Woulda, coulda, didn't. Why?
I was a dilettante about everything. 'Cept what really wasn't important. And what I get to be an ace at threw me away. Go figure.
When I was fifteen, I was pretty fast a runner, and did 'free running' before it was a phrase. I used to jump over park benches, garbage cans, could jump eight feet with a running start, could dive off a board doing an aerial both backward and forward, could do a forward handspring no problem, backward. . .I've done it, but only a couple times from the floor. I was a good fence vaulter, could climb a ten foot pole three times without using my legs, thirteen chin-ups, though I kicked after eight. I could haul myself up a wall that was taller than me with no problem. Not a record, but I could cover three miles in about half an hour when I was nineteen, and I broke an eight minute mile all the time. Again, not that impressive, being I never seriously trained. I used to think running and working out was fun. Got to where I could clean and jerk over ninety of my body weight. The weight set was somewhere between a hundred and two and a hundred and three lbs.. Once after a forty-five day work stint with long days, I didn't have time to eat, I dropped to a hundred seven pounds, and I could still do that clean and jerk, but I think I could only press it six times instead of ten. I lost some muscle with the fat. That was about ninety five or six percent of my body weight at the time, though that was a fluke. That was also the weight I wouldn't go on the rag anymore, so of course I didn't have enough will power to stay there. I was a few millimetres shy of five foot six. I've shrunk since then.
I could draw pretty good if I kept at it, but I have few masterpieces in my past since I usually gave up before I found the work satisfactory. Some people do have or did have my work on their walls, though. I gave my best stuff away. I never bothered to develop the skill past B quality. Maybe B+. Same with my stint as a musician, and I'm not going to clean up my book series, either.
I'm now a complete has been. Is this Hell Hole worth the effort to become anything else of any sort of anything again? I don't think so. Hence I declare myself retired from life. I'm just doing what I have to do to get to where I'm going, and I'm not doing anything more.
What's the point?
Though I wonder what the alternate versions of myself in the parallel universes have done with themselves. One day I'll know. And I don't apologise for falling short.
