You know you're in trouble when...

...you're counting on Congress in a real and tangible way.

It is not a fun time to sit back and watch our national legislature bicker and squabble about how to pay for the payroll tax break. It is also not fun to sift through news articles to find snippets about the part that really matters to me, the unemployment extension.

So much has been going on, and yet nothing has happened. In Washington, and in my life as well. I have any number of directions I could take this blog post, any of which I could expound upon for hours and hours, and yet I still find it not worth my while to put forth the energy. Everything is a sound bite. Everything is a blanket statement. The problems in our country are complicated beyond comprehension, and yet the arguments get simpler and simpler and more infantile. We've created an economic monster and none of us can control it. Not blue, red, or green. We exist at its whim now, and I can promise you that it makes not a lick of difference who is in charge - it's bigger than anyone or anything on this earth. Seriously. Global economics is now so intertwined and cannibalistic, and yet so ingrained into the fabric of our society - it's the butterfly effect on meth. Something so powerful and so mysterious...and yet somehow we all think that it matters who's in the White House...and that somehow that person can effect a change. This is old thinking from a simpler time. We all badly need a system update but we're working with an old model that the new OS will crash. (I apologize for the wandering metaphors here.)
And maybe we'll all be better off when it all crashes. Maybe we'll all be able to get back some of what we sold to this dreadful machine. Maybe...we'll all be a lot more human.

On a personal level, I am able to live day-to-day in this stasis, in this waiting room, but there are times when the frustration and the desire to KNOW what my future holds becomes...becomes what? How can I explain it? It's not a rage, not a frustration. It's...an acute awareness. My whole life has a hole in it right now. It's a hole of context. I don't know what this year means to me. I don't know what it means to my life. I don't know if this is the first chapter of part 2, if it's an interlude, or if it's even my book any more. Day to day I am fine but something is missing. Luckily, running a family of 6 keeps me busy enough that I don't often have time to think about it, but then, there it is...that gaping hole. And when the awareness is on, I can't stop staring.

I don't think about the past any more. Well, that's not true. I don't think about it nearly as much. Every now and then it rears its ugly head. But every time it does, it bothers me less and it fades more quickly. I still can't think about the future because...there isn't one yet. So I'm left with the present. And...I guess this is the other thing that makes it difficult. I feel very alone in this present. It's so hard to have a present without knowing where it fits in that continuum. I'm just not Zen enough to go with this particular flow.

Keep us all in your thoughts and prayers. God bless.

Matt