Old Habits

A long time ago I was talking to someone I haven’t seen in quite a long time, who has, from my perspective, vanished from the face of the earth.  For a while there were slight and attenuated whispers, rumors – nothing good.  Then nothing at all.  Anyway, I don’t recall what we were speaking of, but I said, I suppose of some quotidian problem I was failing to solve, “Old habits die hard,” and this person immediately shot back at me,

“Dreams die harder.”  And so they do.  So they do.

The date I set to get back into things here came and went and it wasn’t the only failure of intent the last few weeks saw.  I’d meant to make note on the 25th of the year anniversary of Randy Pausch’s death, and say something about the “Last Lecture,” but.  Yes, but, but, but, ah, I wasn’t feeling the theme of childhood dreams when the time came.  The lecture itself is well worth the the hour and change it will cost you to watch it and speaks for itself.  Certainly it got done to death (if you’ll pardon the expression) when it was more timely and the rest, as the man put it, is silence.

I wrote elsewhere that I was “hair’s breadth from throwing in the towel on the lot of it” – the writing, the projects, the songs, to hell with it, chuck it in, shelve it, write a little cryptic coda and vanish, vanish, vanish from this imaginary world, this phantasm of the public.  Inwardly I suppose this is not really true at all, I just find it pleasant to think about it sometimes.  Peaceful, to just not try, anymore.  Even as I think it I prepare for continuation, dust off old neglected threads, hoist shovel and put my back to the backlogs.  Sometimes this persistence seems to me my triumph, my ultimate strategy, but at the moment it just feels like more of what I’d love to get away from.

But duty calls, so, later, I suppose.

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Aug 5, 2009 at 6:09 PM

Hiatus

I’m taking a brief hiatus from writing.  Check back on July 25, 2009 for the next update.

It’s a little weird to post it since a week free of updates isn’t exactly anything special here, but I have something specific in mind for that which has become, at the moment, for me, a significant date.  More to come (”God Willing,” as a former professor of mine used to interject, in an arch and faintly mocking tone).

originally posted at spiritofsalt.com Jul 18, 2009 at 8:26 AM