So, yeah. It’s been a while. It’s been a while for a lot of different reasons. All of the usual suspects are involved: work, life, yard work, spending time with the Fetching Mrs. Bixby and the family, etc. etc, blah blah blah. Those are reasons, surely, but they are just the superficial, easy reasons I hang on the one or two big fat monster reasons I have for not writing here very often. Well, spending time with the Fetching Mrs. is a pretty damned good one in it’s own right for the very simple fact that I LIKE spending time with her and when I do there is a very real possibility that sex is involved at some point. Frankly, given the choice between writing here and having sex, well…I’m sure you can understand my position (or positions, as the case may be).
The two main reasons I have for not writing here, the two I generally don’t want to admit to myself that are THE reasons this site lies fallow for a season at a time, are these: 1) I generally don’t think I can write anything in such a way that other people will find interesting, if not downright stupid, and 2) It takes a lot of effort to write.
The first point may or may not be objectively true. It’s something I struggle with a lot because I don’t feel I’m one to judge. The times I do post, I do so because I have a burning desire to get down in words whatever the hell it is that is bugging me at the time and the part of my brain that is my ego develops enough of a backbone to kick the shit out of the part of my brain that is my shyness or self-deprecation or whatever. The fact that I rarely get feedback doesn’t necessarily help. The Fetching Mrs. tells me she loves the way I write, but the self-deprecating part of my brain tells me that she HAS to tell me that, she’s married to me, even though I do like to hear the compliment.
A corollary to this, which feeds to self-deprecating part, is that on some level it’s really scary to put this stuff out there on the Internets for anyone IN THE WORLD to find. The thought of some random stranger in Blue Ball, Pennsylvania (real town, eight miles northeast of Intercourse, Pennsylvania) reading my stuff and not liking it is just too much for Self-deprecating me to handle sometimes. I am aware of how illogical that is, I don’t claim to be a rational being. Unfortunately, that part of my id has such a grip on my creative life that many things I could have done over the years were stillborn. I was so worried that no one would like what I did that I would not do it. Or I would start it but not finish it.
That last part feeds into the second point. I am inherently lazy so, unless I am over the top passionate about something, more often than not, actually doing the work seems too much like WORK and I lose steam and whatever I’m doing is abandoned half-finished. It’s hard to be creative. That fact is lost on most non-creative people…and Rush Limbaugh.
Now, in explaining this second point, I’m necessarily being somewhat superficial and you’ll have to excuse me, but it’s not something that I can really sink my teeth into and pull apart for you to understand. It has a lot to do with focus. Specifically, the concept of hard focus. There have been times when I started to draw or write or whatever and I soon lost myself in the activity. It happened naturally and I didn’t have to force it or concentrate to get into that state, it just happened. Getting into that state was easier when I was younger. I think I took it for granted and didn’t actually PRACTICE getting into that state. So now, NOW when there are so MANY distractions, I struggle to get there and find I don’t have the patience to let myself go and get lost in the act of writing or drawing or nude performance art (just kidding, Sally!).
So, what’s changed? Why am I taking the time now to write an overly long explanation of this? Well, two things (in the literary world, that’s called parallelism, see because I had two points from above and now I have two points…oh never mind). First, this year will be my forty-fifth trip around the sun and I’ve been having an honest-to-goodness mid-life crisis about a lot of things that are in my life and a lot of things that are not, and I don’t want to be on my deathbed bitching about the things that are not, specifically the things I didn’t create, whatever they may be. Second, recently I’ve had several different people tell me they like the way I write, they think I’m pretty good and find me funny (which is good, because for the most part, that’s what I was going for, funny)and they wished that I would write more. A comment from one of these people really made me think about all of this because of who that person was.
I have a Facebook account and have reconnected with a lot of people from my high school and college years, people who I have not seen or spoken to in at least 20 years if not 25. This is familiar to all of you in some form or another, right? One of them is someone from the first high school I went to and who was kind enough to say she liked my writing. What makes this significant to me is that I honestly have a VERY dim memory of her. Her memories of me are stronger than mine are of hers, I think. Yes, I’m sure part of my memory loss is chemically induced, I didn’t party much when I went to that high school. It was a Lutheran high school, after all. No, I did my fair share of better living through chemistry later on in high school after I transferred to El Modena and on through my college years. So from my perspective, she’s a distant acquaintance at best, a stranger at worst, and she took the time to read through the stuff on this site and tell me she likes it and wants me to write more. Her comment to me came out of the blue and was all the more powerful for that. She even had the unmitigated gall to remind me recently that it’s been a while since I’ve posted.
So the timing of her compliment fed into what I was thinking and feeling at the time (mid-life crisis) and added to what my wife and others were saying to me. I’m going to write more, here and other places. Here because it is good practice, other places because just having a blog makes me a blogger and that’s kind of 1990s. I’ll write, post photographs, and possibly sketches, drawings and paintings that I’ve done for all of you to look at and I won’t even care (much) what you think of it. But if you like it, tell me so, if not, well, that’s okay too, but I’d rather you kept that to yourself.
