He's Crazy If He Thinks We're Coming Back Again (He's Crazy Anyway)

Ten days in Disney World. A small bout with possible food poisoning from a local fast food eatery. A flight to Idaho. A road trip back from there via Oregon, Nevada and half the length of California. The unpacking and sorting of an initial grouping of one hundred boxes in our cramped apartment. Numerous trips back and forth from a rented storage area containing the other hundred boxes, which are now also squirreled away in our even more cramped apartment. A small, furry death in the family. The non-stop frenzied pace of my job, not to mention extra weekends worked to make up for some of the time spent on my pair of vacations.

Any wonder why I have been such a bad blogger, Abbott?

The truth is I have been meaning for the last week or so to dive back into the Pylon. It's been nearly three weeks since I last posted, but that doesn't mean I have not written anything at all. A couple of goofy poems, three songs, reworked a chapter on my novel, and numerous false starts on blog entries. Not really false starts, though... most of them will be used at some point. I just found little time to finish what I started, and when time found itself free and in my hands to direct again, I had little compulsion to carry on from where I left off with those posts.

I guess we all need breaks, but I find it is so much easier to write if I just keep going, day after day. If I don't -- if I stop for any length of time more than a week, especially when things pile up, as they did for me in September and October -- then I find it very easy, and ever easier with each passing day, to slough off the whole enterprise. So, breaks are bad for me. The temptation to just couch potato my evenings away after a rough day at work is too great, and I find that the more I keep writing or working on my various little projects, the more my mind keeps locked on target, even when distracted by real-life things like work and fuck-all. The good thing is that I am well aware of this problem, and I usually go to some pains to prevent it from occurring; the bad part is that a good share of my writing involves the watching of various videos and television shows, which leads me back into the very tempting path of simply sitting on my duff and not removing myself from the sofa for anything.

Today was a good example: awake at 6:30am, I had all day, with Jen off at work, to sit down and work on the blog, and perhaps knock out a few reviews. But I also had a backlog of movies recorded on the DVR, and once I watched the first one, instead of dragging myself to the Mac and writing about it -- or writing about goddamned anything -- I found it more comfortable to flip to the Packers game. [Note -- while I no longer really follow anything but baseball, I was raised a Packer fan, and I cherish the calls either to or from my Dad following each game, win or lose. Win in this case, in a major way; 34-0 over the hated Vikings.] After the game, I watched another movie, and then, though I did open Blogger on my browser, I then started listening to The Who Sell Out, and decided to sing along as I cleaned up around the house. The album over, instead of writing, I decided to listen to the awesome Petra Haden a cappella version of The Who Sell Out, and did the dishes. Sure, it's great that I'm doing some much-needed housework -- and it was fun to listen (and sing) loudly to music, since I normally now only hear tunes on my iPod or at work -- but it really defeated my initial purpose for the day. And what did I do once all this cleaning-and-singing nonsense was over? I watched another movie. Another one of which I probably won't find the time to write.

And this garbage? This whining about my lack of blogging. Only started writing it an hour ago -- took a short break to listen to the first side of Tommy (I'm my own worst enemy, you know) -- and if you think I began it with any certainty of where it was going or what I was going to write about, then I believe by this point you should know it is a misnomer. The point was simply to write. The point was to get anything down -- something... anything... -- something down on this post, just to jump start myself back into my process.

And so it is done.

And now I really want to listen to some Rundgren. I'm sure I don't have the slightest idea why...