Tuesday, August 5, 2014

To Blog or Not To Blog, That is the Question

This is a personal blog, as anyone who has read it over the years can attest. It's catharsis for me, putting words down and letting them loose. I am, above anything else, a writer, and I always will be. Sometimes it's humorous, sometimes it's serious, sometimes it's just a random, crazy thought. It's more for me than anyone else, although hopefully sometimes somebody finds something amusing or otherwise worth reading.

I've missed blogging, and in my new, post-apocalypse world, I'm eager to go back to it. I've lost a lot of things recently, but this is my patch of ground. This is me and no one else. I've been warned, post-apocalypse, to be careful about making certain people "uncomfortable." Well, not to put too fine a point on it, fuck that noise. My purpose in life is not to make random people comfortable or uncomfortable. And if you are uncomfortable, perhaps you should look deep inside and explore that a little, because maybe you should be uncomfortable.

I've spent a lot of time lately keeping my mouth shut, and spent too much time surrounded by some people whom I could please only by my sudden and unmourned disappearance. Too bad. I will be judicious, because as the great Buckaroo Banzai said, "Don't be mean. We don't have to mean," but I'm through being, as I was brutally called recently, "invisible."

And no, for select people who might work themselves into a lather, I'm not burning anything down, just reclaiming what's mine. I'm sure there are going to be a lot of tortured metaphors, inside jokes, cryptic blatherings, and general nerddom. There will probably be some very sad and difficult things, at least for a while as I work out my new place in the world. I've given a lot of thought to what I will write, and to what I won't, and to the toxic things I will write and never post, because once I've got them out of my head they will have lost their venom and would do no one any good in the end.

And if you have the time, you might go backwards and read some of the archives. There was some really funny stuff and some really touching stuff, and a few moments in my life that were very important, caught forever in a little snowglobe world. No matter what happened or is yet to happen, those moments are real and they are precious and I'm glad that I put them down on paper when I had the chance.

Monday, August 4, 2014

Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, Redux

So, I've been gone a while. I mean really gone for a really long while. Things, as they are wont to do, have changed. My life has undergone a catastrophic upheaval (preceded by a limbo period where I apparently became someone I shouldn't ever have been.) But out of the blue the other day an old friend, a very dear friend and one of the finest, most honorable people I've ever known, called me (totally unaware of said catastrophic event) just to tell me something he forgot to tell me 30-odd years ago.

And when he learned of the catastrophic event (and I really feel like it should have some signifier of import but I can't think of a title that really does it justice yet), he told me something very simple. He said, "That's not who you are. You forgot who you are, but that's definitely not who you are."   And, like that, the light switch that had been flipped off a couple of weeks earlier, leaving me in a pitch black room that was totally unfamiliar and full of potentially deadly things, flipped back on. Sure, the light isn't very bright yet and I can't see the corners, but sometimes those things take a little while to warm up. I have to believe that the light will get brighter, and that eventually I will find my way out of that dark room. Maybe it'll take a special key I don't know I have yet, or maybe I'll just have to take an ax and hack my way out, but I will find a way out.

And so I'm going to start blogging again. Why? Because I have too many words, always too many words, and they need to go somewhere. And it doesn't matter that much if people read all of them -- although I'm somewhat amazed that this blog still has regular visitors, years after I last posted -- but it matters to me that I put those words somewhere. That's something that keeps me healthy and keeps me sharp. And maybe I'll occasionally write something that someone finds funny, or true, or makes someone feel some emotion they need to feel. For me, it's another way of moving forward and keeping the gremlins in the garret from getting too restless and turning on the landlord.

See, I feel better already.