Yeah, I'm awake again. Been that way for a couple of hours. So I got five hours of sleep. That should be enough, even for the long day ahead of me. Heck, it might even help to get me back onto a normal schedule.

In a few hours I get to drive to Bumfuck, Egypt, to attend my uncle's funeral. There seems to me some confusion, at least on my part, about exactly when the thing is happening. Either noon or 11:00. So I'll show up in time for either schedule.

That will all eat about four hours out of my day, I think. Then I have a dinner date with HatGirl! Yay! That will be nice. It's been a long time. I hope she doesn't cancel on me again.

Then, I dunno. Maybe Rich O's will be safe. I doubt it, though.

Okay, so I wrote this back in 1996:

A million times.

Disappointment times a million.

It never fades. It never gets any easier. It always astounds me with its intensity.

Someday, it will end.

Someday, in a portion of a fraction of an instant, disappointment will transform into joy.

Until then, disappointment will be my reason for living. My purpose. My destiny. My fucking calling.

After that, well I guess I'll have to wait and see what happens after that.

Anyway, that one sentence - the one about joy?

Hope is what caused me to write that sentence.

I miss having a reason to write sentences like that.

Maybe someday, somehow, I'll have another reason...

Damn. There I go again, having stupid hope.

I find this mood, every now and then. It's a little hard to describe, but I'll try. It's not like I've got anything better to do.

For the longest time, I was that guy. Everyone who knows me, and some who don't, know what I mean by that. I was that guy who...who...who...

Well, I guess I don't want to say it. It's been said a million times already, and its always fallen on deaf ears. Deaf and doubting and disbelieving ears. I won't say that my words were wasted, but that's probably just because I'm being stubborn. If I wasted the words, then I wasted my life. And I don't want to say that. Not yet.

So anyway, there I was, being that guy, and then, then I wasn't anymore. I was someone else.

I mean, I am someone else.

But I'm not sure who, exactly.

I spend an inordinate amount of time searching for clues to my identity. I search my heart, my mind. Sometimes, I search the bottom of a glass. Sometimes, I drive to South Carolina or Covington or Nashville. I fly to Las Vegas. I search and I search, but I elude myself. As I've written before, I'm a slippery bastard.

Every now and then, not as often as I'd like but more often than I'd expect, I find myself in a certain mood. It's the mood I'm in right now.

It's not that I've given up, on this quest for myself. It's not even like I've taken a break. It's more like, like it just slips my mind. Like I forget for a while. I forget, not only that I've changed, but that I exist in the first place.

I'm a disinterested spectator of my own existence.

It's a peaceful mood, but a little boring.

Of course, by writing this entry, I've reminded myself that I don't know who I am anymore. So the search renews. Maybe I'll go out to my garage for a while. There might be storms tonight, and who knows?

Maybe I'm already out there, waiting to be found.

This is a snippet from something I wrote a long time ago. I happened to run across it tonight.

I've lost so many dreams.

Too many to count and too many to even estimate. Some, I've let go all on my own, and some I've had ripped away from me while I screamed and clawed and frantically tried with every tiny bit of my being to just hold on for a little bit longer.

Four hours seems to be my limit on sleep. No matter how tired I think I am, no matter if I feel like I could sleep forever, I always seem to wake up after a couple of hours.

And I don't even seem to wake up like a normal person. There's no period of drowsiness to ease the transition. Nope, one second I'm asleep, and the next second I'm wide awake.

Sometimes, I can remember the dream or the stray thought that so forcefully awakened me, but not often, or even most of the time. Most of the time, it just happens.

So, I get out of bed and I find something to do.

Tonight, I started feeling really tired around 9:30. I was out in my garage, glaring at my phone, waiting for it to woohoo or quack at me. I decided that, if I hadn't heard anything by 10:30, I'd go to bed and sleep forever.

Well, I didn't hear anything by 10:30, so I went to bed. My phone did quack around 11:00, so that was nice. By some miracle, I was able to go back to sleep after that.

I slept until a little after 2:00, when I found myself wide awake.

So, I got up, watched some old episodes of Lost, and then sat down to write this boring entry.

I often feel like I'm repeating myself. This is no great stretch of the imagination, because it's often true.

I often feel like I'm repeating myself. Here, in this blog, I mean. So maybe I've said this before. I could search back through over 3,500 old blog entries and find out, but I won't.

That would be too hard, and stuff.

That's what she said.

Anyway. I didn't want to ramble too much. I only wanted to maybe repeat myself. Maybe.

I never thought much about kids. Not any more than normal. Some people might know that I used to have kids, sort of. They were their mother's kids; I was just a stepfather for a while. They were great kids, and I loved them, but then their mother and I went our separate ways, and after a while I stopped thinking about them. I dunno, maybe it was too painful. Whatever.

My sisters have kids, and I'm not the Uncle Dave I would like to be with them. I was off to a good start, I think, when Dina's first two kids were little. But then they grew up and we grew apart. And Neisha's kids always lived on Mars with their parents. At least, that's the excuse that I use. For not being a better Uncle Dave. Same excuse I use regarding Dina's youngest son.

Things are how they are. Kids exist and I tolerate them and sometimes I like them and I'm almost always at least nice to them.

I never thought much about kids. Until...

Wow, I don't think that I'm really allowed to say. That sucks.

So what I wanted to write about now is that, now, I think about kids. All the time.

I think about a baby girl. A daughter, just like her mother. Full of laughter and sparkles and oh so very beautiful and sweet.

Just like her mother.

Whoever that might be.

It's breaking the unwritten rule, I know. Men are supposed to want a son, especially for their first born. It's been a cliché forever; men want a son first.

Not me.

Maybe it's because I'm old enough to feel that even having one child is a pipe dream. Maybe I realize that one child is, at most, all I could ever have. And, the thing is, if one child is all I can father, I want that child to be a daughter.

Just like her mother.

Whoever that might be. She will be so wonderful, though.

I want that to be my gift, someday, somehow. A beautiful baby girl. The greatest gift that any man could ever give to the woman he loves. And it would never have to be repaid, because we would share the gift with each other.

She will be so wonderful.

Just like her mother.

Often, I feel like I'm repeating myself.

Every week or two, I'm supposed to move my oldest quickies to their own blog entry. I haven't done it since November. I guess I've been busy and/or distracted.