Making up for it

I’ve been lax. I’ve been lazy. I’ve been distracted. Mostly, I’ve been elsewhere. And I am making up for it.

I’ve been involved in life for the past couple of months, and life demands. It demands a lot. And when you have nothing left to give to life, when it leaves you exhausted in a heap in the corner, wondering what day it is and how the hell all your hair all got shaved off, it’s time to take a break and get back to what makes you happy. So I’m taking that time. One of the things that made me happy is communicating, and blogging what’s going on. I’ve missed it. But I’m missing a lot of things lately.

Anyway, due to recent events, I’m trying to make a conscious effort to be where I am, at least for a while, and get back to those things I consider important. As part of that effort, I’m making the commitment to blog every day for a week. Some of that week will be weak, and meek, and with little of which to speak. But it will be something I’ve committed to, as Pharoah said in the epic The Ten Commandments, “So shall it be written, so shall it be done.” It’ll be written, anyway. There's something freeing about self-imposed constraints, calming about meeting your own imposed guidelines and expectations. It's like saying, "I don't know what else life will throw at me, but I can do this. I can make sure this is done."

A while ago, when I first started getting into this, my friend Steve wrote that one way to get people to respond to your blog was to be consistent, and post a lot. So I tried to do that, and was pretty successful. At that time, and for a while following, I had a lot to say. I mean, I always have a lot to say, and since I’d reached a stage of my life where I no longer say it, I subsequently had more to write. These days I write a lot more than I talk, though I don’t know how that’s happened. It just has. But, truth to be told, blogging is a valid means of communication, albeit one-way, There’s something terrifying, and a little sad, about sending messages out into the ether in a digital bottle that may or may not wash up on friendly beaches, and may just as easily shatter against some foreign reef, words lost to the silence of the endless deep. But I think they will reach their intended shores, nonetheless. I know they do. So at the same time, there is something freeing. If you can hear me talking to you, then they have reached their destination. These are but the first words of many, the first bottles of a legion of empties. What will these words be? I can’t be sure until I’ve written them, and read them, and finally, not erased them and begun again, as is so often the case.


All of which is to say, there’s lots I can talk about which is around and subordinate to what’s really going on in life that I can’t talk about. But I am talking. And will continue to, for the next seven days. Now, six.