Happy new year. I managed to catch a cold on the way back home, so I’m running at diminished capacity for the day. S has the same thing and she’s about a day ahead of me on the symptoms, which means this should be 75% clear by tomorrow.

The Milwaukee half of the trip was pretty lax. One of my in-laws had COVID and we did not get to see them, except for a quick present exchange at distance with masks on. That was unfortunate, and it meant we had to scramble to figure out how to move things and spend the whole week with the other parent.

We stayed at a pretty unique new hotel called the Kinn Guesthouse. It’s a boutique hotel downtown, just north of the Public Market and Third Ward, and is a unique setup. Instead of cramming a hundred or two rooms into the space, it has 31 rooms across five floors, each room with high ceilings and great layout. What was cool about the layout though is that each floor had a large common area, with a full kitchen and long island to eat at, a living room area with a large TV, and a meeting room with a board room table and such. My sister-in-law also evacuated to the hotel due to the quarantine situation, and it was nice to be able to sit and eat breakfast each morning. The setup felt like a large SoHo office of a tech marketing firm, almost.

Most of the trip was family stuff. I did get a good walk through the Third Ward one day, and everyone went to the Public Museum one afternoon. Otherwise, it was lots of food and conversation and whatnot. Shot 600-some photos, but I am so far behind on doing anything with pictures. I still haven’t posted albums from that June 2022 trip to Denver.

Oh, one unique thing about Milwaukee was this heavy fog during most of the trip. I didn’t have the big camera, so I tried to capture it a bit, but there was this thick soup on the first few days, like enough that you could barely see a block down a city street. It started on the drive from Indiana to Illinois and into Wisconsin and went on for days. I’d never seen Milwaukee like this, so it was unique to me.

Trip back wasn’t bad. We stopped in Denver, which was a weird flashback to my trip in 2022, which I almost called “last year” but now it’s “the year before last.” Gotta get used to that. We stopped in the Amex Centennial lounge, which was decent but way too crowded. Got home just in time for a torrential rainstorm, which almost reminded me of the Singapore trip, albeit 40 degrees cooler.

Today I did a quick spin down Highway 1 into Pacifica. There have been some crazy waves down there a few days ago, thirty or forty-foot waves crashing ashore and flooding out roads and houses. I got down there today with no real traffic problems, and the waves were at about the usual level, maybe slightly bigger. Lots of people had the same idea, though, so parking was a problem. I ended up going down to Montara Beach and climbing down to shore. I had the big camera with me, but I got there after noon, so the sun was the wrong way. The camera had the 16-35L lens, which is absolute butter for wide-open shots. It has such beautiful detail and color to it, especially on a beach. I had trouble getting down to the beach, though; there were a lot of washed-out and eroded trails, and I had to walk about a mile to find one that got down to the shore.

I love the Pacific ocean. I mean, I liked looking at the Atlantic from the south shore of Iceland, but I can get to the Pacific in fifteen minutes. The first time I touched the water of an ocean was at the Oregon coast, and I used to walk to Dockweiler Beach every day when I lived in Playa Del Rey. And of course Hawaii is amazing. But there’s something about the coast on Highway 1 south of Daly City that seems to mix together aspects of all of these places. There are rugged slopes and cliffs like Seaside, Oregon. There are the same little beach houses and surf shacks you see along the LA coast. But there’s like this rugged individualism to the beaches below Pacifica. You don’t see wall-to-wall families camping on the sand with umbrellas and chairs and grills. If you go during the week, you can sometimes see almost nobody there, except for the die-hards in neoprene suits, fighting the big waves. Places like Mavericks can be downright dangerous, and aside from the occasional fisherman, you might see nobody brave enough to take on the big surf. But I’d rather be walking on a beach like that than fighting my way through Coney Island-on-a-holiday crowds.

Anyway. I’ve rambled on for 800 words here and you may be wondering if I’m going to put some big turn in here at the end. And I honestly don’t know, but the new year/new me energy always makes me want to blog every day and write every day, and it usually times out by January 5th. But there are a lot of big questions I want to answer. One is if I can simply keep writing on here without running out of stories or things to say. I forget what the current tally is here, but it’s something like 1400 published entries and a million words, so the odds of having some original thought and saying, “Hey, I should write about my old Commodore 64” - well, I already did back in 2003. So I need to figure out a way to keep the words going. Or do I?

