As my sausage sizzles with a drip of olive mixed in with the pasta on my stovetop, high frequency music reverberates through my nervous system elucidating new pathways for insight and bold creative virtue. Wild how long it can become between writing a sentence that eases me to that level of delight.

You can rush, and run, and repeat everything so extensively that your forget how to articulate yourself. The body can write for you. But I must admit, what my sight has lost (apart from long distance vision which requires spectacles nowadays because of prolonged proximate reading), is to not just fill up posts with documentation of my annunciation of my everyday life – struggles and small time strides. Although, perhaps it is, to write to write.

Right before a long hiatus, I left with a anecdote about Stephen King, whom loves the joys of typing very much. My new anecdote is about how when he was a teacher, he wrote a book in a week during spring vacation (Hopefully this new anecdote doesn’t result in a year without posting.) The reason I bring up this is because I have until roughly the 7th of January, in which I will interview to begin substitute teaching. That is 17 days to pull together a book that should be published by now. The “sequel” to Ten Zen by Ben. It is a few days overdue. Let me mention that when it has been almost three years (999 days since today) since you (self) published a book, you really forget all of the nuances that go into it. Formatting, editing, revising, publishing, printing, reprinting, reformatting, typesetting, all aside from writing the damn thing.

Ten Zen by Ben comes out to about 100 pages. I had proven to myself with my first 1,000 pages that I could write a lot if I wanted. Ten Zen was about proving I can write well. The next ten books I write will just prove that I am a writer. When I broke my own silence strike, I began with the sentence, “I am not perfect.” No, Benjamin, I am not.

I try my best. There has been a small accounted for period where I have given only 70-80% of myself. Not guilty. I will sign off with this, I passed my content exam – the final requirement for me to earn my masters and teacher licensure. You need a 240 to pass, and the first time I took it I scored 238. Those two points amount to about one more correct answer needed for me to pass out of the 100 questions on the exam. This is how I made up that one point: I didn’t had a drink or a drug for two years, I didn’t smoke a cigarette for 18 months, I blacked out my room, I ran, I ate oatmeal, eggs, salads, salmon, and tons of vitamins, I used aroma therapy, I made sure to go to bed before 11 every chance I could, I listened to binaural beats to boost brain function, I stopped eating candy, pastries, or ice cream, I stopped drinking soda, I took cold showers, I slept on the floor, I prayed, practiced yoga, and meditation.

Did I study? 70-80%. But I won by tactic.