Everything you always wanted to know, without having to steal the book…

I recall reading that “The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as Kings.” And for some strange reason, it has stuck with me through all these years.

We all have playbooks, we all have agendas, we all make plans, we all have themes (man… we-we-we… we’re an egotistical lot, huh?), and this quote always seems to hit me right between the eyes. Do you ever feel like you are drowning in information, things to be learned, places to see, people to know, skills to be mastered and then abandoned to make time and room for new ones? Well, I sure do.

And the thing that really sucks is that life is just too short for me to accomplish everything that I’d like to do…

It seems that I get tugged and pulled every day over how to spend my time. Life as a new Daddy has it’s diversions. Stacks of books I’ve tenderly piled up call to me like sirens, and the Internet offers me hours of new information every single day. I labor, just trying to keep up with science and technology, and enough of current affairs to be able to discuss them without looking like “another clueless, redneck, moron!”  Lemme’ tell you, all that studying could fill up anybody’s day.

I suppose it’s just the curse of being a man of wide and varied interests.

Right this minute, all over the world, bright, interesting, creative folks are demonstrating their courage by putting their thoughts, music, art, discoveries and insights out there for public consumption, and I want to know each and every one of them, and shake their hands, one and all. Plus, I wanna laugh at them! Because some of them are c-r-a-z-y!!! LOL!

The agony is in making decisions, and I’m paralyzed by the required analysis. I do this with the full knowledge that every door I open irrevocably opens and closes hundreds more, and the lack of time to venture down the paths leading to discovering them all, makes me resent just about every thing in my life that pulls me away from this pursuit of knowing. This includes eating, sleeping, and the few hours a day I’m now attempting to spend trying to turn myself back into the athletic hulk I was in college! Oy Vay!

And, having a new son, I feel an almost agonizing pull to do something with all this stuff in my head, to leave a record for my son, a map he can follow, to the “greatness” his father failed to achieve. I need to compose the answers to all the Great Questions, to discover lost worlds, to teach the unteachable, and then organize it all into some truth worthy of all the time spent in this impossible pursuit, like one of my heroes, Douglas Adams when he put to page ”Life, the Universe, and Everything.” (I just wish that the movie hadn’t been so stinky!)

However, it’s impossible to decide when the process of education should take lesser precedence to the process of relationships, social reallignment, or regurgitation. Whew, that was a mouthful, huh? I sound like a college professor I had once.

It’s perplexing in it’s diversity – every book or article I read, every piece of artwork I absorb, every song I hear (or play), makes me smarter, richer, more well-rounded, and, then more determined to become a better writer/artist/parent/teacher/guru. But man, you wouldn’t believe the strength that is required! The attempt to just sit read all day makes me no more than a “‘Net potato” of information, huge in girth, and headed for obscurity, lacking the means, or the energy to contribute to the global dialogue.

No valiant communicator, no cyber-messiah ever got anywhere this way. So it seems I will have to write things with which I will forever be dissatisfied.

So, brothers and sisters, I’m warning you now. Don’t think that just because you’ve read something of mine, you possess insight into that demented palace that is my intellect (or lack thereof). It’s quite possible that you’ll never really get the “Deal or No Deal,” my “Final Answer,” or that stab in the dark that is destined to get “Locked In.”

The “Survey Says” that I’ll just be forced to accept that, just like my life, anything I produce is doomed to be a Work In Progress…