Retraction

I was in bed tossing and turning, and unable to capture the elusive respite we call sleep. Actually, it wasn't that dramatic. I had just turned the light off and fell backward into bed and the wheels of blog writing began to spin furiously. I'll tell you, I've lost way too many writing ideas by not responding to that furious spinning in the moment and just listing off to sleep. Not this time, Boy-o! I sat up, reached for the light switch, flicked said light switch to the 'on' position, and fired up my computer.

When I say "fired up" I mean "powered on." "Fired up" is what your short-fuse boss gets after you chain all of his paper clips together. So I powered on my computer. I didn't power on top of my computer. I don't know what it would be to "power." I pushed the button and the computer started operating. All because I had an idea. I will now tell you what that idea was, and continues to be now in the state of "is."

Recently, well, not too recently actually, recently as far as my posts are concerned; I haven't been posting very frequently as of late. I'm speaking of recently as over a month ago. That recently!? Yes. Anyway, in a blog post dated May 25th of this year, and titled Blogger Has Been Bleeger of Late, I made a statement that I now wish to retract. I've heard of retractions before in the press, it's time for me to retract. You see, I made a comment that has since been plaguing my memory. It pops in my consciousness every so often and slaps me and says "you were wrong." It has finally caught up to me with enough force to require rectification.

In the post mentioned above, says I, "Not that I haven't had the time or anything like that, there is always time (yes, Jim Croce, there is always time...put that in a bottle and drink it!)." I am realizing the exact opposite, Jim Croce was more right than he knew. More right than he could ever have known (okay, I'm leaving the bounds of rationality again, which is what got me into this retraction mess in the first place; I ought to leave Croce out of this...but I can't), more right than I could ever have known. But I know it now. Time is limited.

I didn't leave it at such an absolute statement as it seems in the snippet quoted here. In the context of the post and with the rest of what I said you see that I didn't really dismiss the claim that there is never enough time, only mostly did I do that. And as I stated, since writing that post I have had many moments of remembering saying that while thinking about how much I wanted to do or felt I needed to do but just couldn't figure out how to mash it all in. I think there is more time than we sometimes allow for, but most of the time there isn't enough time, and we have to decide what will get that time.

If you have two tomato plants and you only water one of them, chances are the un-watered plant will not produce as much or as healthy fruit as the first. Perhaps it will simply die. Time is like water, or rather, how we spend our time is like water. We can use it to feed things and make them thrive, likewise we can deprive other things of time and starve them to death (which in some cases isn't a bad thing, and to point out the obvious, some things we feed with time are probably better for us to leave them without that sustenance). So what gets our time and attention? That's up for each of us to decide. There lies freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Therein lies joy. Bob Ross knew it.

The only reason I said that was because when I typed "joy" it reminded me of his painting show on PBS. But since I can spin things pretty well, I will now tell you that he knew it and that's why his paintings were done so quickly. He could have spent hours over an easel, painting away, but he wanted to spend more time with his other interests in life so he painted beautiful pictures quickly. He made good things fit into the time he had, so he could have joy in painting and still have time to be Bob Ross.

No matter how you go about managing your time, you will need to sacrifice some things in order to have or do other things. They can all be good things, but somethings got to give. Take right now for example, I am giving up sleep to quench the fire set by this blog post idea.I am sacrificing. And for me that makes this post all the more entertaining and valuable, because I am giving up sleep for it. Maybe it's just a case of buyer's remorse.

I'm wondering something, do you have trouble following my writing because I don't have a defined "past tense"/"present tense" presentation? Never mind, it isn't important...wasn't important.

I think I have sufficiently expressed my thoughts regarding the retraction. I'll give a diagram of how this works. I get an idea to write about and my head starts filling with sentences and phrases that I want to use. This fills up in my mind like so many potatoes in a sack. Some potatoes are good, others are not as good. Some are large, some are small. Some are rocks. Most of them are covered in dirt and are not ready to eat. Actually none of them are ready to eat. I think eating uncooked potatoes gives you botulism. No, that's honey, in babies. When I have children I am going to sit them down and say "you can't eat honey, [baby]." I don't have names picked out yet. My soon-to-be wife and I briefly discussed baby names a while back, but I don't think we settled on any, so for now [baby] will suffice.

See what I mean? Some of the potatoes in the sack are actually rocks, not potatoes at all. Anyway, after the potatoes are in the sack they get carried to the place of processing. Whatever that is for potatoes, I don't know. I guess they probably get processed before going into a sack. I don't know. My ideas, though, like potatoes, eventually get dumped out of the sack (in the case of ideas the sack being my mind) and into a french fry cutter or potato chip slicer. That is the equivalent of me typing a post. The end result is that the potato sack is eventually emptied, as is my mind. In tonight's case, this happened several paragraphs back. I typed about the retraction until I had no more thoughts left about it. I don't know that it all came out in good sense or not, that's not for me to worry about. I just put the potatoes down and let you decide.

The point is that I have run out of anything worthwhile to type under this title. To which you respond, "duh." Good night.