maps describe themselves

Eight months now Pirate Papa has been up and running. Everyday the dork in me google earth's all my new visitors and tacks them up
on my digital map 'o the world. I'm getting 5-20 hits a day from all over the globe, mostly inside the United States. An odd feeling, to
be sure, having an effect with ones words on an audience totally unknown but for bread crumb comments and scattered feedback. I have made
friends with a solid dozen activist parents across the country, gotten mediocre feedback and support from my local community and spent
many hours writing and surfing the net researching something I never gave two bits about before it happened to me. The disconnect is strange,
almost as if I sacrificed my local support network for a more global model. Now the world of parenting has consumed my waking hours and
changed me on a fundamental level into a creature capable of tackling the new dawn. In the last eight months my relationship with my partner
Stephanie has crumbled and reshaped itself. We are no longer living together but are trying to fashion some sort of cooperative holistic
rearing situation in the face of this land of alimony, child support, absentee fathers, proxy parents, teletubbies, ADD and massive sugar
intake. It is very hard to live this life that the world around you does not cater to, in fact denies and devalues and sweeps under several
rugs and makes next-to-impossible to maintain. It is very hard to try to collect several lives inside one perfect painting and sometimes
the lives you end up with are not the ones you started with... crews change I guess is what I'm trying to say, rules and boundaries
evolve, treasure troves are plundered, hearts are broken, maps describe themselves, planks are walked, even on the most lawful of pirate ships.