Do Ya Feel Lucky, Punk?

Ya know, I feel damn lucky today. Not in a let's grab a max ATM withdrawl and go play the ponies lucky, but in a grateful for all the good stuff in my life way.

I've been struggling over a story the past couple days. It's dark. It's lugubrious. It's a small part of my actual life that I morphed into a hyperbolic tale of woe. I'm not really getting anywhere with it.

Which is odd. Because bleak is what I used to do best. The most prolific times in my life, the times when I'd regularly put pen to paper, all had a common thread. Misery. It was during my most troubled periods that I found the need to create, to purge my thoughts. Once was a time when I regularly stayed up all night in an uncomfortable chair in a stark, silent kitchen, furiously scribbling on a legal pad. What came out was my pain, real and brutal. Flowing out of me like a black river. I wrote hateful letters to God, misguided pleas and apologies to an Ex, dark spirals of self-loathing.

Cathartic? Hell yeah.

Which brings me to now. I've been writing in this space for more than six months now. Pretty regularly. Rarely have I struggled for a topic. Sure, much of the time all I have is the previous evening's poker session, but the very act of putting it down is accomplishment enough. My discipline has never been a strong suit regarding writing. I've never found it in me to force a consistent output.

Now, I can't wait to get here. And I'm doing other writing that doesn't appear here/will never see the light of day. I'm improving since that first day, but I'm not afraid to lay a piece of shit on you, either. And nobody knows better than I if a post is crap. It's part of the process, like learning that KQo is a filthy whore. On the flip side, there are some things here that I'm damn proud of.

The idea of being a "writer" was never one I wholly embraced. Sure, I'd daydream about it, but rarely took any steps toward that nebulous goal. It's not really any different now. What is different is that I'm gaining an enormous amount of enjoyment from the simple act of writing, from a finished product that I am happy to have created. I think I'm slowly, but inexorably, finding my "voice." It's like poker and the blog are travelling parallel journeys, plugging leaks, learning from mistakes, developing a comfortable and successful style of play.

The bottom line on that is that this hasn't occurred in a vacuum. My words are not just ink on a page gathering dust in a closet somewhere. They're out there, which, quite unbelievably to me, led to the tremendous amount of encouragement and nourishment from you all, from this community that fortune has dropped in my path.

Lucky? Hell yeah.

And I can't stop this nagging feeling that we're still somewhere close to the beginning of the story.