This entry marks the end of my first 100 days on this blog. I plan to write many, many more entries, but for now, I want to revel in the fact that I made it here. 100 is a nice and big round number, a number that finally brings me to triple digits, and a number that means I’m not playing around anymore. I’ve come a long way since Day 1, and I can’t even imagine what the future holds. I’ve done over 75 straight days of my Insanity workouts, with many, many more to come. I’ve written over 31,000 words in my novel in 100 days. I’ve written over 60,000 words here on my blog. I look and feel better than I’ve ever felt in my life.¹ My novel brings me so much joy and spiritual satisfaction. And my blog keeps me accountable. If my next year can be like the last three months, then I can only imagine the man I could become.

I didn’t have a job when I started this blog since I had quit my old job weeks before. I lost my best friend in the whole world the day before I started this blog. I left my niece’s fifth birthday party with a couple of beers in me. I had gained over 10 pounds in the months before I started this blog because I drank either a full bottle of wine a day or a 6 pack of beer. My novel lied untouched for over 16 months. I just signed off on a new car loan a few weeks before, where I lied and said that I still worked at my old job. I desired so much to run away and go someplace I’ve never been before so I can start a new life and leave the pain behind. I lied in bed all day eating junk food, getting drunk, and watching TV from morning to night. I was lazy, irresponsible, and gluttonous. I needed all that to change. I needed to change.

100 days. That’s all it took for me to get from there to here. But it took just one day for everything to change, and that was Day 1. Day 1 was when I was fed up with how my life was and where it could end up. I needed to change, and all I needed was to act on that desire. I spent the almost $100 on this Squarespace account, spent almost no time setting it up, and just started writing. I’ve kept a journal for years, but something on that day told me to turn it into a blog. I didn’t think to help anyone when I started. Hell, I didn’t even think I’d have 1 reader other than myself. I didn’t think I’d actually get this far. But here I am. 100 days, 100 entries, 1 life transformed.

I like where I am today. There are things I’d still like to change and improve upon, but my life is nothing like it was before this blog. Old habits die hard, and I’m struggling with a few² every now and then, but I’ve yet to succumb to any of them. I leave for California in a few weeks, and I hope to return with stuff marking the day I finally decide to settle down. Until then, here’s to a lifetime of greatness.

Today I realized how fragile my current way of life really is. So many things have to just work for me to do what I need to do. What prompted it was, in hindsight, very stupid, but at the moment, felt very, very real. My key fob for my car stopped working after work. I actually started experiencing problems with it a few months ago, but I since replaced the battery and things just worked. Until today, when I couldn’t disarm the alarm on my car. I went back into my office, grabbed a Phillips head screwdriver, and unscrewed my key fob. I had a replacement battery in my bag, and I used that to replace the battery. Except, it didn’t work. I tried moving the battery around, trying to make sure all the contacts touched, and in doing so, I broke the battery holder inside the fob. I panicked. Luckily, since I’m a nerdy tech guy, I pulled out my phone and opened Dropbox because I had a PDF of my car’s manual in there. I quickly skimmed the relevant sections and learned that if I unlock my car with my key, the alarm — which will go off without disarming the alarm — will turn off if I turn the car on since my car recognizes my key. I didn’t know that, and I was so glad I wasn’t driving through town with my alarm going off like I was playing a game of Grand Theft Auto.

I have to get to work so I can do my job and get paid every 1st and 15th of the month. To get to work, I need my car to work, and that includes my key fob. I can no longer arm my car, but that’s totally okay. As long as my car works. I need to get paid so I can pay my bills. My bills keep me alive. I need to be alive so I can do what I need to do to be happy and content and great. I need to be great because I have this abnormal fear of being ordinary. I don’t know why I have that fear. I don’t really like showing off to others, and I guess I could be arrogant sometimes about certain things and at certain times. Maybe I am just plain arrogant. I’m not sure, to be honest. Only other people can tell me that. And no one’s really told me anything like that, so maybe I’m not. But this arrogance breeds confidence, and I need confidence to live the life I want. And I want to live the life I want because I only have one shot at living, and I want to make the most of it. And to make the most of it, I have to try to be great or else I’ll feel like I wasted it. Wasted life and that precious time given to me.

I have to stop being so high-strung. I have to learn to adapt and be flexible. To be like water. One small problem can’t bring my whole day down. For whatever reason, if I couldn’t get home on time, I shouldn’t let that ruin my day. I still got time to do what I need to do, and if it means not working out or not reading or not doing whatever else, then that’s okay. I should be extra vigilant the next day and learn from what happened and adapt. That’s the only way to survive this, quite frankly, hard life.