I don’t know who reads this or how people find it or if there are any on-ramps to blogs anymore. I think people just doom-scroll and sit and spin on their favorite low-attention-span app on their phone. (I know I do.) Is this something I could change? Is there some alternative to blogs that scratch the same itch as blogs? I don’t know. I know I don’t need to old-man-yells-at-cloud about how blogs were so much better in 1998 and these damn kids need to get off their phones. That war has already been lost. I guess what I need to figure out is how to spend my time and do what I want to do and what I can do. I want to keep writing about nothing and everything, and try to see what gels. So, here I am.

I did this last year, so I should keep with it and do another big year in review post. So, in 2023:

• Started the year by going to Las Vegas for my birthday with a bunch of the regular crew. This was a great trip, and good to finally see a bunch of people and have fun.
• Went to Iceland (and London) for a solo trip. Hauled a lot of film camera stuff. The trip started very dark, but by the end, it all came together, and this was probably the most impactful and memorable trip of the year.
• Went to India (and Dubai and Qatar) for the first time for work.
• Solo trip to Poland. Great food. Auschwitz was overwhelming but necessary.
• India (again).
• Went to Singapore on the way back from India, and it was incredible.
• Went to Reno for Thanksgiving. It’s been a while.
• Went to Indiana and Wisconsin for Christmas.
• The travel total was eight countries total, six new, and something like 100,000 miles total.
• I finished an MS in Management and Leadership at WGU. I forget how much I ended up writing for this course, but it was 12 papers and two tests. I wasn’t as into this as the MBA, but it’s done. I started on 4/1 and finished on 7/31, so there’s my summer.
• FitBit and my FitBit scale crapped out on me, but I have Apple Health data and I did work out every day of the year. Steps are 2,568,505 and miles are 1168. 2022 were 2,200,380 steps; 1,038.01 miles, so a bit of improvement there.
• Weight is not good at all. I definitely did not meet that goal of quitting Taco Bell. I’m pretty much back to my pre-WW numbers, so I need to get on that.
• Returned to office, so I’m in SF three days a week now.
• I “un-quit” writing, but got no appreciable work done on anything solid. I have two titled projects that are starting to congeal, but there were a lot of roadblocks in the way on this. I got about 35,000 words into both.
• I “re-published” two of my unpublished books, so there’s that.
• I published two zines. That was a lot of fun, and I’d like to do more.
• I published 25 entries here. That’s eight more than last year, but it’s still rookie numbers.
• I did a lot of writing in Day One. I also published one-off hardcover books of my entries from 2013-2018 which were somewhat depressing and reminded me I’ve been trying to write the same three books for ten years now and making no progress.
• Only took 6490 photos. I got an Sony a6400 for the times when I need a “real” camera but can’t carry the full DSLR. I’m a bit burned out on photography, so not sure how that’s going to play out in the future.
• I gave up on dead malls and tried to take a big step back from nostalgia stuff in general.
• I got pretty much no reading done except for books on management theory, which were not exactly pleasure reading.
• Way more interpersonal drama I can’t get into, which involved taking a months-long break from all social media, which pretty much nobody even noticed, which tells me a lot about the strength in my online friendships and value of social media in my life.

I think my resolutions this year are to try to get writing again (or figure out what writing even is); throw out or donate about half of what I own; stop buying dumb stuff I will never use; and continue trying to get healthy both mentally and physically. And write. And write.

I just spent five days in Indiana for the pre-Christmas Christmas with my side of the family. It’s a split trip, with this second week in Wisconsin. We flew into Chicago on Monday, then rented a car and drove out to South Bend for the first week.

It’s always weird to be back. The area around University Park Mall was all cornfields when I left in 1995, and now the Grape Road and Main Street strips that run parallel to the mall have exploded with big-box stores, strip malls, and chain restaurants. This time we stayed at at Hilton Home2 that’s roughly by where the old Night Lights all-ages club was in the 80s. (I think that club is a Hooters now, but I don’t remember where it was.) The hotel was built in 2017, on the site of what used to be some anonymous banquet restaurant. Everything around it is new to me. Day Road used to be an empty road through corn fields we’d drive at high speed on the way to the mall. Now it’s full of big boxes of stuff.

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So, various family stuff on Tue-Fri. Ate a family lunch at the Howard Park Public House on the river. I think that used to be a parking lot or empty field when I grew up, and now the entire riverfront has a walk and parks and an ice skating rink, and looks great. South Bend appears to be on the up and up, with all the new spots and the ever-growing Notre Dame. I always regret that I did not spend more time in South Bend as a kid and really learn what was there so I could appreciate what it has become.

