my neighbors can see me and think that probably my neighbors disapprove of how often I'll be out where they can see me. This is white industrialized society. You stay inside or in the backyard where you can't be seen. But our backyard is very small while we own a huge side lot, thus that's where the pond is, thus I'll be there a lot. It will take years for the trees I've planted to hide me. Neighbors probably will really disapprove of how often they may look out their windows and see me out there.

That's how I feel anyway. Like an oppressive weight pushes against me.

This is the song I wrote thinking of my neighborhood.

The oppressive empty feeling. House after house without a soul in sight. Here passes your childhood. It's not supposed to be this way. And there's nothing you can do to change it.

It gets dark at 4:30. You live on a street where the average age is 60. You know this because you did a survey for a science project. You sit at home wasting your evenings, wasting your youth, wasting your existence, watching Barney Miller and Alice, knowing how wrong. It. All. Is. You're just a little kid. And YOU KNOW.

The closest kid your age lives half a mile away and is mistaken by most to be mentally retarded. And because you're friends with him, you're ostracized at school along with him. You know damm well that's how it works, but you do the right thing and continue to be a friend to him instead of making fun of him like you're supposed to. And years later, the dumb ass just thinks you're crazy and dismisses you, because you're so far above what he can comprehend.

Strangely enough, now I've a seven year old nephew living in that same house I grew up in. He's been calling my mom day after day crying about how his other grandmother has been treating him. She's a dumb ass. The particulars aren't important. This seven year old is now meeting the world in all it's horror and he can't believe it. This is how people act?

I hardly ever see him thanks to my rightwing dumb ass brother-in-law but my wife, my mom, tell me that he's just like me. Maybe the genes run that strong. The first picture I saw of my grandfather I was so confused, wondering when I had worn such clothes and had a black and white picture taken of me. Maybe it's the house...

I continue to play the cello without needing willpower. The cello has no frets. This can be very frustrating. Each time you go to play a note your hand lands just a tinsy bit different on the string and the pitch is lower or higher. As a novice I'm forever off tune. It could be thought of as frustrating but at the same time, it's what keeps it interesting. Forever having to focus so much on the pitch of each note. Is it right? Is it low or high? You have to focus so much more, it seems to me, then with most other instruments. And so the thing that makes it so frustrating is also what makes it interesting, and keeps me playing.

I keep waking up to a nightmare. A real world nightmare. My best friend other than my wife has, it seems, suddenly turned into someone else. Suddenly I'm the enemy. And it hurts me so much to try so hard to be a good person, in general and very specifically to her, just to get this for my troubles. And still I worry so about her, but what else can I do? Each time I wake from sleeping, the nightmare anew, and is there something else I'm supposed to be doing?

No. It seems not. I'm just beating myself up.

I sleep and wake again, and repeat.

I sleep for an hour and wake again, and repeat.

It is at least a good sleep lately. I guess thanks to the physical activity of building the pond.

And so if she does nothing, I'll be left with yet another ugly memory for the rest of my life. A decade from now it will still periodically bite me. Jumping up out of nowhere. And I cry reading the end of Hobb's last Fitz trilogy.