Well, I'll tell you. 

I

should have been

a pair of old shoes

that you wear

and then

throw away

so

drive my weathered soul

into the mud

at least

I'll be used

I guess

some shoes

are never shined

It is because I am a sensitive person.  I care.

"Why--I care about everybody so much, I'm fit to bust sometimes!"

And I am upset with myself that I don't always show it. 

I am not a great communicator.

This is why the mother of my children says I have no friends, and why no one understands me.

I put up a wall around myself.  I don't let those I care about really see me, and so they don't know how I feel.  They just know I'm not there.

I am really angry because of how I feel, and how I don't have all of life's answers, and others sometimes seem to.

I am angry that I have wasted time on unimportant things.

I am devastated that in the last 5 years, I lost three people whom I felt close to, yet didn't let THEM know it.  I wasn't there before they got sick.  And I wasn't there when they left. 

Now it's too late.

I keep saying to myself, "I won't let that ever happen again."  And before you know it, you do it again.  Time creeps up on you if you let it.

I feel a bit like Burt Lancaster's character in Field Of Dreams, Doc Graham.  He was a kid who wanted to make it to the Major Leagues.  He wanted to just feel the tangible things of the game of baseball, and he wanted to be good.  When he was old, he told the story of how he got this close to his dream--then watched it pass by. 

That is how I feel, only multiplied. 

I am angry because I am 32, and I have done nothing to help anyone.  Or change anything.  I feel as Meriwether Lewis did on his 30th birthday, when he said,

"This day I completed my thirty first year, and conceived that I had in all human probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this Sublunary world. I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little, indeed, to further the happiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended."

Only he really had done so much when he said this. 

 I am angry at my lost 20s.  I am angry at choices I have made.  And I am angry that I still don't know how to make my life mean more than it does.

I always wanted to build a library, full of great books and learning.  A gallery, full of rare and wonderful things I had found, which told a story.  An observatory, that revealed the heavens to my children; to show them that there is more to all of this than what they can see.  I wanted to build these things for my children. 

I wanted to be successful.

I am angry that I don't seem to have all the tools my Dad had.  He started with nothing, and worked hard for everything he had.  And he provided for his family.  And he had a strong marriage.  He is not perfect, but he showed me what a man is.

I have failed.  I am not doing any of what I wanted.  I am not a good provider anymore.  I am consumed with self-doubt and regret.  And guilt.

All I ever wanted was the power to make other people happy.

This is why I made a conscious decision to stop writing political blogs, and instead write what I know--which is how I feel.  Because I lost confidence in politics, before I lost confidence in myself.  I can't point to the fruits of my labor; the aims of my existence.  At least if I write what I feel, somebody might know me.

Politics has no power to change my life, at least that is how I feel.  Statistics do serve a purpose, but not in the life I am living.  Like a homeless person, I live both between and beyond community and society.  Alienated. 

I am purely an individual, lost in society.  A graveyard ghost.

Even if I am not, it doesn't matter, because I don't see it.

Why am I so angry?  Because I don't see the point.  All I see is my kids, and a world I still don't understand.

Some of you will no doubt say, if you read this, "Stop whining.  Grow up."  "You are too old not to know some things."

Others may say, if they read this, "Why are you telling us this?  Why should I care?"

My answer is this: I have no idea.  I don't even have answers for that.

Sometimes, I think about that guy Casey, the preacher, from the film I loved as a kid called The Grapes of Wrath.  WHo wasn't a preacher no more, because he lost the spirit.  "I sure used to have it!" he said.  I understand that.

I feel like his neighbor Muley, who was kicked off his land.  "Some of us were born here.  And some of us died on it.  And some of us was killed on it.  That's what makes it ar'n; Being born on it, workin' on it, and dyin', dyin' on it... ANd no piece a' paper with writin' on it.... " Etc.

And when his house was trampled by Caterpillar tractors, realized that this land was not His land.

That is why I am angry.

1939, or now.  That is my life, because that's all I think about.

I don't know how to change my life, so that I will be able to have the things I want for my family.  So that I can build my little library.  So that my kids can peer into the heavens through our Telescope.  So that we have a home that feels like home.

Somewhere, violins are playing.  That's a joke.

I am angry that this is all I have to talk to you about.

I am mad that I am not doing something worthwhile, and noble, and earth shattering, while the world passes, and others do, whilst I wait, not learning what to do, or say back in return.

But this is what I have inside me.  That is why I act strange.  That is why I get short-tempered, have blogs about me instead of the most powerful man in America, and why I get pissed when we focus on race and statistics, because I feel sometimes, in the end, thats all anyone will ever see.