Why don't you talk about you.....

Someone asked me today, "Why don't you ever talk about you on your blog?"
Well, the short answer is, because I'm smarter than that. I kept an online diary for several years in college, and while it was very therapeutic for me, in the long run it turned out to be a bad idea to publish that much personal information on the world wide web.

The long answer is, because its not what people want to hear when they ask, "how are you?" No one wants to know how you really are when they ask that question. Its almost a rhetorical question, "how are you?" It's almost never meant as an inquiry into your present state of being. I try not to be this way, but I am occasionally guilty of it myself. After introducing myself on the phone during a business phone call, my first question is "how are you today?" I would be quite taken aback if anyone said anything other than "Fine, and you" or something similar. That just falls too far outside the social norm for formal conversation, or even casual conversation among people who don't know each other.

"Thats all well and good, but shouldn't you be blogging for you" you might be asking. Ideally, yes. In fact when I began blogging something like seven years ago, I did do it for me. But it is simply foolish, this day and age, to publish anything remotely resembling personal information on the internet. Its just going to come back to bite you in the end. So these days, I keep my private thoughts to the pages of my notebooks.

I didn't start this blog for me, I started it for my friends and family, who might want to keep up with me while I was off in Mexico. It was a well intentioned gesture, but as things got more dark, desperate and difficult in Mexico, my posts became increasingly vague, full of tails of outdoor adventures with Moxie at the center. As much as I would have liked for my loved ones to know what was really happening to me in Mexico, I could not post it here.

I still can't talk about what happened, but since I've been asked, I'll go ahead and share with you, "how I am doing" now that its all over.

In the words of Bruce Springsteen, it's like someone took a knife, edgy and dull, and cut six inch valley through the middle of my soul. Would that this was the only rift in my soul. It hurts every day. Images of places, voices of people, pictures of faces, that had infected my life for five years haunt me day and night. I take comfort in knowing that I held nothing back. I gave every ounce of myself. Given everything I know now, I'd do it all again, and hope for a different outcome. I think someone once told me that was the definition of crazy. A very smart man once told me, "What you give your attention to, grows in your life" the corrollary to which is, "What you ignore in your life, will eventually go away" So I don't spend much time thinking about the pain. I've thrown myself into my work, my family and my friends. Maybe someday that valley in my soul will have healed enough to let me look back in a constructive way, and make sense of this chapter in my life, or even revisit it.

Enough of this. Here is the lushious Sully. I'm waffling on the name again, I'm thinking maybe Vader (as in INvader). Sully just doesn't feel right. I keep coming back to Sushi, but Mom doesn't like it.