I didn't forget the limerick this time.

My life is in a bit of not-unhappy tumult at the moment, so a lot of my study-focus is shot to hell. But I am troubled about this whole endeavor. I've been trying, really trying, to "get into it." And failing, really failing. I could imagine my own work being slightly interesting, and I've been having an entertaining time with a lot of the reading, but as I roam the litcrit blogs, trying to see whether I'd fit in, I see entry after entry be people who seem to genuinely care and even get excited about things that I could care less about. It just all seems like such a chore in service of nothing.

I can't seem to silence the voice that reprimands me for not doing what I really want to do, which is to be a creative artist. I'm sort of pussy-footing around it and half-promising myself to do it one day, to find a way one day. But I'm no closer than I was a year ago, or two years, or five years ago. It's not like I'm working my way toward it. If anything, I've been erecting higher barriers.

It's beginning to feel like I'm living one of two possible lives. This one is rich with love and warmth, sane and happy. It's one I had never imagined, one that in many ways is more than I had imagined. But my self, my inner life, can feel stunted or shunted aside. The other life would be lonely, crazy and painful. It's the one I thought I'd lead. It would be solipsistic and self-consuming, but I'd also get to experience those weird highs of creation and discovery.

I suppose most people would say it's my romantic delusion that these two worlds are exclusive of one another. They would think I'm saying I have to suffer to make art. I don't say that at all. I say rather that there are only so many hours in the day, and being happy takes time, and making art takes time. And unless I can make it my job to make art, the handful of waking hours I have outside my office will never be enough to split both ways. I have just enough time, barely enough time, not enought time, to feel like a husband and a father. Taking any of that away seems stupid.

But I loathe, with all my heart I loathe the idea of being 40 or 50 or 60 and coming up with the fiftieth stupid plan to set some time aside for my art. I will have failed to be what I can, to do what I can, to experience what I can. I will have missed my chance to fully live. I am full of a raging jealousy of creative people, of novelists and musicians and movie makers.

There once was a fellow from 'querque
Whose poetic ambitions were murque
He wanted his words
Light as green hummingbirds
Instead they were light as the turque