I have to find the motivation every day to wake up at 5 AM to write my novel, to come home from an 8 hour work day and find the energy to work out for an hour, to desire to read as voraciously as I can, and finally, the willpower to finish my day writing a deeply personal journal entry on a blog that friends actually read. This is all fun and I’m grateful that I’ve been doing this consistently for 99 days, but it’s hard. And today I realized how much I don’t want this all to stop because I couldn’t get home on time.

Wow, I guess I’m not sure how to adapt. I hope I don’t crash and burn. It feels like I’m just getting started.¹

I did the bare minimum today, and I’m not beating myself up about it. I slept in, stayed in, and lied in bed for most of the day. I went to the grocery store to buy some popcorn, but since I didn’t just want to be the guy that goes to the store to buy popcorn, I bought some steak, too. Tomorrow’s dinner is going to be amazing. I bought popcorn because I wanted to watch TV all day today, and I did. I started watching the 100 on Netflix, and it’s a fun show. Perfect popcorn watching entertainment. I purposefully didn’t want to think about dating or how I could be better or about anything other than relaxation. And I feel really good about that.

I get paid tomorrow, and all I’m thinking about is what I could buy. What I should be thinking about is stashing a lot of that check away to save up for my trip to California, which should be happening two weeks from today. That’s what I should be thinking about. Instead, I’m thinking about buying this camera bundle for $699 off of Amazon. This is the camera I mentioned a month ago. I probably won’t succumb to my I-gotta-have-it mentality, and instead try to be responsible. I guess. Besides, I think I finally finished setting up my wish list for when I go to Ikea to buy my much needed and desired furniture. That should crave any lingering shopping bugs.

The days sure do go by a lot faster when I sleep in. I’m so used to winding down my days at around 9 PM, but since I slept in an extra 3-4 hours this weekend than what I’m used to, it feels like I lost that time since I’m not really going to sleep 3-4 hours later. Maybe an hour later than normal, but that’s it. That tells me I’m not getting enough sleep during the weekdays, and that’s something I’ve known about since I started this blog. I’ve been neglecting my sleep because there’s a lot of stuff I want to do each day to ensure I get better in some way. The more I slack off, the more afraid I am of losing control of myself and falling back to my old self-destructive habits and routines. It’s been 98 days since my last drink, but today I really thought it wouldn’t hurt if I had one beer. I really thought that would be a good idea, and thankfully I didn’t succumb to it. But what if I did? What if I drank again?

The thought of turning my back on who I am and who I could be scares me because I know it’s 100% possible. I’m always going to be afraid of falling since I know how hard it is to get back up. If I’m being super honest with myself, before I started this blog, I was in some sort of free fall ever since I moved up here to Montana, and I’m just now course-correcting. I mean, I’m finally letting myself buy some fucking furniture for crissakes. It finally feels like I’m home, and it’s time for me to settle down.

I got really depressed after writing yesterday’s entry. Since it was Saturday, I allowed myself to sleep in. I woke up early because my body clock is used to waking up early, but since I knew I could sleep in, I did. It was during this time that I had a dream about her. After I realized how much work I need to do to improve my dating game, I yearned for simpler times, when I seemingly had this figured out. So I dreamt about her. Thankfully, it wasn’t a good dream. She was sitting down on a table, her head bent down and concentrating on something. A book? A sketch? I sat on a bench farther away from her, and I saw her. I recognized her hair, and I couldn’t help but stare. I looked away, and when I looked back, she was gone. It was around this time when I realized that I was dreaming, and I didn’t like this feeling of longing, so I tried to keep happy. She sat down next to me, her tell-tale smile breaking my heart because I missed it so much. She laughed and put her head on my shoulder, and then I woke up.

I don’t think this dream was supposed to be about her. I’m not going to get back in contact with her; I see no possible way this will end well. I’ve been racking my brain for the past few weeks — month? — trying to come up with the right angle to write to her, to see if there is something I can say to make things right between us, but I couldn’t find it. As a writer whose only tool are words, I couldn’t find the right and best words to write to her to make things right. That should tell me that I’ve outgrown her. I miss the idea of her, and the feeling she gave me, but I don’t miss her. And now I have to get out there and meet someone new.

