An Explanation
I have been staring at the cursor on the screen for an inordinate amount of time, long enough to feel sort of short of breath along with the consciousness that I just downed a cup of caffeinated coffee and am, on top of everything else, jittery.
Until yesterday’s post, a pretty straight forward business profile of Mr. Kopy, I hadn’t posted a blog in well over six months. It had been so long that I had to contact Ryan Olson ( I guess he’s the blogger helper outer) of the Enterprise-Record, first by email, then by phone, to help me re-navigate the process. As always, he was instructive and cheerful about the process.
As it is said, the reasons for my lack of blogging are complex, but simply put, creating the 750-word monthly North State Voices column in the E-R last year pretty much exhausted my ability to produce readable material.
There were other issues as well, of course, which would fall into the category of a middle aged man (who has described himself in print and in class room talks as a ‘crazy bum’ (aka homeless and mentally ill)) still experiencing periods of…disassociation from what is considered normative society.
In my blogs from long ago I made quite a few promises about topics/people I would be writing about and, well, I apologize for not coming through. Yet. I might, but I’ll be more careful about making print promises.
On Aging
It seems nearly impossible that I will turn 62 next month. Although I have my own tailored reasons for having had a fatalistic and gloomy outlook on a possibly longer life, it was generational as well.
Among many of my peers as a younger person, all of us affected by the societal pollen of the 1960s there was a sense, possibly extremely self-absorbed, that we would die young as if it was a generation-specific terminal allergen.
Maybe there’s a percentage, a demographic of all generations which feel that way as I certainly observe such in a lot of people I know younger than me. Some of the hard reasons – climate change, possible human extinction, economic catastrophe, massive annihilation for any number of historically established causes (famine, disease, war and now water) – are different from my youth. The major concern then was the Atomic Bomb or so it seemed.
It is part of my patter when advice is solicited from me by younger people to say, “One of the ironies of my life setting aside that I never thought I’d live for 60-plus years, is that I assumed as I got older, life would be easier – that there would be answers to the big questions, that I’d find some sort of existential peace within myself and neither has turned out to be true to in a sustained or profound manner.
On Writing
A tremendous comfort to me is that I have worked with an editor since 1985 whom I’ll call Lola. She knows me better than any other individual, has a better overall perspective of the person I am and is my biggest source of encouragement as a writer.
Lola and I have sustained a 31 year friendship and she, as well as anyone who comes to knows me understands that the act of writing can be debilitating and difficult for me.
It hasn’t always been that way, but it has been for many years and by blogging — well, it’s an attempt to overcome it.
So, there you have it.
Love and Peace,
Don
