Good God, another year.

And an ugly one to boot. 2013? Triskadecaphobia aside, That is just a homely looking number. It has that “crude prime” feel to it. Inelegantly indivisible. 2012 was such an elegant looking year by comparison. 2011, not so much. And 2010 was divisible but in a silly, obvious way.

2014 will be a little better, at least.

So what do I have to look forward to this year? Precious little. More slow decline of health, more diffident circling inside my fishbowl, more listless and futile attempts to write my way out of this box.

Did I mention I am not in a very good mood?

Because I’m not.

Oh, and the big thing to dread this year : turning 40. As of May the 19th this year, I will have been on this dirtball for 40 inglorious years of doing little and accomplishing less.

I am not looking forward to that. In fact, I am dreading it more than I have ever dreaded anything before, and that includes major surgery and trips to the principal’s office.

Technically, logically, it will be a day like any other. But we human beings cannot help but invest great emotional importance to these milestone years, and I claim no exemption. The thought of turning forty with a life that is more or less exactly as crappy as it was when I was 30 and most of my 20’s makes me want to hide under the covers until the end of time.

If I ignore the passage of time for long enough, it has to go away, right?

Or I will. One way or the other.

From the fact that I am in a shitty mood, you can safely deduce that I have slept all day, dreaming restless and unsettled (yet inconclusive) dreams, and it has left me feeling downright grumpy.

But you know what? That is okay. I give myself permission to feel like crap and be grumpy and hard to deal with now and then. Everybody gets out of sorts sometimes, why not me? To what sort of sainthood am I aspiring when I try to be the Guy Who Is Never Even A Little Testy?

You can do yourself a lot of damage by trying not to be human. By refusing to accept that you, like all others, are imperfect and weak and flawed and vulnerable and, at times, even absurd.

Better to just accept your flawed and imperfect humanity, and through that, accept and understand others as well. They have not failed you.

They are merely human after all.

I still have no plans to take out my grumpy moods on others. That is something I cannot accept. Perhaps this is an necessary ethos of the very emotionally sensitive, but I see making other people feel worse in order to make yourself feel better to be about the worst crime there is, at least on a personal level.

And because sensitive people tend to be attracted to one another, there is no chance that the people in my life could just brush off my foul moods. We are all too fragile for that. I know in my heart that it would hurt them as much as the same would hurt me, and thus, I abstain. I refrain. I repress.

But there must be way to let this nasty, angry shit out without hurting others. I refuse to believe that my options are limited to either being evil or being depressed.

There must be a third path.

At least I am acknowledging my frustration and rage now. And not in a clinical, detached, aloof way, like I am being my own therapist.

I am letting it come up and truly feeling it, and that feels like progress to me. You cannot deal with unresolved emotions via pure logical and common sense, and you are a fool to think you can. Emotional problems require emotional solutions. You have to be willing to feel things in order to be free.

Otherwise, it is like you are tied to a central point like a dog tied up in its back yard, and no matter how far you wander, you will never get further than the end of your chain.

But you can fool yourself, if you like, to thinking you have all the world to explore. After all, you go someplace different every day, right? And you can start at 12 o’clock at the end of your chain, and walk all around the circle clockwise, and as long as you don’t try too hard to memorize where you have been, it is a lot like you are always going someplace new.

After all, if you have forgotten what 12 o’clock was like by the time you reach 11 again, then it is almost like you are not even really stuck… right?

But you are stuck, and the area of your life is very small. Sad, really.

The real growth comes from pulling up that stake, taking off that collar, or at the very least, making that damned chain a few links longer.

That is the hard part, the scary part, the risky part. The part that requires sacrifice of yourself. The part that requires actually changing things, not for play play, but for real real.

That is the stumbling block for an awful lot of people. They want to change everything without changing anything. They want their lives to get better without the scariness of being new and different. They want to get everything they want without giving up anything they already have.

And life just plain does not work that way. You cannot hold on to everything you have if you expect to get what you really want. The real world requires letting go, not for its own sake, but for gain.

You have to make profitable trades. Give up what you want less for what you want more. That is the only way to get ahead.

Otherwise, you end up clinging to junk rather than trading for gold.

So what am I willing to let go, you ask?

Damn near everything.

Fuck it all.