Laid off

It's never been easy for me to write anything, ever. It's always a tortured, disorganized process of constant switchbacks and spontaneous edits. I agonize over syntax for hours. It's a war of attrition. I don't know any other way to do it. Now I'm not sure that I can do it at all.

Here's the thing. Three months ago I was all giddy with mountains and salmon and New Experiences. I was ready to blog my diminishing youth away as best I could. Then a hole in my life opened up and death and caprice magicked away two of the principal people for whom I write -- for whom I wrote -- and with them whatever voice I had developed. And after that, things kept happening, changing. Geography, jobs, textures. Possibilities opened, possibilities closed. Diminutions. Inversions. Transmutations. Devolutions. A lot. A lot has happened.

I don't want to stop writing on my blog. I never intended to stop, but that's one of the things that's happened. I've tried to start again numerous times here in my new old house in my old new town in my refurbished life. I sit down at the desk. Or on the couch. Often, I have coffee with me. Sometimes it's late at night and I'm the only one awake; sometimes it's a sunny afternoon and I'm fully alert. Either way, I sit and I sit. I visit the Internet carnival and bloat myself with cotton candy. I come back. I write a sentence and backspace it away. I read some old posts. I read other people's old posts. I go back to the carnival for more candy. I check my bank account and think about making a budget. (I don't.) I have some Triscuits. I read some Salon. I read some Slate. I open up a bunch of lengthy things in tabs that I'll never read. I listen to the cats who've been having sex for weeks on the south side of our house. I go back to the carnival.

A carnival, even a bleak and banal one, is bound to be better than sitting in an empty cubicle that smells of office cleanser. The boxes all have been cleared out and there are men from the remodeling company here measuring things and marking up proposed changes to the HVAC system on blueprints. The remaining workers are whispering to each other and surreptitiously pointing when they think to look my way. I just keep sitting here. Evidently.

This is 2013

Our New Years Eve party was commissioned at around 2:30 p.m. that afternoon. We'd had two parties in December already and weren't dying to have another, but for some reason this NYE was a party desert. There was simply nothing out there. It kept coming up in conversation the days prior. What are you doing? I don't know -- nothing. What about you? I haven't heard of anything either. Man.

The 31st arrived and still nobody had heard of anything. Surely something will materialize, we all thought. Surely this impasse will be broken. Surely we won't go over the cliff. A deal was reached only when my roommate and I reluctantly cobbled together an eleventh hour party. (There's a reason we are known around town as the Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell of LR.) It was a small affair. Maybe two dozen people, most of whom filtered in after midnight. Some teenage girls had to be kicked out. An intoxicated middle-aged stranger brought us a baking dish full of shrimp scampi and was then himself kicked out for acting foolish. I drank several pint glasses of champagne and don't remember much of the night after. I danced. I played foosball. I kissed a man on the mouth. I grabbed my shovel and dug a fairly large hole in the backyard, for reasons unknown to myself and every other creature on this earth.

I woke up with what feels like a resurgence of strep throat and I didn't leave the house all day. Who knows what will happen tomorrow.