Water Won’t Wash It Away

You might wonder if this is about the birth of a murderer and I wouldn’t fault you for doing so, especially with a headline like the one above.

But this isn’t one of those posts where I ask you to wonder if you are capable of wrapping your hands around a person’s neck so that you can cut off their air supply and watch the light fade from their eyes.

I thought about doing so.

Thought about asking if you could imagine being given the chance to dole out justice to those whose deeds have caused them to be excised from the ranks of humanity and delivered to whatever justice comes post life.

Wonder whether that would make a difference in how the death penalty is carried out. Wonder what would happen if people were given the gift of execution and those that were done wrong could rest assured their immortal souls would be avenged by those whose winged souls haven’t yet taken flight.

Some Things Are Better Left…Unlearned

I have no doubt about what I am capable of…at least when it comes to protecting my children.

There is no doubt about what I am willing to do to protect them but that is because of what I have done, what I had to do.

The thing about it is that I wish I didn’t know these things about myself. Wish I didn’t know that these hands which have done so much good and have been used for gentle and peaceful things are stained.

I might sleep better.

I might feel better.

Some things are better left unlearned.

Some stains can’t be washed…away.

Ok, in college I wasn’t on my university swim team, but I was part of the fraternity intramural squad.

I might be a Taurus but I was the kind of bull who was always at home in the water. I wasn’t ever the best on the team, but I was good enough to be a factor.

Good enough to place in the top 25 in the city in a couple of races and maybe, just maybe good enough to have cracked the top ten.

Since Doc Brown hasn’t offered to let me take his Delorean for a spin and I haven’t discovered any other way to go back in time I can’t say if that last assertion is true.

So I’ll never know what could have happened if I had practiced a little bit longer and trained a little harder.

It is part of why I tell my children that if you really want to find out how good you are at some things you have to go for it now.

Maybe one of the reasons I like writing is because it is not tied into youth and being in perfect shape or as close to it as some of the physical endeavors are.

Some might say that writing is tied to age and life experience and that more years and more life has helped make me better at it.

There is an old goal being given new life today.

It is time for me to dust off some of the stories I have written and to take that fiction and do more than provide lip service about producing a short story.

I have a million short stories and a bunch of them have run here. Hell I have the start of one in this post.

So I have decided to push myself to write something for the Kindle Single program or something similar and to have it done by the end of the year.

There aren’t any good excuses for why it hasn’t already happened other than my own fear of putting something out that was horrible.

It is stupid and irrational but fear often is.

Writers can’t let fear fool them into thinking they have nothing to give or offer.

Writers write and I am a writer.

This is where I walk into the water and wash away the stink of fear and move into the future I am furiously fixated upon building.

It is where I show my children that the biggest stumbling blocks in life are self-imposed and that the future is waiting for those of us who are bold to go after it.

So I’ll go after it hard, fast and certain and do my best to put something out because I figure the first time will be the hardest.

And I figure that if I really nervous about whether people will like it I can always come up with a pen name like Tolkien Hemingway Fitzgerald Dickens or something simpler like Biteme Bitowski.

I can see it in my head. It is not hard to picture. All I have do is take what I see inside and turn fiction into reality.

Don’t ask me if I believe in the impossible because I have already loved and lived it. I can do it again.

• Saved: Children, Love