borrowed time

Lately, I’ve been doing some reevaluation of myself. Duh, seems to be what I do.

A passing joke turned me into a dweller in my own head for a while tonight. While watching some unbearably lame VH1 special about celebrity addiction, someone turned to me and said, Is that why you blog, Steve? Are you a drug addict?

Must have been the combination of all the material from the show and my own thoughts combining to make me reevaluate what is going on in this body.

I will freely admit this, although it is terrifying to do so on a public forum: I come from a family plagued by addiction. Without getting into gruesome detail, let’s just say that it is in my blood.

At this moment, I’m addicted to nicotine. I smoke about a half a pack per day and have done so for the past 4 or 5 years. Simple mathematics tells me that I am rapidly declining in health and engaging in a sort of slow motion suicide, as some put it. Moreover, my dietary and exercise habits just leave something to be desired.

For years, I knew I had to be extremely careful with what I touched. Coming from a dangerous background, I know I have to sit back, step and walk away while I watch others take substances to alter their minds, perceptions or feelings. This becomes perfectly obvious to me all too often and I pride myself in the amount of control I maintain. Yet sometimes, it backfires, leaving friends feeling burned. I’ve learned to stop caring about that.

That is not enough.

My health is the most important thing to me at this point in my life, so I am pushing hard to challenge myself on a whole new plain.

On September 1st, 2009, I will start on a path to rebuild my body as a temple rather than a run down church. I will start a fitness regimen, beginning with breaking my addiction to nicotine along with working myself into a more defined fitness plain. By setting this goal, I am forcing myself to remain accountable.

Frankly, I don’t want to lose any more life energy than I already have. It is just not worth it.

At the risk of getting dangerously personal, there is a method to this madness and getting these wheels moving.

When a person you love and treasure, in the deepest sense, who you silently pray is building a path to a happier life, even though you really have no religious affiliation, when this person who you admire and who has become a formative force in your lifetime looks at you at their most vulnerable and tells you to live longer than them, to go on where they can’t, it changes you. Drastically. You ache. You ache hard. You want to dig inside yourself
- regardless of whatever pain it could cause you – and pull out any sort of light and hand it to them, hoping the darkness will not persist. You scream and you cry and you wake up in the morning clutching your pillow for dear life, wondering out loud what you can do to make this life less painful for this person or anyone you love. You toil and you worry and you just fucking hurt, impassioned and furious that the world could be such a fucking cold place.

You have to do something.

So you do that by being a source of light. You push yourself to be a beacon of hope. You become the vehicle that is necessary to manifest a sense of strength.

You become strong to be useful.

That’s it. Good night and good luck.