It feels like there’s no room left for poetry in my life these days. I’ve been living too long as a responsible adult — working long hours, paying my bills on time, and falling asleep earlier than I often plan to because I’m just so damned tired most nights of the week. The potential for poetry in my life has been greatly marginalized by the soul-sucking rut of the middle class survival game. All I do is work, eat, sleep when I can, and lament the shortness of my weekends. Color me disenchanted.

You know what counts as poetry in my life these days? Poetry is a concise, perfectly crafted e-mail message sent to my office inbox, free of grammatical errors and irritating ambiguities that require follow-ups and clarification. Poetry is a properly balanced petty cash report which requires little else of my attention aside from my approval signature. Poetry is drafting a monthly financial status report, and not having any variances or major discrepancies to explain by the time I’m through with it. Poetry is uninterrupted workflow, free of surprises and comfortably mundane.

My world is looking a little gray and blah these days, but what else is new? I’ve been trying to shake the same case of blahs all year long. Something needs to change. I don’t exactly know what I’m looking for anymore. I just know something’s missing. Maybe I should just place my trust in Paintball to lead me out of this forest of blahs.

Meh, I say. M-to-the-eh.

These days, I’m walking with a limp, and a large portion of the backside of my leg looks like there’s a huge, dark bruise. It’s kind of gross and fascinating at the same time. I considered posting a picture of my messed up leg in all of its internal bleeding glory, but my better judgment won the fight, and I decided instead to post an awesome picture of me snap shooting from behind a spool.

Man. It almost looks like I know what I’m doing.

So I guess I’m out of commission for the next month or so. In the meantime, I’m limping with a gimp leg. This is all a very strange and new experience for me, because until now, I’ve never in my life had a legitimate reason to walk with a limp. I’ve seen people do it on television and in the movies, and I’ve passed by the occasional limper or two while shopping at the supermarket, but I had never walked a mile in a limper’s shoes until recently. Truth be told, walking any stretch of distance is kind of an ordeal for me right now.

To be honest, I’m a little bummed. I’m benched from my favorite weekend activity for a while, and I’m still a little self conscious about my limp. It’s not like I have anything to be ashamed of for walking around with a bum leg. I guess I just don’t like drawing attention to myself, and inviting people to make all kinds of assumptions about me because of my uneven stride. It’s strange how something like a strained hamstring can take you back to all of those childish, playground insecurities that used to plague you in elementary school. I’m an adult, goddamnit. I should conduct my affairs as if I don’t give a shit. That’s something to strive for, anyway.

In an effort to combat these insecurities of mine, I’m putting my faith into a simple remedy — turning my awkward limp into a defiant swagger. Life is just so much better when you incorporate a little swag into the mix. With each shuffled step I take for the next four to six weeks, I’ll be singing to myself the hook to “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” from the Hustle & Flow soundtrack. The only difference is, in my head, I’ll be replacing the word “pimp” with “gimp”. Yeah, I know, that’s kind of sophomoric and obvious. If you have a problem with my remedy, then I invite you to tear your own hamstring, and to sing along to whatever song that you so desire.

Four to six weeks. Ugh. That’s too long to wait for the next opportunity to shoot some people in the face. You know, it really is hard out here for a gimp. Here’s to you, November. I’ll be seeing you soon enough.

Am I the only one who cuts himself short in the middle of a road-rage-fueled, obscenity-ridden tirade after being cut off in traffic because I’m paranoid of dying in a car crash mid-sentence, and I don’t want my last words to be, “Go fuck yourself with a sharp rusty fork, motherfucker”?

I’m having a hard time figuring out whether that thought process makes me an optimist, or a cynic.

By the way, if you happen to be a burglar or a thief, “I’m going to Disneyland” is code for “I will be obsessively guarding my home from behind my locked front door, downing pots of coffee and barely-legal stimulants while I sit rigidly and attentively on a stool with a loaded shotgun in my lap”.

To the rest of you: I’ll tell Mickey you said hello.

PS to you filthy burglars: Mickey is the name of my shotgun.

PPS to the rest of you: No it’s not.

Drink up, me hearties, yo ho!

I guess you could call it a case of the blahs. Or maybe you could call it a crisis of confidence, although I’ve never seemed to suffer from an overabundance of confidence to begin with. Maybe I’ve just lost my mojo like Austin Powers did in that Mike Meyers movie — the name of which escapes me at the moment. I think it might have been The Love Guru. Anyway, I’m locked into a funk, and I can’t seem to shake out of it.

