A New Dawn For Random Blogging

Hello everybody. I have upgraded my blog. My old dear, sweet, gentle readers - fear not - you can still enjoy my random musings on my Myspace blog. This is intended to be more of a cleaned up and slightly less personal version of my normal blog. Because sometimes you just can't go ranting and raving about every little piece of daily minutia.

Hopefully we will have new readers joining us. And hopefully they'll give me money.

In order to facilitate the flow of ideas and musings (and occasional rantings), I will be holding to the old format. The old format being typing whatever pops into my head and seeing where things go. Like the Joker I must have "no rules." Batman couldn't stop the Joker because he (Batman) had rules. Thus, I cannot write if I am confined by rules. But since I am planning on linking this to my Facebook page I will be actually going over what I've written before hitting the post button this time.

So let's see....where do we begin tonight? Well, as of this afternoon my spring break has officially begun. (No, I am not going to go into reintroducing all you new readers to the world of my blog. Nor will I go through the tedium of explaining my life and why I feel the need to ponder out loud the things that I ponder out loud.) Seems I am getting too old for spring breaks. For a while there I didn't have them -- except for that un-official spring break I took from work 3 years ago. I made the solo trip to Florida for two weeks to reunite with the college crew. I awoke the morning of my intended departure with a severe head cold and cough. I waited for a Z pack to come in before ultimately setting off around 10AM. A miserable 13 hours later (and a nightmarish experience with Atlanta's rush hour traffic -- which I may never fully recover from) I completed the journey and vowed never to do it by myself again. Until two weeks later when I had to drive back.

Anyway...did I miss an episode of House this week?

Oh, perhaps you are wondering - "Why call it 'The Evil Grin?'" Well...I tend to get snagged when it comes to naming things, so when something just feels right and I like it - it's best just to go with it. An evil grin is only truly evil if you have evil in your heart. Otherwise, it can be playful, mischievous, even righteous. ..........Great. Now I'm doubting the name. Thanks a lot. I wonder if I can edit the very name of the blog....

The Arby's RoastBurger is still on my mind. This sandwich is almost a force of nature. I can't recall the last time I ate something that not only tasted better as I ate it, but that I began to crave more and more as time went by.

I had a very intense and vivid dream last night. Those who know me best understand (perhaps all too well) the level of strangeness and detail inherent of my dreams. Due to my efforts to make my blog more "suitable" for public consumption, I shall now mentally edit out all the personal aspects of the dream. However, I still want to share its essence. I was at the lake, checking on what was apparently my parents' house. The night had this stifling eeriness and isolation to it. Just like the night during the ice storm that my brother and I went out to the resort to check on things -- it was pitch black and completely silent. We only had one flashlight and it literally felt like being on another planet, lost in darkness. But in the dream there were at least still a couple of lights working. I could see a dense fog upon the lake. Someone who was with me oddly decided to take a canoe out into the blackness, searching for a cave. After they left I felt closed in by the dark, alone, agitated, like how I imagine a person stranded on an island might feel. Suddenly my dream took a sojourn. It was now daylight and I was still at the resort. I was walking through the trees and then found myself laying on a bed set up between a parenthesis of trees with power lines and branches dangling symmetrically overhead. Everything had this timeless, peaceful, contemplative feel. It was as if I were supposed to be pondering something...or deciding something... Then just as suddenly I was right back in the isolation of the dark. But my parents were there. And the person who had left in the canoe had returned safely. I had thought this person was gone for good (or at least gone from the dream). It was then that I had my moment of illumination. Normally when I dream, I seem to know that it is a dream, but I play along - 100% committed to the story/role. And in this moment I knew I was dreaming, but I stepped out of the role. I felt like I could finally see into my own subconscious mind (which I firmly believe to be significantly smarter than my cluttered, distractable conscious mind). And then right before my eyes I began to "see" untold amounts of knowledge and information that my subconscious contains. It was like for one moment being able to access at will every single piece of knowledge, every experience, every thought, every vision your eyes took in. I desperately wanted to hold onto this "bridge" between the two halves on my consciousness. Yet I knew that when I awoke it would be gone. So I think I also tried to just take in that feeling of wholeness. But there was more. I think due to having to return to my clouded conscious mind I cannot recall all the details. I had this sense that...everything was going to be okay. A clearing of all of life's worries. Like a peek at the answers in the back of life's book.

So, that was my dream. Or at least the watered down version. It seems that a common theme to the human experience is a search for answers. We wander through our days seeking answers to the problems we face, the meaning of our existence, the purpose of our lives. But sometimes there just are no answers...or the answers are not revealed for long periods of time. Sometimes things happen and we beg God, our friends, or the empty room around us to answer "why." But maybe we learn more and become better off figuring that out for ourselves rather than having it simply handed to us. We are also more likely to accept an answer that we discover on our own than one given by another. Maybe sometimes it's better not to know the answers and to just "be." If you're always waiting for the day that you have your answers before you can live again, you may just run out of days.