It was good to see family, exchange presents, eat too much, and do the usual grip-and-grin photos lined up against a tree or wall. Not into what I look like in the photos, and the food is adding to that. I really need to lean into the “new year new me” coming up shortly, but that’s another discussion.

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I keep saying I am not into nostalgia anymore, or I’m trying to get away from it or whatever, and honestly I am trying. I intended to not even go to Elkhart for this trip. But S had to catch up on work and I had an empty afternoon with nothing to do, so I got in the car, put on my 1990 playlist, and went on the grand nostalgia misery tour.

First stop was IUSB. I pretty much lived in Northside hall in the 1990-1991 school year. I worked in the computer labs in the basement, my first real paying computer job, (occasionally) went to classes, and hung out with Ray endlessly. I had really strong memories of that place, but in a very isolated base way, probably because of my depression level and loneliness at the time. I commuted every day, which meant spending long periods by myself, rolling through the long strip of nothing between Elkhart and South Bend.

I wanted to take some pictures because the street view in the area is pretty lacking. But I wanted to find places that looked exactly like they did 33 years ago, which is tricky with all the additions that have happened. There’s a bridge from Northside across the river to a set of dorms, which is pretty odd compared to my commuter experience. The old education building has been torn down; at least two other big limestone buildings are where a soda bottling plant used to be; a chunk of the mega-parking lot is now a garage. And most of Northside, the main class building on the river, has been completely redone inside.

Walking around the halls, I did find a few things that haven’t changed. The outside structure of NS is the same limestone, the same courtyard with a walkway going across on the second floor. I ducked in a stairwell that I used to climb up and down multiple times a day to get from the sub-basement computer labs to the second-floor computer science classrooms, and they are absolutely identical inside. There’s a long cafeteria, more like a wide corridor with tables where me and Ray would hold court and pretend to study, and it’s still there but completely redecorated now. But I went around the corner to the vending machine alcove, and there’s a set of microwaves that look absolutely identical to 1990. I’m not sure if they’ve been cleaned since then. The area outside the auditorium looked very similar too, with 1961 wood trim and a set of benches where I’d sit and read between classes.

You can take the US-20 bypass to get between Elkhart and South Bend pretty quickly. I guess it’s not called the bypass anymore; it’s just US-20. But that didn’t exist in 1990, so I took Lincolnway east, which is now 933 aka “old 33” aka US-33 back then. That road isn’t quite a highway, and is mostly 35 MPH and winds through Mishawaka, then Osceola and into Elkhart. Like most of these drives, the bones of things are still there; there’s still a McDonalds and Taco Bell in the same place in Twin Branch, and the giant gas station at County Line Road. Signs change, the colors of houses sometimes change, and buildings vanish. But most of the drive is hauntingly familiar.

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I really did not want to do this. But I had to do this.

I went to Concord Mall. The former Concord Mall. They are just started with the big transformation, which is gutting the mall and turning it into seven light industrial spaces. They have painted the vintage brick exterior a generic drab white, and chopped off the signage, awnings, and entrances, sealing things up in anonymous industrial doors. The JC Penney parking lot was full of heavy machinery, pallets of construction material, and various debris and jetsam from the construction work. The exterior entrance of the old McCrory’s was a gaping hole in the brick exterior. The Hobby Lobby, aka my Wards store, remains untouched. The Martin’s grocery, Concord 1 and 2 theater, and USA Fitness buildings are all in various states of disassembly or abandonment.

The front entrance, by what was once Super Sounds and Enzo pizza, was open, but had “no mall walking” signs on it. An optometrist was still operational, so I could go in the entrance. The interior was bleak. A chain-length fence blocked off most of the concourse, with a floor-to-ceiling wall of black plastic running the length of the hallway. I could hear water falling behind the plastic, and assumed they were doing asbestos abatement. Storefronts were all covered in plywood, but I could still see glimpses of the original brick, which was a signature of the mall, and will probably either be chipped out, covered in drywall, or painted an industrial battleship gray soon.

I didn’t stay long. I snapped a few pictures and got out of there. I went to Hobby Lobby to use their restroom and buy nothing, and on the way out, I realized something: they had the same fixtures as Wards, the same shelves and brackets, and they hadn’t been repainted. I painted all of those fixtures in the summer of 1988. It took me like a month to wash every one of them with turpentine, prime them, then roll them with a special shade of Wards-brand oil-based enamel. Examining one of those shelves, now filled with Jesus-based Christmas crap made in China, sort of freaked me out. It was a strange legacy for me to have in this town.

