Ugh.

Salvation is called that, I think, because it always comes at the last minute. If salvation came before the eleventh hour, it really wouldn't be salvation, would it? It'd just be a good turn of events.

I'm thinking of this because I'm sitting in Central Park, and this moment just couldn't have come too soon - or any later, for that matter.. Been a bit of a rough week, so far, chock full of unexpected weirdness.

Events about which I'm reluctant to talk have made me feel unsteady lately - but as you all know, I don't seem to have any problem with talking about that. I have no problem with self-flagellation. I think I've raised it to an art form, in fact. But I'm not really feeling that way right now; I don't know that what I'm feeling is necessarily bad about myself as much as a lack of hopefulness about the situation I've created for myself. The old feeling of powerlessness that I'd thought had been conquered after my recent struggles.

I'm reminded too much of that song by John Mayer, Why Georgia:

I rent a room and I

fill the spaces with

wood in places to

make it feel like home

but all I feel's alone.

It might be a quarter-life crisis

just the stirring in my soul.

Either way I wonder sometimes

about the outcome

of a still- verdictless life.

Am I living it right?

Don't believe me when I say

I've got it down.

Doubt is hard-wired into my psyche. It's a by product of being sired by Roman Catholic Depression Babies. I wonder about the choices I've made - most often when I'm mired in money troubles, which, surprisingly, this time isn't the issue.

This park is amazing. It really is my salvation when I'm feeling cut off and lonely and afraid. I can come here and sit in the park and watch all the people going by, and suddenly that feeling of connectedness and peacefulness returns - even if it's only long enough to get me through to my next visit to the park. There's something about the sights and smells that makes it more bearable. Of course it doesn't hurt that there's a prodigious amount of eye-candy at which to look.

I think I've developed a case of Chair-Induced Ass Spread®. Just sitting here on the hillside in Central Park with the laptop on my lap has flattened my ass out and given me a huge pain. Of course, I'm complaining while across the road from me a personal trainer is taking his class full of clients through their paces. These people are doing lunges and kicks from the ground up onto the benches, and knee & leg raises and sprints and kick-boxing type maneuvers as they work their way around the little dale over there. And I'm looking at them thinking, "You guys are paying him to put you through that?!?" Funny thing is, all the people who're biking and blading and jogging by on the bike path nearby are looking at them the same way.

In any human endeavor, someone's gotta end up being the freak, I guess.