Montana is beautiful. One of the big reasons why I moved up here from Southern California was because I always thought this. Firefighting for the past three years has only made me appreciate how truly lovely this state is. Being a firefighter has given me the opportunity to explore Montana’s beautiful and majestic forests, and whenever I encounter a view like this, my jaw drops. I wish I could show you all the vast beauty that’s up there in the mountains. The beauty will blow you all away.

Like I mentioned yesterday, we mopped up the northern flank of the fire today. Now that the perimeter of the fire is contained, mopping up means taking out all the open flames and smokes we see in the interior. This is where the fire burned, and fire likes to go where there’s fuel. Roots usually live underground, and guess what? That’s where the heat likes to stay and cause us trouble. A little puff of smoke could mean a tree’s entire root structure is burning, and if it wasn’t for that little puff, we would have no idea that heat is under there. If we missed it, that heat could turn to open flames. Those open flames could grow big enough to be blown across the line by the wind. You know what’s across the line? Fuel. And that fuel will burn, and then we’ll be back to where we started. Our objective was to grid the interior twenty feet from the line. Anything past that is too far in for it to cause us any trouble. Temperatures reached into the 90s, but it felt hotter since the ground was burnt to ash, burning our feet and making all of us miserable. The glue from one of my buddy’s boots melted, destroying his boots. We completed our objective today, and I think we did a fantastic job. We’ll be back out there again tomorrow.

And I think that wraps it up for today…

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. I got the IT job. I have a job now. Like someone is going to pay me money for me to do something I love. Is this real life? It pays double what I earned at my last job. I start Thursday. My only concern now is taking out this fire before then. I think we will, but if we don’t, I’ll have to demobilize early because I’m not screwing this opportunity up.

I have a job, and I’m happy.

My hands hurt. They hurt all day for some reason. I used the same tools that I’ve been using to fight fires for the past few years, and yet my hands still hurt. It hurts to grip anything. I blame Montana’s treacherous terrain. The mountainside today was hard, and the fire was smokey and hot. One thing I hate about digging line is when the path we’re creating around the perimeter of the fire is predominantly rocky. Why can’t the fire burn near soft dirt? And we were given crappy lunches again today: two tiny cans of apple juice, two peanut butter and jelly “jamwhiches”, an orange, a salted nut roll candy bar, a bag of Cheetos, a pizza pocket, and two more sandwiches, this time ham, bologna, and cheese. I gave away everything but the orange, cans of juice, and pizza pocket. And I performed great, I think. I was not hungry all day. I don’t need as many calories as they think we should be consuming.

Now that my bitching is out of the way: I had so much fun today. It’s always great coming back out into mother nature and helping do my part in taking care of her. Fires need to burn, regardless if we think they’re dangerous and thus need to take them out quickly. Fire burns away the old to make way for the new, and this has been happening for millennia. It’s the way of life. The fire was located near Pistol Creek in the Arlee area. It was about 20 acres or so, and it might’ve grown bigger as the day went on. Not too sure on that. A bunch of my friends that I’ve fought fires with all summer — many of them I’ve fought all seven of my fires this summer with — were on this fire, so it seemed like the last two and a half weeks since our last fire was really only yesterday. We go back out there again tomorrow. It looks like we’ll be mopping up for maybe two or three more days, then I’m pretty sure we’ll be calling it done. I’m not a boss (but I’ll be a squad boss trainee next year!), so they’ll tell us what’s going on sooner or later.

For some reason, I haven’t been taking too many pictures while I’ve been out firefighting this summer. I took a few today. I’ll try to take more tomorrow. We don’t really get a chance to whip out our phones and take pictures of what’s exciting around us. If there were big flames roaring near us, the last thing I want to do is take a picture. I’ll be running for my life, possibly searching for a good deployment site, most likely heading into the black.

Tomorrow I should be finding out if I got the IT job or not. If I don’t get it, then I’m going to have to seriously evaluate my life and decide on what direction I want to take it in. That’s always fun.

I’m going to one more fire tomorrow morning. I got the call earlier today, and my immediate reaction after I agreed to go and hung up was fear. Firefighting always — always — disrupts my life, and it’s a big reason why I’m restarting many of my past habits. I’m not fed well there at all, so I know my weight will fluctuate again once the fire’s over. I won’t be working out as much, and depending on the fire, I may not even work all that much. I don’t want to say I won’t, but it’ll be really difficult to write not only my novel but also my blog entries. I can write in both projects with my iPhone, but that’s obviously not ideal. I’m not sure what to do. To top it off, I find out on Monday whether I got the IT job or not, and I’m afraid I won’t be within cellphone range if they do call me. What if I get the job? Do I have to walk away from the fire? What if I don’t get the job? Then the fire will be a good influx of money that I really need.

