If I Can Just Lift These Chains…

All my life I’ve only had one ambition and that was to be a great writer like Hemingway or Philip Roth or Vonnegut.  I’ve  been distracted a lot, by sex, by friends, by sex with friends, by movies, by deaths of loved ones.  These all took time – years.

Now I see how I’ve lost focus and how I’ve been discouraged.  These too, took time.  So I’ve paired my life down to one woman, one business and fewer friends.   I look at my few achievements and I am gratified that I’ve accomplished even the little I have but the past “hangs on me like chains” as Orson Welles once said after his second personal bottle of wine at lunch.

I have stories, so many more than I could ever tell and now a bit more time to tell them.  If I can just lift these chains a bit to free my hands.