You should see my draft folder. It's full of crap. And, by that, I mean it's full of crap.

Nothing flows. There's no rhythm. There's no coherence. There are a lot of good ideas, but that's all they are.

Without passion, writing well may turn out to be impossible for me.

I need some passion. Somebody lend me some. I can repay it with interest. I just need to get over this hump.

I know that expectations are bad things. They only lead to trouble. People tell me over and over to not have them. Many of these same people are the worst offenders of their own rule. They just like to pretend that they've got all their shit together. Maybe they fool themselves or other people, but they don't fool me.

I have zero expectations for the people I don't care about. Also for the people I don't know or never heard of. For everyone else, guess what? Expectations are going to happen.

So, lately, for certain people, I've had to change my expectations. I haven't been able to eliminate them, so I've had to change them. This was so I'd stop being mad and sad and disappointed all the time.

Now, for certain people, I expect nothing but the absolute worst. This sucks, because I continue to hope for the absolute best.

They say that, without expectations, disappointments are a thing of the past. Well, there's another way to eliminate disappointments. Expect the worst. As a bonus, sometimes you get to be pleasantly surprised. So I've heard, anyway.

And it sucks that I feel that I need to think these things about another human being, especially when it's a person who's important to me.

And it sucks even more when these revised expectations are proven right time after time after time after time after time.

Clearly, something has happened. I don't know exactly what. I have some facts, and I'll keep those to myself. I also have some theories, and I don't know if I want them to become facts or not.

I keep looking for reasons. I keep looking and, though they stand right in front of me, I pretend that I don't see them. I keep looking for something that will not only make sense of things, but will make the kind of sense I can live with. Not like or even agree with, just live with. That shouldn't be too much to ask.

I'd like to be able to say that everything will be okay, but I really don't think it will. Not anymore.

Well. it's been a couple of days. I suppose that reactions have been pretty much as I'd expected. All over the place, I mean.

My reaction?

Some people deserve to die, and he was as deserving as anyone in history. So there's that.

I'm a little relieved, I guess. Whatever disruption this causes in the terrorist ranks is probably a good thing. Maybe they'll make more mistakes now.

But I haven't cheered. And I certainly haven't broadcast my own humanity all over facebook by pretending to mourn the cocksucker.

This is just something that needed to be done, and now it's been done. Calling it a good thing seems, to me, to mitigate things that happened to get us to this point. Like thousands of deaths and billions of dollars lost in this war are an acceptable price, now that he's finally dead. And like the hole in New York's skyline, and the empty chairs at all those dinner tables, like they're all okay now that he's finally dead.

This needed to be done a long time ago, before so many terrible things came to pass, but it wasn't. The political will wasn't there. So, in my book, this will always seem to be a failure. All that's happened is now we can put a period at the end of one particular sentence. The terrible story itself continues.

I had a really nice dream last night. It happens every now and then. It's always irritating, though. It puts me into a good mood (me of all people) and from there I have nowhere to go but down.

Down when I remember that it was just a dream. Down when I remember that dreams don't necessarily reflect reality, that all too often they represent other things. Hopes, wishes, expectations that in reality are long-gone.

Just keep beating that dead horse, Dave. Maybe it'll get back on its feet.

Sometimes I feel like I'm just waiting for this phase to end. Except I'm not really waiting. That's too strong a word. It implies too much effort, or maybe too little effort. Words are hard.

And it's not really a phase, I don't think. Nope, more and more often I find myself thinking that it's not a phase; sometime over the last couple of years, it's become a personality.

I prefer to think of this as a change rather than, say, an unveiling. That lessens the sting a little. Not a lot, but maybe enough. Maybe.

It bugs me when I feel like I'm doing this not-quite-waiting thing. There's really no point. Because I've changed, too, and my change might be permanent.

It would be pretty ironic if the tables ended up turning. Not funny, though, not at all. I think it would be incredibly sad.

I'd probably cave.

Spent some time tonight trying to figure out where I am. Or where I'm going. Both answers have eluded me. I can't even tell if I'm the one moving, or if it's the world that's moving past me. The former, I usually think, but maybe not so much this weekend.