The days go by without much variation. The mosaic of the world feels like a copied image stretched far beyond its feasible dimensions. It’s like I’m staring into infinity, and all I see is an indistinct, fuzzy haze, slightly obscured by a lump of orange fur. You know what I’m saying? My cat, Momo, knows what I’m talking about. Apparently, so does Sam Ock.

Play it once, Sam, for old time’s sake. Ah hell, play it again, Sam.

Hasn’t the world realized yet that I’m old, and tired, and incurably lame?

I guess I still look young enough on the surface to some people, but sometimes I feel like I’m a million miles away from my actual age. There comes a day in every adult’s life when he looks at the world for the first time without the benefit of a youthful, wide-eyed sense of discovery, when he beholds the tedium of his daily routines and the echoes of inevitable decay, when he steps aside from a lifetime of expectations and regretfully whispers, “Is this all there is to life?” I’ve lived that moment once or twice. If you stop and listen closely enough, you can almost hear God muttering Douglas Adams’ immortal words: “We apologise for the inconvenience.”

The rituals of existence find us willing participants in a dance of misdirection, misplaced faith, the placement of utter certainty in the least definite of petty assumptions, multiplied to the point of absurdity. This is the state of living.

On a completely unrelated note, I just thought I should mention that 2011 is the year that I turn 30. I think I’m handling it pretty well so far.

It’s such a simple thing, taking health and vitality for granted. When everything is going well, it’s all too easy to forget that we are very much physical beings. I live the majority of my life under the false assumption that I exist inside my mind — somewhere on a heady, cerebral plane. It takes miserable weekends like this one to drag me down from that lofty perch, and to remind me that we are all captives in our fragile, untidy vessels.

I know in time, my health will return, as will my gray, cynically sunny demeanor. Before that day arrived, I just figured it was worth marking the occasion with a well-placed groan, a weak and wheezy whisper of a gripe.

Well anyway, there it is. I’ll see you healthy folks in December.

Yeah, me neither.

On a completely unrelated note, I haven’t written anything new over the past two weeks because I’ve been busy battling against evil ninjas, landing back flips on motorcycles while flying through fiery hoops, learning how to play the guitar solo for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” left-handed because I got bored playing it so perfectly with my right hand, slaying dragons, and not returning Helen Hunt’s telephone calls.

You probably have two questions about that last paragraph. First, yes, I said “slaying dragons”. Did I forget to tell you that I rediscovered the world’s last remaining population of dragons back in October? Yeah, well, don’t get too excited, because it turns out that dragons are all a bunch of dicks. Trust me on this. They’ll all be dead in another two weeks if everything goes my way. Second, yes, I am screening my calls in an effort to avoid Helen Hunt. I already have a lady in my life, Helen. I’m sorry you had to hear it here.

Well, that’s the latest from me. I’ll come back and write something new once I’ve finished kicking so much ass.

“But KZ,” some of you are probably thinking, “that pumpkin doesn’t look very sarcastic to me.” For those of you not in the know, the name of my pumpkin is a reference to an old entry I posted a few Halloweens back about one of my fondest childhood memories, which involved a pumpkin, a ballpoint pen, a five-year-old KZ, and my good-intentioned grandfather.

I realize that some of you lazy bums are probably too apathetic to click the link above. It’s really your loss, though. You’re missing out on all of the debauchery and hot chicks. Or, you know … a heartwarming recollection about my youth. Who has time to keep track of these things nowadays?

Happy Halloween, you lazy bums.

I broke my blog late last week while attempting to enhance the layout template. At the lowest point, my homepage was taking twelve agonizing seconds to load, and the comment box would send you to a blank error page when you clicked the submit button. The worst of it, though, came when I rushed through a support forum walkthrough without reading very carefully, and I ended up purging my comments database without taking the proper precautions. My blog comments dropped from 268 to 0 in a matter of clicks. Thursday was a bad night.

Once I realized how badly I had messed things up, I spiraled into a full-on panic. The slow loading time and the comment box errors were minor annoyances, but they were nothing in comparison to the thought of losing all of those comments that I had accumulated over the years from friends, critics, and random well-wishers. Imagine the way you might feel if you had accidentally set your old family photo albums on fire because you left them too close to a gas stove on the kitchen counter. My state of mind was something close to that. After a considerable amount of teeth gnashing, denial, and cathartic swearing, I gathered my thoughts, and I realized that my comments were not completely gone.

