"So I thought you were gone..."

…..and six weeks later, there was a blog entry.

I had some legitimate reasons to not post, but really, I was ready to make this (re)entry weeks ago. It just didn't feel right. I don't know if it stems from my experiences or something else, but I didn't really feel I was in the right place to blog again until now.

Anyway, I suppose an explanation is in order. Like many people, I made the annual pilgrimage to the home of my forebearers for the Christmas holiday. A faulty circuit on a dimmer switch fried my old computer, along with 2.5 unpublished blog entries I will never see again. Honestly, I was pretty upset about all that I had lost. My last backup was November 21st, so it wasn't as catastrophic as it could have been, but in the ten days between the end of school and when my old laptop got exploded, I had done little apart from write. Looking back, there's so little reason to even catalog what all was lost—there are far worse tragedies to experience, be sure. Maybe it's better this way.

Apart from the fried computer, my personal life was battered in a way that left me feeling all of thirteen for awhile. It's so strange...we enter most years feeling stronger than we were previously. We think of things we did or mistakes we made only a few short years before and we smile slowly in the knowledge that we would not fail in such ways again. We revel in our supposedly increasing wisdom and life experience. We start to feel like we have things figured out, at least comparatively speaking. There's a certain mature note about this assurance, it's a voice in our heads that says “see, things will be alright. You're on your way to all you wanted.”  This isn't the brash assurance a lot of us have at a younger age, but a quiet settling of our foundations.

Then, like in all areas of life, something has to come along and remind us that some parts of this existence do not change. We have to remember that very small things (tiny hinges, even) can turn our lives over in an instant. For good or bad, fertilizing, uncomfortable change comes sooner or later, often leaving us reeling at the destruction of our carefully chiseled reality we had so recently been reveling in. We remember that nothing is assured.

Anyway, my tumultuous few weeks left me unable to do some things for awhile, including write in any form. Through December I had written almost feverishly, some of it good, some of it not so good, some of it very surprising. I had dabbled in fiction again and found the waters fairly warm (the decision to go back to such was brought on by a large bottle of Jameson and a lot of Bukowski poetry) After the New Year, I wasn't able to do that for awhile. There's no concrete reason why, just sometimes the words aren't there. But like all difficult times, they eventually begin to pass. It's probably fairly simple—I have a lot of good memories and experiences closely connected with writing, whether for myself or others, in the past sixteen years, it's somewhere I can go and say thing better and with more care than I can ever do verbally.

In addition to the computer death and rough weeks, I also started a new job which has kept me pretty busy for the past three weeks.

Anyway, I will be back to posting regularly again and (barring any new existential crisis) hopefully people still check back here. I know some of them are, because you've confronted me about not updating. It meant a great deal to me that my words in this arena have meant something to some.  I've got a few ideas for what I hope will be good entries, probably a bit more humorous and a bit darker than what I've written here so far (I'm always amazed at how happy this thing sounds, something about the format just lightens me up. Bap.)

Anyway, thanks for all the encouraging words sent to me through various channels, both in regard to this blog and in dealing with my personal life. I'm nothing without the great people I've been privileged to know.

At this moment, I just want to be. I want to enjoy the small joys I find in the day-to-day without measuring them against some cosmic aspiration. I want my actions to be elemental; everything I do should just be the function it serves, unmeasured and uncompared. I want to turn off the third person and just be a man in the world who utterly deaf to his narrator, just for awhile.
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