I keep trying to come back and update.
Good fuckin’ intentions and all that.
It’s weird how I seem to be doing almost nothing, and yet feel busier than ever.
Dogs, guitars, home, health, mumble, mumble.
More coming, I swear, because why even have this thing if I don’t write?
ADHD is a hell of a thing – how did I cope with it so well for so many years without even knowing I was doing so?
At least I look good.
It’s been a weird year.
(how long has it been since it hasn’t? I don’t know that I remember that far back)
HST once said “It never got weird enough for me.”
I once would have agreed with that sentiment, but honestly these last few years, i’m it being weird. Weird isn’t as much fun as it used to be.
IN the last year i’ve seen such fun things as:
Weird, as I said.
This ain’t all bad, though certainly there’s bad in there. After leaving my job June 1, i’ve done a few things put off for years while I struggled with family issues, tried desperately to be effective at work, and generally put myself second or third in priority. Pre-pandemic, I had accumulated a long list of tattoos I wanted to get, starting with finally tattooing my neck. That all got kiboshed by pandemic, but since I have time now, i’ve finally started to get that moving, including tattoos on neck, collar bone, and calves. I’m basically filling in spaces at this point, while getting ready to do a couple big pieces.
At 61, after a 40+ lb weight loss, i’m finding my skin is finally showing age, so I feel a ticking clock on how much longer i’ll feel like tattoos will look good. There are already spots that no longer feel tattoo friendly (losing weight at 60 is ALSO weird). So i’m hoping to interconnect a lot of smaller pieces with fill-in things.
This post won’t have pictures, but i’ll follow up with them.
I’ve got two appts on the books now, and as soon as I can schedule travel, several more by tattooists in SO Cal.
I’ve also spent a great deal of time getting organized. This includes hacking through years of accumulated stuff (a family that tends toward hoarding present a physical challenge, but i’m finally winning that); i’ve consolidated two stores spaces into one, and FINALLY have my garage back to the point where I can start to remove big racks used to handle all the crap that over-flowed my kids bedrooms when they lived with me.
I’ve begin to travel, at least a bit, though there’s more of that to come, and i’m finally catching up on my own health care, getting stupid but needful tests out of the way.
What I can NOT stand to do, at this point, is be at a desk and near a computer, which has impedes my feeling that should be writing. I still have a sense of urgency, though it’s not quite clear what is urgent; I feel a ticking clock which tells me not to start things I can’t finish, though in fact I have time to finish things. Only hard physical effort relieves this feeling, so I’ve become a perpetual motion machine until fatigue poleaxes me. Tasks I can do with muscle are getting done, but the ones that need focus – despite my ADHD meds – are being avoided.
Balance eludes me, but I am pursuing it. There are things I want to do that require sitting still; I have two guitar customization projects, not to mention just playing more. I have paperwork and phone calls that similarly need focus.
But not yet. I’m mot ready for balance, so long as it’s warm outside, and the doors are off my jeep, and the dogs want to go play. Balance tomorrow, maybe.
But I owe myself posts:
Later.
it’s been a minute, as the kids say, since I’ve been here (or fucking anywhere).
I’d say sorry but who’d notice?
life fucking gets in the way. Family shit, health shit, job shit.
just, you know, shit.
details later. I’m ok, but too overwhelmed by piles of trivial stressors to get my mind back in a writing frame as yet.
to be continued at some point.
As long time readers will know, xmas eve, 2013, my friend Brandon Dawson died of an overdose.
Brandon – despite the obvious – was a kind and generous human being, and a good friend, and i’m forever grateful to him for hosting so many of my (and my friends) blogs, free.
However, his demons won out, and when he passed away, he left me locked out of our server (he’d recently updated passwords, and didn’t give them to me, or did, and I didn’t write them down). I struggled to get access to our server, but was unable to do so.
Several friends lost blogs when the server was taken down; I was lucky to be able to export all my writing from THIS blog, though I lost a few others (one that was sort of a secret, exorcising the demons and confess the sins sort of thing which is probably better gone, anyhow).
As i’ve mentioned, I was able to recover nearly 1400 entries; everything, basically. But in rebuilding all of this, i’m finding a vast number of broken links, including internal links (my direct links used to be at site/blog/archives/<title>.php, but is now site/title), lost images/songs/etc, as well as the simply outdated (links to news articles, links to now-gone blogs, etc)
All in all I had more than 1500 broken links. I’m gradually repairing all this (sometimes by deleting no longer relevant entries, sometimes by just un-linking, and going forward, sometimes updating links). But, it’s quite a bit of work.
Why do this? Well, first, broken links hurt SEO, which I am trying to improve to bring in more readers (and by more, I mean, higher single digit counts; i’m keeping expectations low here). But also, for the couple of friends who may delve into archives (Hi Liz!), broken links are annoying (and annoying for me as well).
