The Next Phase Has Begun

I can't tell you much about what happened over the last week. Let me put it this way.

Best. Sean. Story. So far. An amazingly fictional, mythological experience just choking with extremes and intensity. Ask me in person. It's mind-bending. James Herriot meets Rupert Pupkin.

But to cut to the chase.

I am as a phoenix risen from the flame. I am able. I am employed as an apprentice in a fascinating and lucrative profession, and I'm getting in through a side door. I have begun training to shape my body into a beautiful weapon. I have finally begun my course of instruction at Man School. I am being prepared to take a place in the one percent.

I know what I am now. There aren't any words for it these days, but there is a class of people like me. I have a fellowship, a guild, a history. Our core values are intellectualism, aesthetism, valor, honor, and excellence. I had the first two and the last, but without valor and honor I was part of a man. Now I am whole.

I have started taking steps toward real, actual adulthood. I will be engaging with the world on its own terms instead of dictating my own and grinning as the world flays me in response. My purity is over. I will have to contend with my core values as obstacles as well as virtues.

And I will need to access pleasures previously too -- sinful? degraded? -- for my previous self. Pride, vanity, competition, desire, all have to be embraced if I am going to be able to move in the circles into which I am being pulled. I'm going to be swimming with sharks, so this gator needs to smooth his moves and sharpen his teeth.

I'll be starting a new blog with a different title. Self-deprecation isn't appropriate for my current path. And I'll be going over this blog and reducing it to a 'best-of' collection, with all references to my personal frailties excised. I no longer approach life from the perspective of a victim, and wish to distance myself from that stance. No insult to anyone else; my attitude toward others is unchanged. But I've let fear govern my life to too great a degree for too long, and now things are different.

My life as an artist will continue unabated, and can only benefit from this new direction. Most of my independence has been left to me; what has been taken is the opportunity and desire for indolence.

Aspects of my character that have previously been unbending laws will now have to be guidelines and preferences. The fierce purity I have maintained through my life is no longer compatible with a course of honor.

And so.

Don't worry about me any more. I thrive. Don't think I'm going away. I will be more in touch than I was before. I'm thrashing with my new computer set-up, but I should be fully back on-line in short order. There will be a phone, and a mailing list, and business cards, and all the happy paraphernalia of a professional approach to life.

Now I'm going to go walk around and feel something strange thrum through my body as I absorb the fact that I don't hurt and I'm not doomed and tomorrow will see me stronger than today. See y'all around, and give my best to your family.