i had a friend back then the lake 
who used to call me of a morn 
which just is not my name but still 
it's good when someone calls you 
even if that someone's just a puddle 
living in a slightly bigger hole 
at any rate 

my friend and i hung out with trees 
who now are kind of balding much like 
me but i digress i think or maybe 
its transgress congress it is 
some gress perhaps gres-gris 
i really don't recall i've gotten old 
i think

do you when you are thinking back 
think back on how you thought back then 
or do you think back on how backward 
all your thinking was or maybe 
you're a forward thinker i am not
i'm more a sideways stumbler 

still i had a friend the lake and we were 
once the best of fluids druids maybe 
i don't know i had ancestors once they mostly died 
and now i've sunk to hanging out with 
ponds and all their pondsy schemes

I spent a lot of time alone in my twenties, and I got pretty good at it. It was the kind of “good at it” where you question your reasons for going on living, but still. We all make sacrifices for our art: my art was loneliness, and I gave everything I had to it.

When I first started this blog, I wrote extensively about that part of my life. Most of the issues discussed at that time were long in my past, but I found it helpful to place it all in perspective.

People say that you should always remember who you are and where you came from. That can be harder to do than it sounds. Sometimes age or circumstance gift us with an aura of wisdom that our actual lives scarcely merit. It’s good to remember — or, at least, it’s good for me to remember — that I had no idea what I was doing and was just kind of wandering from place to place and thing to thing until I lucked upon a job I love, a woman I love even more, and a wonderful and blessed existence.

But it is good to remember that I am still, inside, the kid who, for a time, had a lake as his only friend.