I’m down to 1350 broken links as of this writing, but I think it’s just going to take weeks of a-few-at-a-time to get through it all, with the image posts being hardest (trying to figure out if I have the original images someplace, and then uploading, or replacing, or just un-linking).
or i’ll give up and quit dickin’ around and just wrote porn instead.
Mmm. Porn.
By the way I now have ‘subscribe’ option for new updates, when you comment, so if you’re aching to know the second I put up something new, comment and look for subscribe options.
Ah, crap, I just realized that in conversion of my old site archive to this, I seem to have lost about half my total posts.
I have it all, in a temporary blog I set up while moronosphere.com was down, but now I have the hard process of figuring out what’s missing, entry by entry, and then figuring out how to export and import just the missing stuff.
Grumble.
It may not even be worth it. As much as I hate the thought, not every one of the 1300 posts from my original blog may be so suffused with brilliance I have to have it. And all the photo links are broken, since I lost all that when Brandon died and left me locked out of our machine.
But some of it – well, at least as memories of times long ago – matters.
EDIT:
ok, not difficult at all. WordPress importer is smart enough to know what’d been uploaded already and simply bypasses.
I’ve uploaded it all, and now see all 1271 published posts (plus a shit ton of drafts).
Your homework is to go read and digest Every. Single. One.
There may be a pop quiz later.
Hey I know a few people are hitting this space. I see it in activity meters.
Unless you’re just all robots but it’s ok, you don’t have to admit it to a Turing test.
But in any case, let me know you’re here.
I’m trying to start writing something.
I’ve edited a lot over the last month, even re-wrote bits of things.
It’s been cathartic to feel it coming back, to hear narration in my head again, to refresh memory of how to create.
I’ve even got a friend asking me to write her something.
How did I used to start a piece of fiction? I frankly can’t recall. I can’t recall how to get from blank page to — that thing that happens after a blank page. That thing where words go, with purpose and meaning and intent.
I was good at this, a while ago, until I stopped being able to do it at all.
I’m doing this instead of that, an avoidant technique.
Stop stalling I say to myself. Type.
In a minute.
Meanwhile, I was successful in getting a number of friends interested in my novella, Wanton. One or two via Facebook, but maybe 20 via a post on Instagram.
The two on Facebook actually read, loved, responded. But the mass of people from Instagram, not one went beyond thanks after asking for the link.
It’s the age old creator’s problem, isn’t it. Create something for yourself, first, because audiences don’t really want to venture forth to new things, even if they ask.
Ah well. Three or four new readers is something, particularly after a decade of not having anything posted. It’s a start.
But as a reminder to myself, go listen more to friends music. Go read their books. TELL THEM you’re reading, listening. Creators need it.
It’s funny, when I started this blog, which was mumble years ago, it was utterly free. Nobody read it, nobody knew it existed apart from my friend Jen who originally hosted it.
There is a pure and complete freedom to write without any audience. I could say anything, do anything, didn’t matter.
Social media changed that – orkut, in this case. People followed a link and I gradually picked up readers, first random strangers, then later real life friends and family.
Suddenly the externalization of inner voice might be read by the people I was talking about, and I started writing to an audience, or worse, not writing because of an audience. It changed
Now, it’s come full circle. Nobody is reading; in all likelihood, they never will. So I could do what I originally started this for, howling into the void, free, honest, unfiltered,
I dunno if I’m ready for that. Or if the internet is ready. Maybe I’ll find out, though.
For the first time in at least a decade, i’ve updated the About page for this site (also linked on side bar and in menus, here here here, oh, everywhere, as the Genie said.
You should read it, it’s unimaginably brilliant. Really.
Also, on the off chance that anyone is reading out there, I really appreciate comments. You don’t have to use a real email and i’m definitely not saving anyone’s emails; that shit’s just there to ward off spam comments (which, despite nobody reading, I still get a cubic fuckton of daily).
Well, today I more or less announced myself as a writer in Facebook.
which won’t be big news for the people who used to read this space, or for the very few who have read my fiction, but in the modern, post blogosphereera world of social networks, I don’t think many of the people I interact with know me as such, despite this site having been linked from FB and Instagram for years.
but after completing a marathon revision session on my novella Wanton, I both needed acknowledge my own progress, fighting back from years of feeling unable, as well as, I’ll admit it, hoping somebody would go read it. I don’t work in a vacuum well; I’ve always needed an audience to write for, or at least hoped my work would find one. So while I did t link direst to this site or to the novella in question (yet), I am hoping I get a hit or two and somebody says, I’d like to read that.
One thing that’s changed since I wrote this is the need to trigger warning it; I never before felt I needed to label my work, despite it being largely erotic, because I consider Wanton, at least, to be fiction, a love story, rather than a wank-piece. It may get you aroused, and I hope it does, but the intent is to tell a story about two characters in an obsessive, destructive relationship. It’s about the people, not about what they may do.
but, the story is filled with blood, pain, come, drugs and both physical and emotional harm. The last two people I shared it with pre-edit, I didn’t warn, and I think it gut-punched them in different ways.
going forward, then, it has warnings.