As someone who is trying to live as clean a life as possible, I fear that I may be too boring for most girls out there. I don’t drink anymore, and I have a strict diet that I don’t want to deviate from, and I like writing. Writer’s, by definition, are solitary individuals. My routines are limiting my free time to really concentrate and spend with women, and I just realized I’m giving myself excuses not to do this. I hate dating. I hate it hate it hate it. But I have to. I have to.¹

Another issue preventing me from improving this area of my life is my fear of being shallow. I have a type², and for the most part, I have not been attracted to many girls I encounter in my day-to-day life. I don’t want to ask just any girl out because I can. I need to be attracted to them, and if I’m not? Then I don’t want to talk to them. That doesn’t mean that if I am attracted to someone I go and talk to them. I don’t, and that’s the damn problem. And I usually see these girls when I’m not looking for them. They just appear out of nowhere and I’m caught totally off-guard. That’s actually something I can work on and improve.

I’ve been afraid that I need to go out there looking for them, and that thought has been giving me a lot of anxiety. Should I go to a bar? A club somewhere? Should I join some sort of activity like cooking class?³ Instead, I should just go about my life, and I see someone I find attractive, I should go talk to them, and that’s the part I want to work on. Finding the confidence to approach a cute girl. Because that’s the best way I can think of to find someone in a very sparsely populated area. At least I think so.

God, if you guys don’t think I’m an idiot yet, then you do now.

When I was younger, I read this short story about a guy who was locked up in prison, and he was given access to as many books as he wanted. He read as much as he could, and he bettered himself as much as he could, so by the end of the story, he left prison a different and much better man. I forgot what this story was called, but as I grew older, I became acquainted with other books with similar themes. Obviously there’s the Count of Monte Cristo, a book I have not read yet but really want to. I’ve seen a few different film adaptations, though, and the scene I enjoy the most is when he’s locked up in prison. During high school, I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X. In it, he gets locked up and decides to change for the better. One of the things he does is to read the dictionary so he could be a better communicator. For some reason, I loved that, so I read the dictionary a few years ago, and I’m still recalling interesting words I learned from this activity.

I live in a little studio apartment with very few things. I have a bed, a table, and a chair. There’s a kitchen and a bathroom, too, but that’s really it. I’ve been living inside this prison for almost two years now, and for the most part, I’ve loved it. It’s my home, and I’ve accomplished some great things here. It’s simple, so I’m not that distracted with trivial things, and it has what I need. But it doesn’t have everything I need. I’ve blinded myself from a few essential things that would make my life happier. That’s people.

I love my friends, but my best friends are scattered all across the country. I have friends all over Southern California, some in Northern California, others in New York, and yet more all over the country. I’ve lived in Montana for almost three years, and I haven’t made as many friends as I would have liked. Don’t get me started on my dating life. I need to change all this. I need to be more active and pursue this part of life with all I’ve got. I need to meet more people because I’m not going to find a girl locked up in my own little prison. I can leave any time I want, but I choose not to. Why? I don’t know. It’s this not knowing that irritates me. Am I shy? Am I lazy? Am I scared? What is it?

I joined a crappy dating site today, and I wasn’t attracted to most of the girls I saw on there, and the girls I was attracted to live very, very far away. All the good girls seem to be taken around here. This is one of the worst things about living in such a sparsely populated area. I think most of the girls I’d be interested in leave and go live somewhere else, or they’re snatched up quickly by someone else. I’ve met very attractive yet very taken girls, and there’s no way I’m going to break anyone up. That’s just wrong. I need to start dating, though, and if I have to spend a lot of time and energy scouring my area for attractive girls who look interesting, so be it, right? I’m not going anywhere for at least another year, so this is something I have to do. And I have to move on. It’s been too long now.

Anyone in Montana who happens to read this know of anyone you might want to set me up with? Let me know! I’m dead serious, unfortunately.

I work at a very small K-12 school as a tech guy. I’m in charge of every single piece of technology the school has, and for a small school it’s a lot. Over 130 iPads and iPod Touch’s, over 150 laptops, and over 100 desktops. Not to mention managing the network and making sure the school doesn’t crash when there’s a crisis. I’ve been able to go from school to school, meeting elementary teachers one minute and high school teachers the next. Through this mobility, I’ve been getting to know students, and the students have been getting to know me. The seniors are actually the class who’ve gotten to know me the most since they’re the more sociable class. There’s a few guys there who always say hi to me, and it’s always a pleasure whenever I get to work on a computer in one of their classes.¹

Getting to be around kids, especially high school kids, has granted me the possibility to revisit memories of the time when I was in high school. I wish to believe that my 18 year old self would be proud of my 28 year old self. I used to be so shy and so angry and so full of self-contempt and insecurity that it poisoned my life for years. Now I’m on this journey that I never thought I’d ever embark upon when I was a teenager. I thought I was stuck with whatever life the universe gave me. Nobody knew the inner demons I battled with daily and how much I’ve had to fight to simply stay alive. Nobody knew this because I never talked to anybody about it. I was shy, and I didn’t have friends I could just talk to about this stuff. It wasn’t until I started seeing a therapist during college that all of this pent up rage and pain spilled out, freeing me to be me.