I have to be at the division by 7 AM. I haven’t even packed yet. The last fire I was on, we were allowed to go home every night. I’m thinking that the bosses will be offering this option again since the fire’s local, and the weather isn’t hot enough to cause the fire to spread any bigger than it already is. Regardless, I have to pack my bag and be ready. I love firefighting, and I’d love to hang out with my buds again. The fire could last a few days or even a week. I just hope that everything I’ve built up in the last 13 days don’t go to waste. Maybe I can keep my blog updated, but they won’t be at least 400 words long, which has been my unofficial word count since day one.

I have the tools to keep the most important parts of my routines going: I can write with my iPhone (and I can even bring my iPad with me, just in case); firefighting by definition is physical, so I’ll be moving around no matter what; and I can try my best to give away all the junk they give us and subsist on the healthier options, if there are any.

This is not the end of the world, man. You’ll be making money doing something you really enjoy. If you get the job, explain it to your bosses what’s going on. They know you’re a firefighter, I’m sure they’ll understand. And your habits? Just try.

I’ll try to roll with the punches and hope for the best… I’m going on another fire!

The excitement and necessity that came from starting and writing this blog has waned, and now I’m facing resistance. My body wants to go back to how things use to be. It doesn’t want to work out, it doesn’t want to write, and it doesn’t want to eat well, as well as a handful of other things it doesn’t want to do. This is the moment when things start getting really difficult for me. Judging from past experiences, this is the time when I start to relax on a few things, and thus head down the same destructive path I seem to always find myself in.

Maybe it’s good that I work out, but maybe I shouldn’t do workouts from Insanity and Insanity: the Asylum Vol. 1 and instead do something easier and shorter. Maybe I shouldn’t write my journal entries on my blog on a daily basis, but instead a couple times a week. Maybe I could start writing in my private journal again, where I can write shorter entries and no one will be the wiser. Do I really have to write my novel every morning? Can’t I just skip one day? I’m hungry, and I really don’t feel like making dinner. Can’t I just eat out once? I know where she lives, and I know where she works. Can’t I just maybe visit her in one of these places and say hi? God no! That’s stalker material, and we can’t be having that. Move on already!

These thoughts have been running around my head a ton this week, and there have been times where I’ve almost succumbed to my weaknesses, and other times where I’ve eased the pedal off a bit. Those are usually little things that in the grand scheme of things don’t matter that much, but if I add them up over a long period of time could start becoming a problem. I have my alarm set at 5 AM; I turned it off and slept in till 6 today. My cardio seems to have been severely hampered by my laziness the past few months, so I’m not pushing myself as hard during my workouts as I know I could be. I usually don’t go grocery shopping without a shopping list; I’ve been buying extra things when I buy food, and that’s not looking good for my budget. These little things are the trouble spots that on the surface should be easier to fix, but sometimes tend to fall through the cracks.

My personal philosophy for a long time has been to focus on three pillars of what I consider a complete human being: mind, body, and spirit. I try to structure my days with tasks that hit on these three areas at least once. Anything less than that makes me feel like I failed myself on that day. I didn’t fail today, and I haven’t since I begun this journey 12 days ago, but this journey isn’t easy. The man I want to be isn’t making this easy.

Isn’t that the point, though? Nothing worth celebrating comes easy, I think. That’s what makes victory that much sweeter.

I just came back from my job interview, and I have to say, I’m excited. I applied for an IT job at a local K-12 school, a job I have no professional experience in but tons of personal experience in. The interview lasted for over an hour and a half, which I think is a good sign. I met with the vice principal and two other members of the board. I tended to ramble in my answers, but I felt I was honest and sincere and hopefully even confident. The job requirements seem easy enough to do, so I’m not too worried that I’m under-qualified for the job, even though I feel like I am. It should be fine, I hope. They will tell me of their decision by Monday, and I’m so excited right now that that seems like a long ways away.

Other than that? There’s nothing much else to report. I worked out, got my haircut for free (his Square credit card reader wasn’t working), and wrote another 300+ words in my novel. I like what I’m doing so far in this rewrite, like I’ve mentioned before, but I don’t really want to talk about it while I’m still writing it. I updated my iPhone and iPad to iOS 8 yesterday, and I really love the changes Apple made. I love the extensions, and I really think I can use my iPad more as my workhorse machine and use my MacBook Air for writing and as my TV replacement. I like that set-up, but it’s definitely a work in progress.

I was afraid I was going to write an entry like this on my blog, but here it is. I’m not really saying anything. I’m just relaying what happened; I’m keeping a record of my day’s events for posterity’s sake, not because I have something to say but because I want to write something. Am I being hard on myself? Am I trying to create something here that is so out of my reach that I shouldn’t even try? Or that it doesn’t even exist? I don’t know. All I know is that I didn’t make time to focus on tonight’s entry. I had my interview, which took lots of precious time today. I had my routine tasks I need and want to do every day, and that takes time. And now? Now I’m tired, and I want to watch a movie, and I’m looking at the word count to make sure I hit at least 400 words. And I have.