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I did the rest of the tour: my old house in River Manor; the old runway that got turned into a subdivision in the 80s; my old abandoned Taco Bell where I worked my first job in 1987. I drove up main street and through downtown, and some of that strip is utter devastation. I don’t mean to keep shitting on Elkhart; I’ve done enough of that over the years, and it’s somewhat pointless now. But it’s just amazing how far it has fallen. I heard news while I was in town that the last movie theater closed, and the mall closed. The city is apparently buying the failed strip mall that was built when Pierre Moran got de-malled and doing… something with it, or not. There are long stretches of properties that have been abandoned for decades, or razed and left vacant. There are I think two major overpass/viaduct projects starting, and more businesses are closing and houses are being moved or demolished. The only growth industry in town seems to be Superfund sites.

Previously, these trips would give me heavy “you can never go back” vibes. Now, it’s just a big door closing. There’s nothing to be nostalgic about anymore. Everything is gone and done.

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There are many reasons I could never go back to Indiana. And the Indiana I knew is rapidly vanishing. But sometimes I get a strong and strange feeling of deja vu I can’t entirely integrate.

I was walking across a parking lot the other night, and it hit me. There was something about the crisp winter air, the clouds overhead, the look of the sky. I was in the parking lot of a casino, but when I looked out, I saw fields plowed down for winter, and the one row of tall trees a quarter-mile in the distance, the leaves fallen in December, just century-old skeletons reaching into the sky. There’s something about the sparseness, the feel of the atmosphere, that gives me a deep base memory, a sense memory that goes deep into my bones. It reminds me of the holiday breaks of childhood, the feeling of being 16 and driving a beat-up Camaro to a friend’s house on the back country roads. It’s a very entrenched time machine and these memories aren’t about a specific event or person. They’re just a sense, a feeling. Not happy or sad, just a quick flood of memory about everything and nothing.

When I was on the second floor of IUSB, looking out a window across the parking lot, I had an incredibly strong memory of looking out the same window in 1990. It was a Friday, during a shift at the computer lab, in mid-December. The air was the same crisp cold, the clouds heavy, and I could feel in the air that it was going to start snowing. I knew I would mess around on the VAX computer or two or three more hours, go to the McDonald’s on McKinley, and listen to the same Queensrÿche album I listened to every day that school year as I ate my #2 meal on the long drive home. I knew that classes were over, and I’d spend the next two weeks indoors, at my girlfriend’s parents’ house in Ottawa Hills, or at my parents’ house. It was not good or bad or anything else, but that moment is so entrenched in my head, and it’s amazing that it instantly came back 33 years later.

Anyway. It’s Christmas morning and I’m in Milwaukee for the week. I should write about that next, but I have a few thouand calories to eat first.

I was in Reno for Thanksgiving, which was a pretty straightforward affair, except I forgot to bring gloves, and it was like 25 degrees outside. No snow, no trouble at the Donner pass; I just neglected to remember you need hand coverings when it’s below freezing. This wasn’t a major thing, as I didn’t really do a lot outdoors, but I’ve got more winter wonderland travel coming up next week, so I have to remember to bring gloves.

I have these gloves I bought in April for Iceland, which are very thin, but have the special magnetic junk in the fingers so you can use a touchscreen, and the index fingers and thumbs flip open in case you need to twist a knob or futz with a lens and don’t want to take your gloves off. I haven’t used them since Iceland, and when I dug them out of the bin today, they were filthy. I got some Woolite, started scrubbing them, and my sink was suddenly filled with bright red volcanic dirt. I think the last time I wore them, I was climbing Snæfellsjökull, and on the way up Bjarnarfoss, I fell down and thought I broke my knee. Weird memory to see and smell all of that red soil again.

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Reno was pretty sedate. It was my first time there since 2019. We stayed at a Marriott, had a mini-suite that wasn’t bad except the heater sounded like a hundred-year-old film projector. The gym was decent. The pool was outside, so no pool, although I can’t swim anyway. I did a lot of writing down in the lobby. I don’t know why I like writing in the lobbies of hotels, but I do. For some reason, sitting in this one very vaguely reminded me of the Grand Hyatt Berlin, where I stayed in 2014, but looking at the pictures on Google, it looks nothing like it. That seems to happen to me a lot. I just walked around the College of Alameda, which always gives me a weird sense memory of the IUSB campus, but the two look nothing like each other. They just built a new classroom building that looks very vaguely like it’s in the same style as one of the new buildings they put on Mishawaka Ave at IUSB, but all campus buildings built after like 1985 look like that.