Since 2008, when I started blogging on my own dot-com, my WordPress blog settings have been configured so that I receive an e-mail every time somebody leaves me a comment. Thankfully, I’ve had the foresight to save those e-mail notifications, all of which duplicate the full text of every comment I’ve ever received at this domain. I spent the entire weekend manually inputting those comments back onto my page through a long, tedious process of copying text from e-mails, submitting comments to my blog posts while disguised as my own readers, approving those comments through my admin dashboard, and backdating every comment to its proper date and time. Although I was able to salvage all of my readers’ submissions, I did lose all of my own comments since my website never contacts me for admin comment replies. So I improvised as well as I could along the way, inserting the kinds of replies that I remember leaving the first time around. I finally cleaned up my mess by Tuesday night.

All weekend long, I couldn’t help but feel a little silly over the entire ordeal. The whole comment restoration project made me feel a bit like a self-absorbed, inauthentic fraud. There I was, dedicating my entire weekend to the restructuring of the Temple of KZ. To be fair, I was putting a lot of effort into restoring those comments because I didn’t want my outspoken readers’ past generosity and time to have been in vain. Then again, I would be lying if I said that my compulsion to repopulate those comments had nothing to do with self-aggrandizement and vanity. I’m not going to lie — comments are the lifeblood of a blogger’s vanity. That should come as no surprise, though. What’s the point of self-expression if nobody ever takes notice? I didn’t get into the writing game just to hear myself talk, you know. Comments on a blog are an expression of reader interest, a validation of what the author has said, and what the author will continue to say when fueled by the confidence afforded to him by reader feedback. This comment repopulation project has served to remind me that I should never take my blog comments for granted again.

Once I restored my WordPress comments database to nearly its original form, I decided it was time to stop being lazy, and to start transferring over all of those pre-2008 comments from my old home at Blogger.com. This weekend was the first time that I ever made the attempt. As I look back on all of those comments from the past, I have to wonder what took me so long.

I rediscovered a lot of forgotten history in those earlier submissions. The first comment I ever received as a blogger came from my good friend, Carlos, on September 30, 2002, in response to a blog entry titled, A Tribute to Her. “Kevin, you are a fucking genius”, Carlos had said. I’d like to think that he said that without a trace of irony. I was gratified that he had thought so highly of my writing, but I didn’t feel much like a genius at the time for having allowed myself to fall for a girl who was already in a committed relationship.

I remember those early days in 2002 and 2003, when Carlos, Conrado, and Francisco would rock the comment box on nearly every post. I’m pretty sure they were my only readers back then. It really meant a lot to me that they kept coming back.

I remember receiving those incendiary challenges from “Charlie the Possum” and “The Spider” back when I posted Possum Attack in February 2003. Those anonymous comments still makes me laugh when I think about them today. Nice, Conrado. Speaking of irreverent replies, I fondly remember the time when my discussion of The Deer Hunter in my Movie Titles post from 2002 elicited the following response from an old friend, mild-mannered Ed:

“hey ASSHOLE… that’s not cool!”

That’s the only time when Ed ever felt compelled to leave a comment. It was a good one.

Looking back to June 2003 in Fast Food Humor, I think that was the first time when a reader called me out for taking artistic license during the retelling of actual events. As you can see, seven years later, not very much has changed.

I remember those days in 2004, back when my girlfriend, Diana, and I were still in the earliest stages of our courtship. She sat down one night and read the entire contents of my blog, and then proceeded to pepper my site with comments on entries that were over a year old. I was touched that anybody would ever bother to do such a thing. It was a wonderful thing to know that somebody like Diana could find something of value in this modest little site of mine. I think that was around the time when I really started to fall for her.

March 2005 was the first time when one of my blog entries ever broke the tenth comment mark. Maybe it had something to do with all of the sex talk. It was around that time in general, I think, when my writing made a noticeable turn for the better.

And how can I forget November 2009, back when my buddy, Casey, supplemented one of my denser posts with a lengthy, insightful diatribe? That comment was an amazing gift to this blog. It hardly feels like something I deserve.

Since 2002 and beyond, right to this very day, I have been humbled by the outpouring of support that my small band of loyal readers has shown me. I’m not entirely sure why I started to write a blog back in 2002, but I know today why I continue to do it. As I look back on my modest collection of reader comments, I feel a great sense of gratitude for anybody, and everybody who ever took notice of my meager little voice amid the shrieking wind. I am a better writer today because of all the things you’ve said, my friends. All of you.

So . . . can anybody teach me how to back up a comments database? Because that would be super.