If I don’t make time for the things I think or want to value, then I have to reevaluate my priorities. I want this blog to be a big priority in my life, and to be successful, I have to make time for it every day.

I have a job interview tomorrow for a job that I think will be a perfect fit for me. Part — if not most — of my stress the past couple of weeks has been because I don’t have a job. Every purchase hurts, especially when I know that the longer I go without a source of income, the more I’m going to hurt later. But it’s also been all the free time I now find myself with. There have been times where I’ve felt paralyzed because I realized I had nowhere to go and nothing to do. Of course I know there’s so much I can do, as evidenced by my todo list, but none of it is pressing. I found out last week that I didn’t get a job I thought I was going to get, and I’m afraid I’m going to bomb the interview tomorrow.

I have to convince myself that I’m going to do okay. I can’t think about failing but instead about succeeding. As long as I bring my A game, and I know I did my best, then there’s nothing I should worry about. If I fail, I fail. I can’t dwell on it and let it bring me down. I’ll have to pick myself back up and start again. But if I succeed? If I succeed, I’ll be over-the-moon happy. I would have a job, a new source of income, and a new routine that I think I need most desperately. I love what I’ve done in just about a week. My novel is in full swing again. I’m getting back into shape (although Monday’s workout has left me sore for a few days). I have this blog, which has helped my health and well-being tremendously. I don’t have many readers, but I don’t care. I like writing here, and I feel like this is just the beginning. I foresee this place becoming something much more in time. I fear I won’t reach my 365 consecutive day streak of entries, but even just ten is worth applauding. That’s ten I didn’t have ten days ago.

Slow and steady wins the race. I’ve always believed in that. By focusing on just one pound a week, I lost over 70 in one year. By writing just one page a day, I wrote my novel in two years. By slowly examining myself, my emotions, and my actions, I believe I can become not only a better person, but a more healthy one, too.

To accomplish this, I have to bring it every day. And then I can say I lived, I think.

I have trouble letting go of the past. As much as I want to focus on the present, I can’t stop my thoughts from always drifting to some lingering memory of my life. I had my first ever crush when I was in the fourth grade, and I sometimes still think about this girl now. There have been girls since then that I still think about, and of course there’s her. There hasn’t been a day in the two years I’ve known her where I have not thought about her, especially not in the weeks since she cut me out.

I’ve realized that whenever I do dwell on some scene from my past, the main underlying emotion is regret. I always replay these scenes in my head with the knowledge of my experiences and try to recreate those moments with different things I could have done or said. If I said this, for example, maybe this positive outcome could’ve materialized. Or if did something instead of not doing something, then maybe I would be a bit happier with myself, maybe a bit more fulfilled as a person and as a man. I don’t know, obviously, what would or would not have happened since I cannot change the past. No one can, and I have to stop thinking that I can.

We have to leave the past in the past and accept that we would not be the person we are today if it weren’t for that path that trails behind us. We cannot live in the past, no matter how much we want to, but we can learn from it. I’ve learned to recognize similar situations that happen to me in the present that has happened to me before, and those little mental recreations where I imagined fixing or improving my circumstance in some way manifests itself when I most need it. It doesn’t happen all the time, especially not when I most desperately need it to, but I’m grateful for the times it does.

In an effort to accept the small wins, I’m listing today’s small wins. I worked out hard, but I didn’t push myself as hard as I would have liked. I decided today that I’m starting the Insanity/Insanity: the Asylum Vol. 1 hybrid workout on October 1st. I wrote another 300+ words in my novel today, and I’m really enjoying the direction I’m taking with this second draft. I started to use OmniOutliner in conjunction with Scrivener today in an effort to organize the story better than what I did the first time around, which was literally making it up as I went along. That’s why my first draft ballooned to over 150,000 words. I’m aiming for 80,000 this time around. Finally, I’m still alive. Every time I focus on my breath when I meditate or when I try to catch my breath while I’m working out, I’m reminded that I’m alive.

Life is hard, but we only get one shot at it. We must take advantage of that.

For the first time in a few weeks, I feel good. I feel like things don’t look as bleak as I once thought they were, and instead I feel hopeful for the future. This morning, while I had my car checked out at the shop and while I did laundry, I wrote the most sincerest and honest cover letter to a principal at a local school looking for an IT person that I’ve ever written. As we may have noticed, I have a tendency to wear my heart on my sleeve unashamedly, and that was reflected in this letter. I was desperate to make this letter work, and I think I cracked it. I sent it and my résumé to him and waited. A few hours later, he e-mailed me back and asked me when I would be free for an interview. Immediately, I thought. I replied that I’m available all day tomorrow. He’s yet to reply, but I’m hopeful. Ever since I seriously started looking out for my health over three years ago, I made it a ritual to check and log my weight every Monday morning. I chose Monday because it was usually the first day of the week where I would work out, and knowing what I weighed would set the tempo for the rest of the week. Like clockwork, I checked my weight this morning. I gained two pounds since last week. At first I was a little disappointed, but I became hopeful when I realized those two pounds could be muscle. I’ve been putting whey protein powder into my shakes after every workout, and I’m hoping that’s the cause for this weight gain. Otherwise, I have to change my diet even more, and I don’t know if my budget can afford healthier options at the moment.

