Trudging the Road of Happy Destiny

"High & Hard" Copyright © Austin Cline.

Today's poster is another fagulous creation of Austin Cline. Now THAT'S the Navy the way I wished it had been!

And speaking of wishful thinking, Spring has FINALLY sprung here in the Northeast (check out today's weather forecast for where I live and work, over there on the left). And it is WONDERFUL!

I have to share this little tidbit of wonderfulness. I wake at 4:45 a.m. and hit the shower by 5:10 (yeah, I'm that organized). There's a big window next to my bathtub/shower. And the birdies were in full song by the time I got in the shower this morning. It was glorious. I could hear the babies chirping out their insistence to be fed along with the parents singing loudly, trying to teach their youngsters their particular brand of birdsong. I revelled in it.

This is a far cry from 10 years ago, when I still lived on East 78th Street in Manhattan, and was skidding along near my alcoholic bottom. In those days, when I heard the "chirpers", I knew that I had blown through yet another night of alcoholic hell. That's when I'd think, "oh god... i've done it again" and I'd feel like shit. Monumental shit. The biggest piece of shit that ever walked the face of the earth. In fact, I was the ultimate piece of shit... at the center of the universe because, even at my bottom, it was still

all about me.

I hated the birds. I hated looking out the windows, overlooking 78th Street, and seeing all the "bright, shiny, people" on their way to wherever normal people went at that hour of the morning in Manhattan... probably to their jobs on the Today Show, or Good Morning America, or to their desks in the foreign exchange departments of Wall Street, to see what the European markets had done overnight.

And I'd take another pull off the bottle of scotch and pray that God would take pity on me and not let me wake up the next time I blacked out.

But of course God did take pity on me, much to my chagrin, and kept me alive.

And this morning, when the birds sang, I no longer wished I was dead. In fact I was very happy and grateful to be alive.

Alive enough to spend a glorious Spring Day just trudging the road of happy destiny.

Ain't it great to be alive?