So it’s New Year’s Eve again.<\/p>\n
I’ve been wracking my brains for a couple of days, trying to come up with something to say about the year just ending, but honestly, I don’t know how to begin. The Year of Our Lord Two-Thousand-and-Twelve was traumatic and evolutionary and life-changing, a real personal watershed for me… but it was also mundane and filled with tedium and really kind of a blur. A lot of big things happened right at the start of the year, and then after that it seems like I spent months and months doing nothing but working and commuting. Everything changed for me in 2012, and yet… not a lot actually happened<\/i>. Or so it seems today from behind my rolltop desk in my home office, surrounded by the wrapping-paper-and-empty-box detritus of another holiday season, as I struggle to find some kind of introspective hook for an entry I feel obligated — but not especially inspired — to write.<\/p>\n
I guess that’s part of the problem I’m having with getting started. It’s not just that I don’t know what to say. I’ve also lost much of my impetus for blogging, I think. Looking back, I can see a slow but steady drop in the number of entries I’ve been managing to post, month by month, over the past couple of years. And the posts I have<\/i> been making have been less substantive, too. Lots of photos and video clips lately. And even though I always try to throw in at least a couple paragraphs of commentary when I do those quick ‘n’ easy photo-and-video posts — something <\/i>to provide some “value add,” as the corporate types would say — well, they’re still just photos and videos. Aside from a very small handful of entries, I don’t feel like I’ve written much this year that’s really worth reading.<\/p>\n
It’s not that I’ve lost interest in blogging. I certainly haven’t run out of potential subject matter. I encounter at least one or two items every day that I’d like to post about. But as always, I have trouble finding the time<\/i> to do it. At least the time to do it the way I want to do it, which is at length and well-written and somehow meaningful<\/i>, and not just “look at this thing I saw online.” (Not that there’s anything wrong with “look at this” posts — that’s how blogging started, after all — but I want to do more than just those, you know? Facebook and Tumblr and all those other social network\/microblogging sites are tailor-made for the “look at this” thing. Simple Tricks ought to be… well, more<\/i>.) I follow several prolific bloggers who either post several times a day, or post lengthy items a couple times a week, and just about everything they write is actually about something<\/i>. Their stuff has value and insight, and reads like the best journalism or op-ed pieces, or criticism or memoir. That’s what I want to do here. I want to contribute something worthwhile to the conversation. But honestly I just don’t know how they do it, unless they’re unemployed and have no other hobbies or interests whatsoever. Because I sure as hell can’t seem to find enough hours in the day to handle all the myriad projects I want to do over and above the chores of ordinary life, and still manage to express myself here, too. To be honest, most days I feel like I’m just barely holding my shit together at the subsistence level, and I don’t have the energy to take on anything else. Stupid dayjob. Stupid commute. Stupid me.<\/p>\n
There’s something even more frustrating than feeling like I don’t have time, though, and that’s the feeling that, even when I do find a free moment, I’m no longer up to doing the job. Some days, like today, I have trouble getting started. More frequently, I have trouble finishing. Yeah, yeah, I know… insert the “not uncommon for a man your age” joke here. But I’m seriously troubled about this. I fear that my focus is shot, or I can’t summon the Muse anymore or something. The words just don’t come the way they used to. Well, that’s not quite right… it’s more like I can sense them floating in space around me, but I only seem able to gather so many of them together before they all spring out of my grasp again. To put it less metaphorically, I can no longer easily articulate what it is I’m trying to say, at least not to my satisfaction, so I find myself flailing away at entries, trying to figure out how to make them better and feeling instead like my ideas are growing more and more diffuse the longer I spend with them… and then the window of opportunity passes and the entries start to feel like last week’s fish wrappings, so I just abandon them, unfinished and unfulfilled. And that frustrates the hell out of me. And then the frustration tends to ferment down into ennui<\/i>. Yes, that’s right, blogging depresses me these days. And that just makes it all the harder to do any of it.<\/p>\n
There are times when I wonder why I’m still bothering to try.<\/p>\n
But as I’ve said before, blogging is about the only writing I still do, and if I give up on even this… god, I just can’t contemplate that. I’ve identified myself as a writer for so, so<\/i> many years. To let go of this final vestige of what I used to think was my destiny… it’d be like losing one of the lobes of my brain or something.<\/p>\n
And now I see that I’ve killed an hour writing about how I can’t seem to get writing, and it’s time to go start getting ready for this evening’s festivities. Typical. Exactly what I’ve been trying to express.<\/p>\n
Happy New Year, everyone. See you on the other side…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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