Ten-thousand, nine-hundred, fifty.

I keep telling myself I’ll spend a few minutes here working on my blog today — I keep putting it off. I must be expecting something profound or enlightening to spill out from my hands out onto the screen; nothing doing.

Today, I’m thirty years old. My twenties are over. My twenties are over and I’m damn near certain that the damage I’ve done to my long-term memory is what’s keeping me from spending the day lost in regret at having wasted some of my best years struggling and learning how to become the person that I am today. I do, however, find much comfort in my optimisim for what the future has in store and also in the experience that I’ve gained by taking the path that I have. If I only would’ve spent the first part of my life directing as much energy into making money as I did in shooting it up into my arm…

I can only “if I only” so many times before I start realizing that while the road I’ve taken has had some rough turns, each and every stop was completely necessary in order for me to get where I’m at right now, here today. There’s no point in wondering what if or had I done, nor is there any purpose in my beating myself up over those I’ve hurt along the way. This isn’t to say that I don’t feel the world for those around me who didn’t make it; for the handful that weren’t so lucky and died believing they’d be ok pushing off that black and thick. For some reason, I just wound up not being one of them. For some reason, I rolled a different set of dice.

I don’t have it in me to spill out any more than just a couple of short paragraphs, but I do want to have something to look back on so I’ll call it a night. As I head into my thirties, into interferon and other medicinal voodoo, I want to be able to look back at what I wish I could’ve seen at the end of my teens. I want to see who I’ve become and what it took me to get here. What it took to be me…