I am such a nostalgic, always living with one foot in the past. I unconciously develop a highlights reel of my life, and have it on repeat in my heart. I polish my memories off and display them behind protective glass so the elements can’t degrade them. I carry them around with me, and though the memories are happy and light, they are not meant to be carried around constantly. They leave me no room to pick up new memories, and their constant presence only serve to offer stark relief to the darkness of my current state of mind.

It is not an uncommon occurence for me to go through all my facebook pictures tracing the course of my life that has brought me here. These trips through time only serve to reinforce the melancholy feeling that pervades my thoughts. Facebook is actually an incredible phenomenon in the way that it stores and catalogues your life. However it occured to me after my last foray into the past that it offers a one sided view of your past. All these pictures of parties, and silly faces, and hanging out with friends, these things really happened, but thats only half the story. There are no cameras around when the bad things happen, when loved ones die, when people hurt you, when you feel rejected. There are no cameras around when your sitting on the floor balling your eyes out because a girl told you that she just wanted to be friends, or the feeling that the world isn’t right sweeps over you  while looking at a coffin made for an infant. These events are never documented, are never stored in your “timeline.” In time these memories fade, as they should of course, no one wants to remember those things, but all your left of the past is the shiny, happy memories. The highlights, I like to call them.

 It’s a double edged sword. For me, it cripples me with nostalgia, as if I could somehow get back to those places that seemed so happy. They don’t exist though, not as a I remember them. I struggled just as much back then, as I do now. The same insecurities and doubts that plagued me then, plague me still. If I could just shake this warped view, then maybe I could finally find the strength to face the future.

As it stands now though, I can’t even muster the energy to pretend that I’m at all excited or hopeful about the new year.

I can’t remember the last time someone told me they believed in me before tonight. I can’t remember the last time someone believed there was more to me than what they see before them: a broken down, washed out, out of place man, before tonight.

     To hear a friend tell me that I’m worth more than the sum of my mistakes, almost brought me to tears. It is something Jesus has been trying to remind me of but I never want to see it. It was an unexpected boon to my troubled heart, and from a source that I wouldn’t have guessed. Tonight, I felt loved as a person, that someone thought of me as something more than what I think of myself. That I had value, and a place. In my emotional state, I can not understate the significance of it. I have this vision of myself based on the way people treat me, except it is self fulfilling, because I want them to treat me like that to justify the vision of myself, and can therefore push them away, and feel sorry for myself. So when someone breaks that expectation, it is a beautiful thing.

I have this burning desire to be known, and accepted. I’m sure it is shared by many, but I know that for me it is especially important where I am in life. Twenty Seven years old, highschool dropout, army dropout, 8 years in undergrad, I want people to know that I am not just these things.

    We take people for granted, we forget that they are actually people. We view them only from our self centered view, and we never step outside of it. They don’t fit into the lazy, half baked molds we try to make for them. We give no credit, and no grace to people. We see what we want to see and we don’t care to think of why others are like they are.

Why is it that when you make a choice to do something that involves lowering your defenses and opening yourself up to the possibility of getting hurt, the devil comes and reinforces all the reasons you built the wall in the first place. I decided to do something I haven’t done in a long time, allow myself to have a little hope, believe that maybe I’m not a hopeless case. As soon as I do, my heart is filled with insecurities and fears, despair grips my heart, and I want to run and hide again.

The Devil IS a prowling lion, and he has waited with quiet patience, till I poked my head out from the thick walls that I’ve lived behind for years. Waiting for the moment of vulnerability to attack.

Selfishness is self perpetuating. Worse it is infectious. The lie that if you don’t get what you “deserve” before anyone else, you won’t get it at all. It only leads to more selfishness. What a world we would live in if we didn’t live with the belief that “I’ve got to get mine.” Imagine how smooth traffic would be, no more masses of people pulling out into lanes during left hand turns at rush hour.

 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ ³² For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.³³ But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

 This verse always brings to mind Black Friday, that joyous occasion when people trample others in order to save 5 bucks on a jump drive, or get the latest 2011 equivalent of tickle me elmo. What if we just didn’t care?

     Where does providence end, and our freedom begin? How responsible are we for the decisions that we make? Grace is at work always, but that doesn’t mean we’re free from the consequences of our actions. Even with all the shit that happens in our lives, God is inexplicably there working through it all. We don’t see it, we can’t see it when everything is falling apart all around us. Still it’s hard for me to separate my disappointment from His name. I can’t decide if I’m here because God has brought me here, or if alot of bad choices have, and maybe its a little bit of both.