I wonder how many of the kids I pass down the halls every day are going through the same things. I saw a high school girl sitting alone against the wall of the Middle School building with a sketchpad and pencil, deeply engrossed in whatever sketch she was doing. I see the same trio of senior girls always hanging out together, always sitting next to each other in their classes², and always going home together. Ten years from now, will they be as close as they are now? I know I’m not as close with my high school friends anymore, so I don’t know.

High school is a time of discovering who we really are and who we choose to be. We’re friends with our friends because we happened to share the same classes or we lived next to each other or we played the same sports together. Later, though, we’ll make friends who share our same interests or who we met at some party and hit it off immediately or who we happen to fall deeply in love with and marry. Except for that last part, this is how it’s been for me. I know of some high school friends who have continued to be friends, who went to college together, who live together now. That’s amazing. Obviously, we’re all different, but I’m still curious to know who some of these kids will grow up to become.

I want to talk to and get to know these kids because I feel like I have some wisdom to impart to them. I’m not entirely sure why I want to, but I do. Maybe it’s because I’m 28 and I want kids of my own. Or maybe because I don’t have a social life and I just need to go out with some good friends and have fun. I don’t know.

Anyways, yeah.

One of the best things about working out is the meal that comes afterwards. I always like sitting down on my chair, a plate full of food I cooked myself in front of me, and that feeling of accomplishment that pervades throughout my body. I earned this. And then I dig in, and the food always disappears faster than I would like, but that’s okay. I know I’m doing something right for my body, and my body has rewarded me with more happiness, more energy, and more confidence. These rewarding feelings never seem to be on my mind before or during my workouts, and I don’t know why I don’t let that motivate me when the simple act of doing it doesn’t.

I didn’t want to workout today. I delayed it much later than I should’ve, and then during the beginning of the workout, I just wasn’t feeling it. Disregarding the pain on my right foot, I didn’t feel like pushing myself today. I didn’t mind working out; it was just the fact that, knowing myself, I would be unsatisfied if I didn’t give it my all. A big reason why I hate the fit tests¹ is because I already pushed myself in the beginning, and I know I have to push myself later because I need to see those numbers improve or else I’ll feel like I failed. So in the beginning of my workout today, I pushed through the pain and my own weariness and worked out until I slipped on my own sweat that pooled on the floor. My muscles ached, my right foot hurt, and a big ol’ smile formed on my face once the workout ended. I was done, I was tired, but I felt good.

I don’t know if there’s a secret here that I can impart to you guys. Just do what needs to be done. I know if I didn’t work out today, I would break a promise with myself, not to mention my 70+ day streak I’ve accumulated. I know that the rest of my day would be shrouded in failure and guilt, and since I know what that feels like far too well, I did not and do not want to live through that, especially since I’m in control of my own destiny. And I know that if I didn’t workout, I wouldn’t have earned my food or my rest. I haven’t had trouble sleeping in a long, long time because I try to earn them. Trying to live a life of integrity is hard but worth it.

Nothing in life is free. I like it that way. I’m not there yet, but I want to look at all my possessions and know I earned all of them. I want to pick up this object or look at this piece of furniture and feel the joy each items brings me because I know I earned it. I want to look back on my life and know that I’ve earned each and every day, and that each of these days helped me get where I am today. I want to earn today, and I want to earn my life. It’s not easy, but it is fun.

All because I didn’t want to workout today.

For weeks now, I’ve been thinking about and quietly planning in my head my road trip to California. I’ve been considering the length of the trip, including travel time, as well as cost. The purpose of the trip, mainly, is to pick up the rest of my stuff from my mom. I have about 9 boxes of books and a couple more boxes of DVDs and miscellaneous other stuff. I mostly just want the books. I’m also planning to stop by an Ikea to buy some furniture. Since the beginning, I was thinking about going around Christmas time, and now that Christmas is just a few weeks away, my thoughts have been on this trip a lot more.

