At my age, I trust my instincts now more than ever, accepting that what feels like a higher than normal use of one social media product (Facebook) has…not a purpose or meaning, exactly…but fills a gap between two points, or connects me to a place further up the  mountain I’m climbing after encountering an uncrossable chasm of doubt and fear.

The same goes for real/physical life.

I have the goal of getting to Mars two hundred years from now and am leaning on the two friends who can get me there whether they want me to or not or whether they want to go with me.

No matter, the goal’s the thing and the friends are both the means and the motivation for moving me off my keister, buttocks, arse, tush to get there.

I love my wife dearly — she is an integral part of who I am from before I started dating girls/women, thus more aware than anyone other than my sister or mother of what/who I am.

At the same time, I worry that she is not interested in more than settling down in this suburban life for good, with the occasional vacation trip to other parts of the world, prepackaged excitement, well under control.

I am a wild man and would be dead now if it weren’t for her.

I’ve spent so long tempering the madness behind a shield that protected me from my father’s disciplinarian personality that I almost became a permanent automaton for the sake of a subculture that nourished and raised me but does not completely satisfy me.

My Christian friends have told me through the years to quit sitting on the fence and, presumably, to join them in their pastoral lifestyle that they see in me which makes them happy.

Little have they seen the real me who has no permanent happiness in weekly Bible studies going over the same material again and again as if there’s something in there they hadn’t noticed before.

By age five, I had my fill of the Bible and spent the next fourteen years nodding my head and feeding back to them their good feelings that they affirmed in Bible passages associated with their inadequacies and falling short of the perfection of an unseen deity.

But I found no relief in the religious text, hoping upon hope there was something else besides ritual, dogma and diatribes to cause endorphin and adrenaline rushes.

So it is that I find myself here, after getting an ego boost from nice words and phrases people give me on Facebook for the fourteen years of bliss I reflected back to them in my childhood and early adulthood.

They rarely if ever saw what was truly under the hood, what really powered my engine.

My wife knew.  So did Monica and Mike.  My sister barely had an inkling.

No one else knew the multiple personalities that begged to be released into society.

It’s time to give them full rein.

Abi understands more than I expected her to what lies within.

With her, I am learning to control the beast, to find the place between the madness and social dancing to make me someone better than I am.

With Jenn, well…a new storyline is emerging that changes my approach to the future.

What, if anything, they expect out of me, I do not know.  I can only trust my instincts that tell me to keep heading toward Mars.

Where my wife fits into all this, I can’t say.  I love her no more or less than before.  She has been so much an integral part of me that I trust her more than life itself.  If what people describe to me is the love of Jesus, then Janeil is my Jesus and of that kind of love, she is all I’ve known without fear of being rejected.

No one can make the next important decisions in my life except me.

These decisions include what the start of this blog entry was supposed to lead to earlier than now; that is, I’m beginning to see that Abi and Jenn are helping mold me such that my business side — the cold, calculating engineering project manager — can actually exist side-by-side (even happily so!) with my wild side.

Would that it be so!

It almost makes no sense to schedule my time to give my wild side room to grow but I think it’s time I do.

I practiced the idea when I built a desktop robot in dedication to Jenn’s father.

And, by golly, it actually worked!  I got to make a presentation on the Internet about the robot, explaining not only how it worked but also the theory behind it…and people were interested!

Therefore, thanks to the encouragement of Christina W., I’m putting together my engineering skills, my madness and my project management skills to branch out from this lab-within-a-study-within-a-bedroom-within-a-cabin-in-the-woods-within-a-suburban-subdivision and, should plans work out, open up a shop selling my wares, objects made with my hands from my imagination, all to raise funds for a trip to Mars.

How exciting is that?

We shall see how much my short story writing is affected — the quality as well as the quantity — may have to keep posting historical entries, a la Boing Boing, to keep readers interested.

Thanks to everyone for their support!