     There have been a few times in my life, where I have been so broken down, so lost and alone, and God has come and pulled back the curtain of my life, showing me the inner workings, the puzzle pieces and how they fit together, how the choices that I’ve made have led me to this one point in history. There is this scene in V for Vendetta that always gives me goosebumps because it explains the feeling so well.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUkgNvvF7Vk

     The speech begins at 1:18 into it, and he says “Suddenly I had this feeling that everything was connected, that I could see the whole thing, one long chain of events that stretched back….I felt like I could see everything that happened, and everything that was going to happen, like a perfect pattern laid out for me…”

      It was probably the darkest time in my life, the girl that I had been seeing broke up with me on New Years Eve, I was homeless and living on couches and in my car, I had no job and little money, everything was falling out from under my feet. I was extremely depressed, extremely unhappy with the state of my life, and I felt powerless to change things. A week or two later during a church service, the moment that Finch is talking about in the clip happened to me. I was praying, and God laid it all out for me, how all the things that had happened in my life in the last six months were to bring me to this one moment of beautiful brokenness, so that I could for the first time in a long time feel my need for Him again.

     Isn’t that the most powerful tool used in storytelling, the big reveal? The revelation that everything we thought until now had been wrong, because we never had all the information. There were things at work that we knew nothing about. Think of the scene in Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows where Snape gives his memories to Potter to see. It completely changed everything for Harry, it completely changed everything for the reader/viewer. We know knew the full story, and suddenly Snape wasn’t the villain but the hero. It’s a cheesy reference, but the principal is the same.

      Lately I’ve been watching through the show Futurama on netflix. Futurama is a cartoon by the same people that do the Simpsons. It’s about a guy named Fry, who is accidentally cryogenically frozen in 1999, and wakes up in the year 3000. It’s a very clever show, with a surprising amount of heart. Their are a handful of episodes that are incredibly deep, and always hit me hard. One in particular is called Luck of the Fryrish, it flashes back and forth between the past and the present(the year 3000.) Fry has an older brother that is jealous of him, everything Fry does his brother Yancy does, one day Fry finds a seven leaf clover which is incredibly lucky, and allows him to beat his brother in things he normally couldn’t like basketball and breakdancing. In the present, Fry accidentally stumbles upon his old house in the ruins of Old New York, and decides to find his lucky seven leaf clover.There Fry finds a statue of his brother, Yancy, who had changed his name to Philip Fry and become the first person on Mars.

      Fry notices in the statue that Yancy has the seven leaf clover pinned to his chest. He becomes bitter and angry at his long dead brother because he stole his identity and his dream of being an astronaut. It then flashes back to the past, where we see that Yancy is heartbroken over the disappearance of his brother Fry. Fry goes on a quest to find his brother’s burial site and reclaim his lucky seven leaf clover. When he gets to the cemetary he notices another statue of his brother, but this one says, “Here lies Philip J Fry, named for his uncle to carry on his spirit.”

     It’s the big reveal! All this time Fry thought that Yancy had stolen his life, had done all the things he would have done had he not been frozen, and you learn through flashbacks that his brother named his son after his beloved brother Fry, and had given him Fry’s lucky seven leaf clover. Nothing was at it first appeared. I don’t know why but it always makes me tear up.

      After all, is that not our great hope in this world? That not everything is as it seems? That all the evil in this world, all our bad choices, our broken relationships, our scars and the weights on our hearts will be gone?

Broke the 10k mark on my novel which is probably the most I’ve ever written for one thing. I have 6 chapters, but I’ve stopped and am going through them and adding things, probably re-arrange them a bit as well. I sort of write stream of conciousness, so I have to go back and make the past line up with with I wrote after it which is kind of backwards.

According to research that I’ve done, a traditional sized paperback book has about 250 words a page on it, which means I have about 40 pages of a book now. The average fantasy novels word length is 120,000 words now adays. A novelists’ first book is about 90,000. I’m not really concerned at this point about the numbers, since its hard to tell how long it will be till it’s finished, but its nice to have a meter to compare too.

Also I think that its going to end up being more than 1 book. Obviously I’ll have to see if I even finish what I’ve written.

I am kind of stuck though. I am not sure which way to progress. The book is a fantasy novel, and has a system of magic, but I don’t know which way to proceed with the system. Its a pretty big decision because it will influence the rest of the book. It needs to be interesting, but it needs to have drawbacks. So far the main drawback is the social stigma of using it.

I started writing a novel. It’s tentively called The Golden City. It’s a fantasy story that follows the life of a man who is destined to build a great city. A city he was born to create. It starts when he is a little boy and will follow him till however it ends sometime as an older man. I’ve just finished writing the 5th chapter, and I have about 22 pages. If anyone cares to read it, and wants to give feedback let me know. I might post it here.