Hello Steemit!

My name is "swordpen" and I am a writer/artist living in Birmingham, Alabama with my lovely girlfriend and a little jack/chi dog.  I was born in Selma, Alabama, I am sure many of you have heard of it, and attended a university in Alabama before leaving school to work a series of seasonal "adventure " type jobs in the American west. I was everything from a cook, to a dishwasher, to a ranch-hand and bed and breakfast manager for awhile, and bounded back and forth from Montana, to Colorado, to Oregon, to California.  At one point I was actually living in the small cabin near Lake Tahoe that John Steinback wrote the Grapes Of Wrath in!  I guess you could say I was a young man who was blinded by the likes of Jack Kerouac, and that blindness led to things like finding myself hitch-hiking in Paradise Valley, Montana in March when it was twenty degrees and snowing on the way to Yellowstone Park. I was simply following in the footsteps of many before me, but it always seems so new and exciting to the young person who is doing it for the first time.

    I cam back to Alabama after ten years of this lifestyle, to help care for my elderly parents, and to "grow up." The first goal I accomplished to the best of my abilities, and the jury is still out on the second goal. I was disabled a few years later in a car accident, I was coming home from work and a drunk driver in a stolen car ran a stop sign and ran over me. I can walk with the aid of a cane and a brace, thank god, but I suffer from chronic pain from multiple injuries that were sustained during the accident. The much maligned and vilified "opoids" are the only reason I can walk today, and I live in fear every day that public hysteria will make them impossible to access for chronic pain patients.  We are a minority that I feel are lost in the national conversation over overdosed teenagers and soccer moms, and we are the victims on the "front lines" of the drug war.

    I lost both my parents this year, My mother during a hysterectomy surgery, and my father nine months later passed in the nursing home. My girlfriend is a four year survivor of uterine leimyosarcoma, a deadly smooth muscle sarcoma. She was hospitalized last summer again, and we were afraid that it had returned, but it had not  thank god.

    So, this year has been a terrible, terrible year for me. I know this is not a positive introductory post, but this is why I was glad to find Steemit: I am a writer. I may not be a good one, I used to think I was, and I won some contests here and there, everyone thought I would be the next "big novelists" yada-yada-you know how it is. But the fiery, confident young man turns into the weary, disillusioned, beat-down older man.  This is life, it is hard, it is a son-of-a-bitch, and anyone who says otherwise was born with a trust fund and a rabbits foot. But this is what we have, we are given by whatever Powers That Be a certain amount of time on this unique blue-green planet and bear a responsibility to make life as pleasant for others as it can be while we are here. Or at least as pain-free as it can be. Why?  Because we are the only lifeform on earth that is cruelly aware of time. We are the only living that watches the turn of the clock, the digits on the watch, and are aware of the spaces in between. Those spaces are our LIVES, and we must not waste them. We must leave our mark.

    So, I will be leaving some stories here on Steemit. Hopefully one, or two people will like them, and maybe they will even give somebody some kind of Moment..a  pause, maybe revive a welcome memory long thought lost, maybe even a smile... that is what I hope for.

    I have some problems with Steemit where it randomly logs me out, and all my comments have a green box around them and I am not sure if anyone can see them? Also, my cover image for my avatar will not show? Maybe someone can help with that?

    Anyway, thank you , you who read this, for giving me so much of your time, and look for my stories if you wish. I believe Steemit can be used to help people connect with art, it is already, and that is tremendously exciting to me. Winston Churchill was asked, during the height of WW2, if Britain should stop funding their arts to save money. His response was "What the hell are we fighting for if not that?"

                                  Steem on!