Lucas McCain Would Be Splitting Heads

Sometimes I just feel so small and soft. Like I don't want to participate anymore, in any of this. I just want to stay where it's comfortable with the people who are comfortable and check out of this game that forces you to feign interest and dedication as though any of it matters anyhow. Twenty years? It is a pestilence. Like an imposter faking my way to some distant and elusive horizon and only when I reach it will I find safety. Sometimes I feel like a corpse. Always though, in my vision of that place, she is there. I can continue, knowing that. God, if any of my prayers have answers, I hope You hear that one.

It wasn't the thing that she said it was. It's upsetting and also terrifying that it can be summed up as easily as that. It took two days. Two days and for eleven years their lives torn asunder. There are a lot of things that I want to say, to a lot of people, but the thought at the end of that line that really makes me prostrate is that it doesn't buy them any additional years. It doesn't get us football nights in the shop back. It doesn't get them a romantic retiree month on vacation in places like Sanibel. When she won't even go to Granville Ohio what can you do? An entire life lived like that. The hardest part about being an adult is that you can't fix any of it. Only live your own life as an example. And the invitation that is always open. It's never too late, to begin again. To forge ahead with the life that brings you joy. It can be reached so simply. 

Empathy without end is a malady. A poison. Life is hard for all of us, and we all have to choose our hard. When you allow a child to make demands, do what they want, have nothing to be responsible for, you are choosing that they will experience their hard later.  You are deciding that they won't have any hard as a child when it's relatively easy, and it will be incumbent upon them to figure it out as an adult, hopefully without entering the criminal justice system. The two worst things for a child are to never get what they want, and to always get what they want. There are a hundred million shades of grey in between the two states. At the root of each: responsibility, love, tempered disappointment, work. And yet she takes a punch to the eye and calls it empathy, and casts aspersions upon the one who would save her. What other course is there, but to leave? Zeus: rain on the plains and the fields of Athens.....