I don’t blog much anymore

Because the work involved in getting to the point these days is so intensive that I choose not to, ever. Get to the point. The places there are to post a good rant these days. In a hot bright flash I feel I could hit you with all the clarity in the world. All of the why. And then I sit down and when it comes to the end I keep thinking there’s a better way to arrive there. More punch in a better closing sentence somewhere. I think, I’ll never post this shit. And then a new thing happens along and inspires a new rant that again there is not the time in the world to properly detail. We are so stuck in our own heads. The best you can do to get in another’s is catalog their behavior well enough to maybe predict what’s next. But by then you’re already trying to amend them. To contribute your external little bit on self improvement. Because I love you, you say. And already their minds are onto something else. They’ve gotten away from you. Maybe if you had all of the time in the world you might construct more punch in your better closing statement. Everything moving around you so quickly that one day it occurs how little you’ve come to control.

I lost my phone last night. But not before I drowned it. Seventy-one unread messages at last glance and four inboxes that I mostly avoid. Plus all of my call history is red. The fact is I constantly look for little places to leave it and there are plenty to go around. One more voice disconnected from a face and I might just shut the thing down completely. That’s always the threat anyway. But then I find myself needing it. For navigation. For time. Occasionally for a light to read by. But to communicate? No. I’m caught up in that generation that learned to communicate in the open. I grew up in a place where phones were connected to walls and people agreed to meet at landmarks in public places. I can’t quite shake it off. So when I tossed the phone yesterday into a plastic bag that was hauling the things we’d acquired—the show souvenirs and the playbook and the bottled waters and ticket stubs—it wasn’t really anything to me that the water cap twisted open and we lost it all. What is it we say? That these things happen? There’s not much else that applies quite as hopelessly and resignedly as this. How has it better been said? Shit happens. And then I lost it, walking around there shaking the water out from the crevices, the piece colder than I’d ever felt it before. Technical little corpse. I must have set it somewhere, or let it slip. But wouldn’t we have heard a phone clattering on pavement, sober as we were, unexcitable. What’s the difference with a piece like that. Dead in the water. All I keep remembering is that I learned how to talk into a handset twirling the cord around my thumb.

And now the situation of today has come around to the simple responsibility just to move. To get out and do something. Walk the dog. Buy a phone. Blog about it all. I used to cry if I was stuck inside on a Saturday. Cry if the blinds were ever closed against the daylight. Cry if there were too many days straight of weather good enough to keep me from taking a break. My favorite days are grey and wet when I am sick. The need is for some real plausible and agreeable reason to shut down under a blanket and shut off. I need to not have to explain it; need for you to look at the circumstances too and arrive at the same conclusion, back me up, come to the same strong closing thought that spits necessity into the cause.

But the sun is out, as it has been. My phone is a drown victim sitting some place in yesterday. The dog is old enough to know how to put her will on a thing, wrap me around her like a cord. And the blog. You could say it’s done. But on the same breath you’d have to concede that there were a million ways I could have ended it better than this.