Considering how horrible the last month has been on me, I’m making it a goal of mine to appreciate these positive days. There were times in the past few weeks where I seriously considered taking my own life in a very impulsive way, and I don’t like it when I’m like that. Those are the times where alcohol both made me feel better and way, way worse. I need to appreciate all the wins I can because there will be days when things just won’t go my way. I have to believe that one bad day isn’t everything. The next day could turn out to be amazing.

The good days give us the ammo to combat the bad.

This morning, while it was still pitch black outside, I sat by my desk in front of my laptop, opened my novel in Scrivener, and stared at the blank screen. My goal was to write at least 300 words toward the second draft of my novel. I sat there staring at this blank screen for close to forty minutes and nothing to show for it. I didn’t care if I wrote 1 word or 1,000. All I cared about was disciplining my mind and body to sit in front of my laptop, ready to write. Up to this point, I’ve written zero words. After today, I had 452.

After writing that first word, the rest came easily. All I needed to do was be serious about starting. We all have goals we want to accomplish, and many of us visualize us achieving those goals and the warm feelings that accompany them. For a long time that’s all I seemed to do. I visualized myself doing so many things, becoming someone completely different, someone funny and smart and handsome, and those images in my head felt good. The downside, though, was that these images weren’t real. I wasn’t that man doing those things I so desperately wanted to do, and when that realization hit — a realization that has hit me so many times before and since — my emotional high quickly sank, and I hated myself. I felt guilty when I would ignore my todo list, or when I would lie in bed watching something mindlessly on Netflix instead of working and bettering myself in some way. So today, I decided to do something about it.

This week has been long. I had my last drink a week ago today. I’ll be honest, I’ve craved a drink so much these past two days. Yesterday was rough. Today, not so much, yet I still craved one. I didn’t work out today because I want Sunday’s to be my day off from working out. I worked out for six days, so I think that’s enough physical activity in a given week. And I’ve kept my blog updated on a consistent basis. There are seven entries, one for each day my blog has been live on the Internet. My goal is to reach at least a full 365 days before I consider relaxing my self-imposed daily requirement. Do I think I’ll make it? I do, but I foresee many obstacles that could get in my way. In the end, though, my goals seem clear and my path is set on accomplishing them.

Except… I don’t envision an ending to my journey. When we’re on a mission toward self-improvement, our journey spans our life, and the only end is death.

I’m afraid of myself sometimes. There are times when I’m so overcome with emotion that I truly don’t know what to do. I feel paralyzed, and that’s one of the worst feelings I’ve ever had because I feel like panicking and that’s stressing me out. My mind sometimes creates reasons to do things because they just feel right to do. I usually never stop to think about what I’m doing because the emotions coursing through my body just feel right. Why would I question that? Why would I doubt myself?

I’m so full of regret with some of the things I’ve done in the past few weeks, actions that have cost me dearly, that I’m on the verge of a breakdown. There’s this hollowness in my chest that is hard to ignore. I feel anxious to do something about it, but I can’t. That feeling is too strong, and I can’t go back to how things were. Those doors are closed forever, and I can never reopen them. I have to move on, but it’s hard when the road ahead is dark and unknown. But I have to.

I have to keep pushing harder. I have to take advantage of every day and live them (and life) to the fullest. And I have to stop making excuses. It sounds like maybe I’m being a little too hard on myself. Maybe I am. Maybe that’s what I need to do to see this thing through, whatever that thing may be. Regardless, I’m unhappy, and I know what needs to change, and, for the most part, I know how to change it. All I need to do is do. I need to move on, and the only way to do that is with time, and time’s all I have right now.

One of my biggest issues that time is not fixing is my seemingly inexorable loneliness. I feel like I have nobody here to go to anymore. One thing I didn’t realize before was how my former job clouded the fact that I don’t really have a social life here. That coworkers only tolerate other coworkers because they have to and not because they want to. For five days and forty hours every week, I would see the same group of people and we would laugh and fight and live with each other. That’s where I met her, and that’s where I felt socially fulfilled. It was enough for me, and that’s not something I considered when I quit. Do I regret that? Sometimes.

But look: my actions are forcing me to look at myself straight to my soul and ask, “Is this the life you want?” “No, it’s not.” “Then fucking do something about it.”