I had hopped up fever dreams on the drive in to work back in those days.  Pre-dawn indigo-and-sodium-orange sky, frantic I-35 all smoky and filled with hate.  I'd get to work still cross-eyed from my trip to the garage; yeah, I used to smoke before work.  I'd sit down, I'd put on some music, and I would "feel" the words hitting my forebrain, wanting out.

Sit down, engage my fingers, and type.  Words that sometimes lost all meaning or all intent as they hit the screen, changed from what I intended to what you wanted or sat twisting somewhere in between gasping.  My personality, this character I play.  I played.  I'd finger the strings, my head swirling with remnants of morning smoke, my body tired or in pain, weary.  That old struggle.  The ends of my fingers burnt.

Each moment described faulty and lost in a wilderness of nonsense.  Some of it screaming through so well it scared me, I'd re-read it in my own little masturbatory way, stroking my own loss of ego, wanting to rise higher than I was.  I'm not a writer, see, but I play one on the internet.  Oh but I so loved that space, and my few friends or co-workers around me at those times would know better than to step up to me for anything while my headphones, eyes, and feet were all engaged in the same rhythm with my fingers.  I loved those moments for their pure enrgy, their ability to cut me whole, split me down the middle.  That big selfish thing, that insistance, these words so much more than I.  Not better, not grander, not more ego-driven, but just more as in The Lie, bigger than me, this ain't me.  This, the old "this," the past "now" wasn't me or you.  It was a feeling that I got when I combined my dire frustrated middle-America angst with my daily habits and my reckless music.  I described a moment, not a person.

That moment singing, clear and loud, right through the shuddering heart of what I could have been.

That lost thing, bleating.  Last week sometime, I caught myself forming a story, and realized how long it had been since I'd conversed with that moment.  And tried to figure out what had gone missing since the sort of golden age of what I was.  Is it the drugs?  No drugs, no more, and it was a mighty drug.  Is it the job?  Not working for the evil hell of a soulless corporation has left me with a sense of happiness, and with happiness there can be no angry ranting.  Is it the home life?  The loss of pain?  The age that I'm now settled into?  My new job, the amount of effort it claims and the amount of secrecy I have to maintain?

Yes.  It's all of that.  I can't explain it, really, except to say that in the last two months I have undergone more internal change than I ever thought I could, and all of it happened without any sort of drama.  Maybe it's the anti-depressants that I still take because apparently once you start, you can't stop.  I have a feeling that a majority of my ambition around creative endeavors left me the day these little pills kicked in.  Not that I don't feel, or feel numb...I still get those stabbing moments of whatever it is we get in America...but I don't have any ambition to pursue them, or to pursue myself.

No more, me.  I think the real answer is, I lost interest in my own words.  My own self.  My life is steady, boring, and external.  There isn't a great deal of movement internally.

I'm busy.  Tired a lot, from work, but happy.

I do sometimes, often, look back and regret not being able to light my head up, bring fire to the space between this screen and our eyes.  I think I may find that again, everything moves in circles.  I think I may soon be at a point where things make less sense, or I may have some time to think.

So I'm not concerned about my words becoming permanently lost.

But for now I am worried that I may become inactive, unknown.  That my name will cease to have the sort of network it once enjoyed.

Well, it was never my name.

Hi.  My name is jason.  And everything, everything, everything is just fine.