Aside from eating and more eating, I didn’t do much else. Oh, I went to a sports book and bet $20 that the Rockies would win the 2024 World Series. I don’t even vaguely believe in the team after this year, and I’m honestly pretty much over baseball in general. So, no idea why I did that.

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The Christmas travel is South Bend for a week, then Milwaukee for a week. I’m trying to tighten the blast radius on this so I can keep things under control, so there won’t be any side trips anywhere else, and just family stuff. This is the first time I’ve been to Indiana since 2018, and I don’t know what to expect. Well, I know what to expect. What’s weird about this trip is I don’t even think I’ll be in Elkhart. My sister was the last holdout there, and she moved to Chicago a few years ago. Normally I’d go to Concord Mall, but I’m done with malls, and there is no Concord Mall. Ray is there, but I will have to convince him to meet us in Mishawaka or something. I have no interest in doing the Jon Konrath Reality Tour and look at a bunch of vacant buildings. If it was summer, I might be up for walking Ox Bow park. And Goshen’s downtown is neat. But other than that, the nostalgia is far too depressing for me.

I often wonder about visiting Bloomington again, for the same reasons. Looking at old journals, I used to fixate on Bloomington far too much. I haven’t been back in over ten years, and I feel like that obsession has faded away. I don’t know how that happened, and I wish I could apply the same technique to like 167 other things or people in my life. Maybe it’s because so much has changed there. Or maybe it’s just not important to me anymore. I do want to go back at some point and look around, but it’s a hard trip to make just for the sake of that trip. It’s probably cheaper for me to fly to Europe. Maybe at some point.

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Another glove memory: I once had this pair of leather gloves that were like Darth Vader gloves. They were very well-padded inside, black leather, and they had a long cuff that went halfway up my forearm. They were like motorcycle gloves I guess. I think I got them from my step-grandfather in like the late 80s or early 90s. I remember having them when I got my first leather motorcycle jacket in 1993. I lost them, I think in 1994, maybe by leaving them on a Bloomington Transit bus. I’ve never been able to find a pair exactly like them. Probably doesn’t matter much since it rarely gets below 40 here. Maybe if I move to Iceland, I’ll start looking.

Today is an anniversary of sorts. Thirty years ago today, I decided to be a writer, decided to “identify” as a writer, started calling myself a writer. Actually, I probably didn’t put those words together on October 30th, 1993, and I definitely did not put my occupation as a writer on a 1040 form until at least a a few years later. But today was the day this whole thing really started.

I’ve told the story before, in different permutations, different mixes of fact and fiction, enough that I don’t even know what is real anymore, what I would tell someone if I had to. I mean, I’ve always been a writer to some extent, even if I didn’t know it. I had a poem published when I was in grade school; I wrote a lot of short stories and papers and whatnot when I was in high school and college. I’d already published zines by that fall, written stuff in other zines, and put thousands and thousands of words into USENET posts and forums. I’d even published a story in a university newspaper at that point. But I’d never thought of myself as a writer, never considered it as a vocation, a career, or even a hobby. I always thought, “Someday I will write a book” but never put any more thought into it than that.

The actual story of how this started is somewhat trite and stereotypical. I was struggling in a deep depression in the fall of 1993 — that year, really — and had been abandoned by someone I trusted. And sure, it was all my fault, but it was at a key junction in my life when a maelstrom of shit was falling down on me. I’d been kicked out of school and was on probation; I was unable to continue in the computer science department; I’d lost the scholarship that was paying my tuition; I wasn’t sure what I was going to do for a degree anymore. Most of my friends were graduating, getting jobs, getting married, moving away. I was stuck, didn’t know what was next.

The abandonment thing, I won’t get too into that. I was in this relationship that I got far too invested in, and I messed it up, and she left. I’ve blamed myself for it for decades, and then recently, I read a lot about attachment anxiety and adult attachment theory and realized the fix was in decades before I met this person, and my problems go back much further than 1993, and I really can’t get into any of that in the scope of this dumb little story. Short story long, I was very damaged on October 30, 1993, and I desperately needed to find some way out.

