And did you really think that was it?......

It's a diffirent world now.

It's 1:04 am - and that's late. I 'snuck' out of bed, totally unable to sleep. Even though I was down and out, I got up. The ten count was too slow and I got tired of hearing the numbers. It seems something in me is still alive. Something in me wasn't killed after all. The overhaul somehow left something in tact. As it turns out, Brett Martin, whatever that means, is far from dead.

I was going about my days in normal enough fashion. As I lay thinking, or stood walking or just happened to be and looking ahead, something from behind grabbed me, telling me to listen up, that I wasn't as lost as I thought I was. I knew it was there all along, but I suspected wholly that it was on it's last legs, and I wasn't gonna bring in life-support to keep it propped up. The skin had shed and I thought it was phantom pains. I was walking this way, dammit, and didn't need any distractions or riff-raff going my way. Silence, all, fate was this way and damn be my name if I wouldn't heed it's call. The voice would be silenced soon enough.

I stood at entrances to parking lots, telling cars you can or can't park there, and no, I can't take your money. I carried medical equipment to people who were partied to the nines on Lysol. I put on a logo'd shirt and played music with a cell phone. I did it all. I paid my bills. I ceased to smoke. I dropped the pot as well as the pop. I tamed the rage and stopped listening to it, too. I put on sneakers and sandals and got them wet in the river. I stayed alive, was up by five and smiled a smile of 'have to'.

It was all going in whatever dirfection that it was going in until one day, and I don't know which day it was. But what a day it was. I was working my most recent job. I was selling computers, in a way. It's a long story for another day, but when that story is told, it will not be one of glee, joy and sales. It will depict a man who had, besides love, lost it all, and was at the one-cent slots of life, just trying to get enough wins for more spins. The man who had once seen action at the biggest, glitziest no-limit tables in his world was reduced to playing for pride and pennies.

Then the day came, whatever day it was, where the satisfaction of a life well lived had ceased, and in it's place a sad realization that I was going through the motions - at best. What was once a existence based on pushing the limts of myself and, potentially, so many others, became a bill paying ritual aimed at staying afloat in an endless ocean sucked dry of hope.

I didn't really know, at that point, what was wrong. I finished the contract, had a big cheque coming my way, and that's that. Why the feeling?

The feeling is because I am not dead, but had been living as if my spirit was. In making the changes in my life, I had erased from myself that which I identified myself as, and simply went about my days being an honorable citizen trying to make ends meet. Problem is, I've never wanted to be an honorable citizen. I wanted to do something extraordinary, and as best I know, bill paying and all-in-all subordinating is the furtherst thing from that. I want to break the mold.

So, what awoke in me, and what kept me awake, both tonight and in life? That thing within all of us that is bigger and truer than what we do. It is the light which attracts the moths that are the events of our life to us. That thing that, no matter which it is dressed in, is still indeed IT.

I stripped myself bare of what I knew myself to be only to find out I was more what I thought I was that I could ever have imagined. Bills still need to be paid and feet still want to get wet, but after several months of being the walking dead, it turns out the answer is I am so very much alive.