One of the biggest issues I’m most concerned about is the cost. I have a Dodge Durango with a V8 Hemi engine. This is not a gas friendly car, so gas will cost me a lot. But, and this is what converted me into driving down there and not flying, the cost to drive down there and drive back with just my stuff is a lot cheaper than flying down there and shipping my books through the post office. I want my books! And since I’ll be down there anyway with my big car, a stop to Ikea seemed logical and exciting. But again, to buy the stuff I know I’m going to want for years to come will be somewhat expensive. I want a few bookcases, a rug, a new bed frame and mattress, a lamp, and an end table. All in all, this trip will cost me over $1,000. Since I know I won’t be doing this on a regular basis, I’m thinking of treating it as a one-time necessary expense that I can put on my credit card and pay off during 2015. I’ve actually been more concerned about my drive down there than the cost, in a way. The cost was something I knew I had to eat, but it still affected my decision.

Another big issue that has concerned me has been time. A trip to California, regardless if it was by plane or car, will disrupt the flow I’ve built up over the past few months. 93 days to be exact. It will take me 2 days to get there, regardless of how vigilant I am. I’ve never driven for the length of time required to get there, and even though I know I can do it just fine, I won’t know until I’m out there actually doing it. So, two days there, two days back. That’s already, lets say, three full days on the road.¹ Then I’ll have to spend a few days with my family to make the whole trip worthwhile. Another part of a day driving to Ikea and actually buying my furniture, and maybe a few days up in Los Angeles to visit my friends. Realistically, I would need to block out an entire week for this trip.

My biggest concern relating to time was disrupting my workouts. Fortunately, Insanity ends on the 27th. I could spend the 28th stretching, but if I forego that and leave first thing that morning, I can spend that Sunday driving and arriving the following Monday. I can spend Monday through early Friday in California, leave Friday and arrive sometime Saturday night. I can then spend that Sunday resting and setting up all my furniture, and I’ll be back at work the next day, on a Monday. I’ll lose five days of possible work time, but I think I’ve already built up a few days of vacation that I could cash in. That’s something I’ll have to check in sometime before I leave. And on this Monday, I can start my new Insanity workout, which would be Insanity: Max 30. This workout was just released today, in fact. I don’t want to break my 200+ day Insanity goal I started like two months ago, and taking a week off seems okay, especially since I’ll be starting on the first day of the new year anyways.

That, my friends, are my thoughts that have been weighing on my mind these past few days. I know this might be a very crappy entry, but it’s a crappy entry in a long line of crappy entries. I just know I have to lay the groundwork now for this trip because I know just having my books around will make me better and happier in the long run. I’m a longterm type of thinker. Small habits that build up to big things and all that. Lets hope this trip actually happens. I’ll of course keep you all posted.

At the end of every day, when I’m lying down with my laptop on my lap, my fingers on the keyboard, and I’m thinking about what to write about for my blog, one of my first maxims, per se, is to try not to repeat myself. When things are going well, however, my bank of ideas always seems to be empty. I know I touched on this a few entries ago, but I just wanted to reiterate that again tonight because things seem to be going well still. I’m hitting my targets every day, I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing — writing, reading, working out — and I’m generally, simply, happy. I have no complaints. Well, scratch that. I guess I do.

Since things are going so well, why not try to shake things up a bit and add something new to my routine? I know I’ve had that thought flit across my mind a few times in the past few days, but I never took it seriously enough. It wasn’t that it was a bad idea; my mind was just on other things at the time, and since I didn’t write it down, I forgot about it. Then it would come again, and I still didn’t write it down. Hell, this is a good lesson for me to internalize. Why in the world have I bought these notebooks if I’m not using them? Craziness.

Anyways, I have hundreds of tasks on my todo list, many them as larger projects that I haven’t made progress on in a while. Some for months, others for years. They’re projects that aren’t important for me to do but are still things I would like to do at some point in time. Most of them involve stuff on my computer, others are bucket list-level items, and others involve me spending money. I know there are “rules” out there that say if something’s been on your list for X amount of days, be it 2 weeks or 2 months, and you still haven’t made progress on it, then you should assume that you’re never going to get around to it and you should just delete it. I never really subscribed to that idea. Some stuff, yeah, I would delete if it no longer applied, but there’s stuff you might want to do someday. Those are the things I’m talking about.

