I’m having a terrible time with any sort of communication these days. I can’t seem to get a blog entry finished (I have at least a half dozen started). I’m not able to maintain an IM session for more than a few flirty comments. I’m not responding to email. I’m not able to maintain a conversation in SMS text.

I’m feeling sad and angry and withdrawn, and finding no good outlet for all this.

Part of it’s simple logistics. I just picked up a stack of new responsibilities at work – basically, I wound up the defacto owner of every major internal web site for all of my company’s hardware engineering organization. I didn’t exactly mean to do that, but once it started to pick up momentum in my direction, I wasn’t gonna stop it. But I’m having to un-do a lot of very bad work that contractors did, in a hurry. The goal is to eventually get this all into a content management system, but god knows how long THAT will take. So I’m suddenly a web monkey and having to figure out the basics of fucking css.

This is on top of my existing job; so now in effect I have two.

So that’s part of it. I just got an order of magnitude busier. I woke up thinking, not about my morning coffee or about what I’d like to be doing to some nasty little slut or about what I was gonna do with my weekend. I woke up thinking about fucking css and all the work I have to do.

But it’s more than that. I feel defeated in some way. I feel things in my life slipping away from me, people slipping away. And I feel like my own ability to communicate is going with all this.

I need to write. I need to create and communicate. Words are my tools, my way of knowing my universe, and when my command of language slips, I feel as if I’m disconnected.

I keep flashing on the last shot in the last episode of firefly; Jubal Early spinning in space, isolated and utterly alone in the universe, insulated by the thin skin of his space suit. And he says – “Well, here I am.” Like nothing matters so much.

For the first time in I can’t remember how many years, I got up this morning and didn’t check my email first thing. I get about 100 automated reports and notices every night, system statuses, database backup reports, disk space checkers. Same stuff every day. I always log in and check email first thing, in case something has gone badly haywire. And because, almost always, I have some conversation going with someone. And today I didn’t even open email until I’d made coffee, had some breakfast, settled four kid fights, looked at the usual morning news web sites.

I knew there was nothing but bad news in email. Bad news and empty silence. Well, here I am.

I need to fucking do something.