I'm going through a phase. Please be patient with me, friends.

Hey, at least I am admitting it. Lately, I have been brooding in my tower (shit, that's got to be a line from a Rush song) and contemplating stuff like "Should I go with AlNiCo II or V magnets on an unpotted slightly overwound P.A.F. style humbucker?" (It's a guitar thing). In other words, I am cork sniffing small, unimportant stuff in order to avoid the heaviness of life. When I get in these phases I tend to take apart inanimate objects with my mind as I go to sleep and try to manipulate their reassembly in my drifting mind. It's my way of controlling things. As a result I start to push people away from me by not paying any attention to them.

I have had a fairly long streak of not getting lost to this tendency of mine, since I started blogging. People don't seem to believe me when I tell them about the period of time in my life where I encased myself in silicone chips and shut out the external world. It doesn't even have to be electronics, just inanimate, lifeless things that I can bring some kind of life to.

I started writing a novel in 2002 called "Ryan Dreaming", a tale of a teenage boy with an unusual ability to manipulate the physical world in his subconscious state. This was both astonishing (what I created) and totally destructive to my personal momentum, having just graduated University and needing to start a career. I used to stay up till 4:00 AM writing this thing and then usually could not fall asleep because my mind was racing, basically absorbing all that I had except my "Joe" job that I worked. I eventually hated what I was doing to myself and deep sixed the project in frustration. I shut out friends and family during that period of my life.

I had a brief honeymoon with mankind before starting a hobby of building my own electronic music gear and effects. I spent countless hours teaching myself electronics theory and the skills to make fuzz, distortion, modulation, and delay effects, not to mention vacuum tube powered guitar amplifiers and analog synths.

Somewhere during this savant trip, I studied and took my GRE with hopes of getting into a program for a PhD. in Psychology (oh, the irony of it all), of which I did well. I applied for some programs and was an alternate for a school psychologist program at one university. Of the five that made the program, I was number six and prayed for one of those lucky bastards to quit. Not one of them did and I went back to not giving a shit about a subject that is just a pastime for me now. Enter in the phase of discovering a life lived for other people's wishes.

Discovering blogging has helped my brain breathe enough to forget the disappointments of this decade. I feel that I am getting my bearings and set sail for something that is good, but I still get tempted to get lost out at sea and just marvel at how fast shit goes South in my life. The self-destructive bent in my life is pretty easy to see when taken in panorama. It's clear that I am aware of it. I just wish I could figure out why I am so fucking attracted to it. I think it's because self-destructive bents taste like beef jerky and Mountain Dew, and boy are those ever tasty!

I am going to ease back on this phase and tomorrow I will start checking in with you guys. I would tonight, but it is 3:30 AM right now and I need to stop dragging my ass during the day.

I love you guys. I really do.