Since California is so short on things called "seasons", I hereby annex the seasons and rename them...or at least this one.

This one shall be called "Doubt".

I've bounced back and forth a lot in the last...almost 10 years (ever since I started high school)...trying to figure out what I cared about.

No. Really that's not true. The stuff I cared about landed on me with both feet. Music and Theatre dropped on me like a bomb. I didn't have to go searching them out. The choice between a music and a theatre degree in college was a pretty simple review of who I felt I identified with more. Thus theatre.

Then writing dropped on me, and I like that too.

Then the confusion hit. The fear sprouted. The doubts about the future. The approaching apocalypse of real life, responsibility and finance. I started vacillating.

Write? Act? Day job? Be "Responsible"?

As retarded as it sounds, I never anticipated the difficulty. I'd lived in a world where ability and diligence were requisites to achievement, and nothing else was really needed. Big Fish: Small Pond.

I had no experience trusting Providence for the outcome, it was never necessary.

I've been convinced, sometimes on alternating days, that I wanted to write for a living or act for a living. What I cared about was running headlong into what I wanted out of life. I found myself smack in the middle of the biggest blind spot I never knew I had.

I know what I care about, but I don't have a good sense of what I want to make out of that care.

So I don't have a good read on the best course of action, because all I've ever been good at is getting into the arena and aiming as high as I can.

I'm sure this is all wonderfully vague to anyone having a read. It's the same when I try to communicate anything like this to Alicia. It all makes sense up in the coconut, but when I send it flying through the air, it winds up soured somehow.

I care about acting. I never really sat down and thought about how to make that work for me. The best I could come up with was an either/or decision about which major conventional market to enter, and make up the rest as I went along.

Is it really gigantic ambition? Or is it just tremendous lack of imagination?

I've always thought of ambition as the drive to succeed or overcome despite any and all obstacles. If that is the measure of ambition, then I've got none. I've got some of the most basic obstacles facing me just now, and I don't even want to try to hurdle them. I'm short on cash, and having trouble getting in the door on auditions...any audition. This is pretty standard fare. Do I want to persevere? No. I want to act. I don't want to work for it. I just want it to happen. And why is that?

Because I've never had to work for a damn thing in my whole life. School was easy, the jobs I've had before now have been relatively simple (I suppose I did earn the CDL, but that doesn't really measure up to this), it's all been kinda like dominoes, falling in sequence. Now I've got to hang on by my toenails and really hustle, and I don't want to...even for one of the few things I really, really care about.

Am I really so hyper-obsessed with things being straight-forward and unambiguous that not even a chance at my wildest dream excites me to action?

Do I have such a faulty grasp of my spiritual convictions that every time I try to involve God I just give myself another reason to quit?

My life has never been open-ended like this, and, frankly, it's terrifying that I've come to this place now, married and be-childed...long, long after I should have caught an inkling of this shortcoming.

I thought it would motivate me to burned the ships on the beach, coming out here like this. Turns out, I'm pretty fucking hard to motivate.

That's a disappointing hole to blow in one's self-perception.

Or, perhaps, this is another crappy excuse, and my real problem is that I'm just a tool.

Current Status: So confused.

It's all supposed to mean something, but why did no one tell me that it would be written in a different language?