This weekend, I've stood still. I've done nothing. I've rejected invitations and I've ignored phone calls. I've done nothing with my life except that thing which comes all too easily to me. I've wondered.

I remember a time, not too far in the past, when I always felt like I was moving toward something. It was, to be sure, a long and arduous journey, but there was a destination. Now, again, not so much. Maybe I'm still moving, but the world is flat, and only the edge awaits me. Or perhaps I'm a deer frozen by headlights. By fear. By uncertainty as to which way safety lies.

Perhaps there is no safety, and I'm only fooling myself when I let those silly thoughts claw their way to the front of my mind.

It bears down upon me, or I hurtle toward it, and I don't know what it is.

I'm really rambling now. I know that. My brain is at such odds with itself. Wonderful thoughts enter and are immediately rejected as horrible.

I forget too much, and I remember way too much.

I'm just so damn tired of it.

I remember reading something once. That a sign of a dying blog is when the blog becomes full of apologies and excuses for not having new content.

I think I'm just tired. Of everything. Writing. Pretending. Work. Love. Life.

There's no point.

There's no spark in me at all. Not even an ember that I can somehow fan back to life.

This mood shall pass.

Unless it doesn't.

So very tired.

It wasn't supposed to be like this.

I don't believe in fate. What I believe in is timing. Sometimes, the latter can look an awful lot like the former.

Yesterday was our monthly maintenance day at work. I had a pretty light list of things to do. I got to work in time for the 1:00 start.

I had two hardware technicians show up. One, to replace a failed disk, and the other to look into an unrecognized system board. The disk replacement went quickly and without incident.

We had to wait about 25 minutes before we could look at the system board. The backups on that server were running long, and we needed to make sure they completed.

Once we got the go-ahead, the system board was fixed in about 30 minutes.

Next I had a few patches to install on a couple servers. This took about 45 minutes.

Then I spent about an hour waiting for our database administrator to start his stuff up and check everything out. He finished this around 3:50.

At 4:00, I spent a few minutes talking to my boss, and then I left.

Meanwhile, there was a young Army guy who was having a day of his own, I don't know any of the details of his day. Perhaps he was running late, and therefore speeding. Or maybe he was distracted by something. Maybe he had to pee. Maybe he was speeding just because he was young and that's what young people do. Whatever.

At 4:10, after my light turned green, I pulled from Bunsen Parkway onto Hurstborne, preparing to turn left. Also at 4:10, the Army kid was barreling down Hurstborne. He saw the light turn red in front of him, he saw several crossing cars in front of him, and he tried to stop.

He ended up stopping by plowing into the front of my Monte Carlo. Spun me about 30 degrees, I figure.

If any one of a dozen things that I did yesterday had taken just a few seconds more or less time, I wouldn't have been in that intersection at 4:10. If any one of an unknown number of things had happened differently for that kid yesterday, he wouldn't have been speeding toward that intersection at 4:10.

But things happened the way they happened, and they took as much time as they took, and so we were both there, in the same place, at the same time.

Crunch.

It's hard not to think about how many things had to play out just right for that accident to happen. I was the second car at my light. If I'd been the first, then the car behind me would have been hit. Or if the kid had started to slow down a half-second later, he'd have hit the car in front of me. He was definitely going to hit another car. There was no doubt of that. He was going too fast. There were too many cars in front of him.

If he'd started to slow down a half-second sooner, he'd have smacked into the door of my car, right where I was sitting.

It could have been a lot worse.

I don't believe in fate. Fate is a silly concept. A way for cowards to shift blame, avoiding consequences for their own actions, and a way for weaklings to hide from their own responsibilities and potential.

I don't believe in it, but sometimes it seems pretty damn believable.

This dude at work got himself a new toy. A Macbook Pro. So we're all huddled around watching him play with it.

It seems really cool. I can almost see myself drinking the Apple Kool Aid before too long. I already took a sip when I bought my iPhone, I guess taking a gulp with a Macbook wouldn't kill me. Except financially.

CartGirl says I should definitely get one. I didn't tell her who already has one.