do not read.

This is the kind of cathartic, brutally self-analytical writing that you probably hate. It’s something I need to write, but it’s not necessarily anything you need to read. Please skip to other posts on this blog to avoid the car wreck you’re otherwise about to witness.



Call it burnout, call it malaise, call it brain cramp or writer’s block, call it abject laziness – whatever the name, it’s the reason behind the conspicuous lack of original posting in the last month. I’m not burned out on blogging – I love the opportunity to post what’s going on in my life, probably more so than you care about reading it – but it’s rather tedious to go into much detail about same when it’s a rather consistent routine.

Combine whatever you’d call it with my general apathy toward essentially everything right now, and it’d make for a stultifyingly dull read for you, my audience – my army of one, as it were. The fact is, I’m having a hard time caring about much of anything anymore (as I briefly alluded to in my Black Flag post somewhere below).

What’s not to love about my life? I have a beautiful son and wife, right? A house? A job? A functioning motor vehicle, recent gremlins notwithstanding? Food in the fridge? My health? Sure, when you put it like that, then everything else to follow would indeed come off as self-indulgent whinging, to borrow a phrase I saw elsewhere on this blog. (Spell-check says, “I don’t understand ‘whinging.’ Do you mean ‘whining’ or ‘whinnying’?” But this article lays the definition out pretty clearly – read the first two paragraphs before insomnia threatens to be cured.)

Ugh. Life isn’t perfect, is it? Has it ever been, since Adam and Eve screwed it up for the rest of us? In my antiquarian book stack, there exists an accounting text from 1878 that puts our condition fairly precisely in the first or second paragraph of the entire book – and keep in mind, this was 128 years ago, before the World Wide Internet and 24-hour quickie marts and porn-on-demand: “The prime condition of life is want.” Funny, though, how folks confuse “wants” and “needs,” often synonymizing the two terms. Maslow would probably have a field day with prioritizing today’s “needs,” wouldn’t he? (Spell-check: “I don’t understand ‘synonymizing.’ I have no other suggestions.” No, you probably don’t.)

Speaking personally and more directly to current events, I’m not talking about material excess. I can’t think of a lot that I really want for. That’s part of the reason that I’m unloading a lot of my stuff on eBay as of late, because really, what’s the point? I’ve overindulged in seemingly all material things my entire adult life, and it’s time to cut back.

The dichotomy of my life finds me torn between two ends of an axis. On one end is the me who operates by the maxim, "I'd be much more of a people person if it weren't for people." The individual stars that dot the sky of my life are wonderful people, but when speaking of the general populace at large, I think we're much better off without one another. I don't have the patience for the random person's various foibles, neuroses or tics. And I don't do idle chitchat - funny, since this blog is the very picture of idle chitchat - and I think that puts a lot of people off - people who I'm sure I'd otherwise have warm, close relationships with.

On the polar opposite of that axis, though, is the terribly lonely me. I continue to regret all of the mistakes I’ve made in my life. I have managed to do great harm to virtually every important relationship I’ve ever had – platonic, familial, romantic. Sometimes the damage is irrevocable, and sometimes they manage to return to a state of tenuous repair.

This damage is rarely, if ever, due to anything I have actively, consciously done. It’s the converse, really – I go a couple of days without saying hello to someone, and then days turn into weeks, and weeks turn into months, and months into years. I have a tendency to disappear from people’s lives as a result.

Why is this, though? How can I go from someone who seems so very warm and caring and loving to someone who basically becomes a cipher? I don’t know, and I don’t know that I’ll ever figure out. And I hate that I’m like that, too. Here’s why.

A teenager’s mentality still exists to an extent in my consciousness: the desperate “need” to be popular, the desperate “need” for some sort of warmth in my life, which is probably more universal than it is confined to the teen years. I’ve always been jealous of popular people – at first, in high school, because I thought their popularity was highly undeserved, and now because I see how lucky certain people are, because they have the charisma and charm and all of that crap that attracts people like flies to a light.

Me? I’ve always been someone who’s believed that I should be popular by virtue of my own existence. (A completely preposterous notion if there ever was one, right? Read on.) I think this is a consequence of having my ass kissed for the biggest part of my adolescence and before because I was what they called “gifted.” Yes, a child needs to be told he is special, but when the praiser goes overboard with his or her praise, the child goes beyond having warm fuzzy thoughts about his own uniqueness and starts believing delusional thoughts about his own value as a human being relative to that of others. (“I’m more special than you are!”)

Take this blog, please. I do absolutely nothing to promote it – just the fact that it’s out there means, to me, that it’s better than 95% of the unholy mess of blogs that are out there, and that by that point alone, it should be drawing readers. I don’t care if you don’t care what I have to say, just as long as you’re here to hear it, and you come back often to not care some more.

And, of course, I can’t for the life of me understand why I get, tops, 8 visits a day. Of course, the blogosphere is essentially a huge vacuum of noise, and it takes true self-promotion to make what you have to say rise above the noise. Self-promotion is an anathema to me – I like to think that the quality of my writing is self-promotion enough. I’d rather spend an afternoon in the proctologist’s office than blow my own horn.

More relevant to this discussion: I can count on one hand the number of friends I still have (with fingers – plural - to spare), and to be honest, I’m surprised that they haven’t had me shot yet, although the rustling in the woods near my house every night unnerves me. The problem is the same as it is with this blog’s low readership numbers: I just don’t try. It’s not about trying hard enough, it’s about trying at all, and I don’t.

Do I love them, just as I love so many of the people who have touched my life for a short time only for them to watch me disappear into the ether? Absolutely. I treasure them very deeply. And whether you're a dear friend or a complete stranger, I thank you for reading this far.

Anyway, this self-criticism is careening out of control with no end in sight, so I'll cut it short by saying: All of this is a microcosm of the larger present crisis in my life, the details of which I’m still not entirely clear on, but it’s a panic that I feel inside myself.