The thing about my current routine, though, is that it takes up my whole day. There’s very little wiggle room for me to add to it unless I take away other things I use my time for. And the one thing that I know I can cut but god dammit I don’t want to is television. I can save a few hours every day if I stopped watching television. I watch at least 2-3 hours of television a day, and writing it out makes it seem like that’s a lot. But is it? I watch an episode of television in the morning during breakfast, after writing 300+ words in my novel. I think I deserve that. I watch another episode of television after work. I don’t eat lunch at work, so I usually drink my Primal Fuel shake while watching television. That fuels me up for the workout I do right after. Then during dinner, after showering and cooking the meal myself, I watch some more television. Food and television seems to go hand-in-hand, and that seems super normal to me. I live alone, I don’t eat with anyone, so television keeps me company. Is that sad? I don’t know. I am sad that I’m thinking about cutting out television. Now, is that sad?

I guess I have to think about my priorities. If I think about the three pillars — mind, body, spirit — and I couple them with the three things I have to do every day — reading, working out, writing — I can see that I already write twice a day. Would adding more writing to my routine make me any better? I do want to write more in my notebooks, mostly just ideas and thoughts and nothing so structured and formal like this and my novel. So, maybe. I know I can’t workout any more than I already do. One Insanity workout per day is plenty, and last month when I did two per day, I almost injured myself, so I know for sure that that was plenty. So, no for that one. Reading? I know I’ve said I can read more, but I usually don’t. I read for an average of 30-60 minutes a day, but not all at once. It’s spread out across the day. Maybe I can read more.

Hey everyone, thank you for following along on my thought process there. I’m going to try to add more reading to my day, just to make my routine a bit fuller and more fulfilling. Maybe by filling my head with more ideas, that’ll make my entries more interesting. Win-win. I’m also going to try to cut one of my television watching times by one and read instead. Possibly my after-work snack time. I’ll let you guys know how it goes.

Maybe.

Move your feet.

When I was younger, I almost drowned. I was at the river with my family. My dad brought his fishing rod and simply fished. We helped him catch some crawdads that he could use for bait. He taught us how to fish, but on this day, I really wasn’t interested in fishing. I just wanted to swim. So I did.

We weren’t alone. There were other people there, families with their kids, just trying to relax and have fun. It was a beautiful day in Southern California, but they happen so often there that I took them for granted while I lived there. This river was on the side of the road, so it crossed underneath it from one side of the road to the other. I remember looking through this tunnel and thinking how dark and scary it looked. I didn’t want to be anywhere near it.

I remember I liked catching crawdads. They were so easy to catch, and my dad taught me that they were delicious. Maybe that’s where my love for sushi comes from. I remember swimming in the river, sitting down on the shallow areas and simply enjoying the sun. The river current was soft and gentle, and I remember letting it take me away sometimes. I remember letting it take me, and I closed my eyes and enjoyed the sun on my face, the sounds of laughter coming from the kids, and the babbling sound of the river. It was all so peaceful. But then I remembered the tunnel, and when I opened my eyes, I realized the current took me very near to it. I tried to stand up but the place the river took me was deep, and I couldn’t feel the floor. I panicked.

I tried to swim away, but I was a horrible swimmer, and all I did was make things worse. The current took me deeper, and I remember lifting my head up until my face was parallel to the sky. The water was up to my neck, and I remember thinking about dying right there. The thought just crossed my mind, and I imagined my mom crying. That thought broke my heart, and I didn’t want to die, so I extended my body as far as I could until my toes barely scratched the surface beneath me. I flapped my arms against the current while tip-toeing along the surface until it rose. I ran ashore and sat down until I caught my breath.

I looked around me and saw that nobody looked at me. My father kept fishing, my brothers kept swimming, and everyone else lived their lives with no knowledge of what might’ve happened to me. I didn’t tell anyone what happened, and I haven’t spoken a word about this to anyone until just now.

I’m not sure why this memory came back to me tonight. For some reason, the three words that began this entry flashed across my mind, and I thought I was going to talk about how we must all move our feet to keep moving forward; I thought I was going to write about football, how running backs have to keep moving their feet to fight for every yard and how we all must be like running backs when it comes to accomplishing our goals; and I thought I was going to mention the flowing river and compare it to time like so many writers and poets before me have done, and how we must keep moving our feet because even though time keeps moving regardless of what we do, we can dictate where we go rather than be taken somewhere by some other force. Free will and all that.

Instead I wrote about this memory I haven’t thought about in a long time, and how much more I liked that idea than the others. We have to keep moving our feet and fight for every inch because otherwise we’ll be letting some other force live our lives for us. We have to live the life we want, and the only way to do that is by moving our feet.