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In 1993, I lived at Colonial Crest apartments in Bloomington. (They no longer exist.) I did not have a car. I had a city bus pass, but the bus line was all screwy and didn’t run at night, so I walked, a lot. My apartment was 1.3 miles to the 17th Street office of UCS where I worked a few days a week. It was 2.2 miles to Ballantine Hall, more or less the center of campus. At the very least, I’d walk about two hours a day, every day. I would listen to a tape walkman for all of these walks, plus whenever I was sitting around campus, working on a computer, whatever. And I was spending a lot of time sitting around campus, because I’d have a class, then have 90 minutes of down time until the next class, half an hour in the student union, 20 minutes waiting for a computer, an hour eating Pizza Hut Express, whatever.

The gist of this: I spent a lot of time alone, in my head, beating myself up, in three different ways: long walks, dead time in public places, and of course the hours and hours I spent in front of computers, screwing around on the immediately-pre-web Internet. I needed some way to not do that, or do something productive with that time, and through strange kismet, this sort of fell into place.

Once again, this is horribly cliché, but my friend Ray told me I should check out the spoken word albums of Henry Rollins, who had not yet recorded “Liar” and shown up on Beavis and Butthead, but aside from the post-Black Flag Rollins Band, he was about six albums deep into the spoken word racket, and had published maybe twenty books or chapbooks. So a few days after the 30th, I bought The Boxed Life, a two-tape album of his spoken word and started walking and listening to it, memorizing it.

The whole thing seems stupid now. I think there are various machismo stereotypical male idols that men of my age back then latch onto, be it Charles Hemingway or Charles Bukowski or Joe Rogan or whoever else. In one sense, it almost pains me that I got so wound up with this thing. But I felt like I had nothing, no direction, and there were far worse things to get tangled up with. Even mentioning the male loneliness epidemic pisses about 50% of the population off, but there is a real phenomenon of early twenty-somethings not knowing what to do with their life, and turning to whatever idiot has the biggest mouth. Nobody has fathers; nobody can open up to male friends. So you’re going to have guys who get in that rut who suddenly find a Doors record and lock into Jim Morrison and start wearing leather pants and writing shitty poetry. It happens.

At some point, I thought, “Hey, this Rollins guy just talks about what happens to him and writes it in notebooks. I should get a notebook.” So I got a notebook, and I started writing in it, in those weird little gaps of time in my day, journaling from lunch or at a bus stop or late at night. I also hunted down all the Rollins books. I wasn’t a book collector at that time, and would maybe passively read a non-computer book a few times a year. But I read his stuff, then read everything he referenced: Henry Miller, Bukowski, Fante, Burroughs. That got me into the beats, which got me into postmodern fiction, which got me to experimental, which got me to a room full of books. I started hoarding, reading constantly. I’m embarrassed by my early influences, but they got me to my later influences, so what can you do.

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The little 80-sheet notebook I bought at the campus book store for $1.39 turned into several journals, which turned into short stories, one of which became the start of my first book. I never healed the wound, but I filled the void. That particular relationship did not heal for years, but I now realize that it wasn’t the hole from the missing person, but a hole in my soul that existed since birth. She was just a symptom of the problem.

I wrote. I wrote badly, but it slowly got better. I slowly got better. I mean, I never got “better” like I was somehow cured. It took me years to stop thinking about her every hour of every day, how I was betrayed, how it was all my fault. It is mostly gone, and I can’t even remember what her voice sounds like. But last night I had a nightmare about her, woke up at 3:30 AM with my fight-or-flight fully triggered, didn’t even try to go back to bed and got up and hit the shower to start my day. There have been a half-dozen people who have done far worse to me since, and maybe the dream was about one of them. Anyway, writing was the one constant. It got me past this, until it didn’t.

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The writing continued until 2021, when it stopped. There are a lot of threads to this story that recur: the wound, the loneliness, abandonment, frustration, emptiness, defeat. In 2021, I tried to tell myself I was no longer a writer, because the pain and frustration of my writing “career” caught up to me and I simply could not write anymore. So I quit writing, said I wasn’t a writer. The void remained. Nothing could fill it. Believe me, I tried everything. Nothing worked.

So, I came back. I think. Did I? Am I still a writer? Am I writing now? The void still remains, but maybe I’m making progress.

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Bill James - the baseball statistics guy (you know, moneyball, Brad Pitt, whatever) - had a quote about writing that always stuck with me:

I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.

I always felt that I fell into writing because of that, because of my ability to get lost in words, in absence of being able to get lost in people. My frustration with love and life drove me to a universe of communication in a much deeper format. I don’t know what I’m doing now with writing, or what will come next, or what I need to do. But I know that it all started when I fell into this exactly thirty years ago today.