An Accumulation of Albatrosses

It has come to my attention that it may be possible to carry this shambling persona, this self-indulgent, measured engagement, or lack thereof, with the world too far--that there may be responsibilities I am not addressing, opportunities that are lost as I lay in a pile of my own filth, gazing at my navel. (Or worse yet, reading online forum threads about videogames.)

These things have always gone in cycles, for me, and perhaps it is time to begin a new one. In short, I have decided, with no small amount of prompting from the world and my friends, that it is probably time to wake up.

There are a million things I have not told you about. Love, second-hand death, the rising tide of madness and a car crash, to name a few. It has been a year and a day since my last post produced exclusively for this blog. I know because my good friends called me on it at the bar. There have been things that I tried to tell to you, and could not bring myself to complete. Eventually, the weight of unwritten words around my neck made it difficult to even look at the website, let alone type anything.

That was a nonsensical, self-indulgent sentence, summarizing a nonsensical, self-indulgent state of affairs that has, I believe, ended.

Tonight, I have missed a movie, driven the back roads, shot pool, been thanked by a bartender and spoken words of truth and import with dear friends. I promised that I would do something, not something specific but something nonetheless, and I intend to keep that promise. I have been letting failures, or at least mismanagements and projects that drag on and on, accumulate and weigh me down, leaving the things I care about to rot in the field. It just won't do.

If you're reading this, thank you for giving our confused little website your time. Thank you for putting up with my self-indulgent nonsense, and my arrogance, and my ambitions. And thank you for putting up with my absences, all too frequent.

It is a much easier thing to read than to write, to think than to speak, and to sleep than to learn. (Which is not to say I have slept well lately, on the whole.) The world around us is ever fascinating, perhaps now more than ever, and it is so much easier for me to watch it go by than to act, even in the tiniest of ways.

But it is only through acting on the world that I can truly understand it, and myself. And perhaps I have some responsibility, both to understand and to act on that understanding.

So.

Hello, internet! It's been a long time. I think I am going to begin to write to you again. James is still here, as is my good friend the Gentlebeast, and Thom, and perhaps others will be drummed up as things begin, again, to roll.

Thank you, as always, for your time. I hope to be stealing more of it soon.