Fingers threa’t dark with wine and blood

In which our Hero clenches sticky fists and stares through the wall

I’m here. Kind of.

I’ve been having trouble reading. I’ve been having trouble keeping up, and feeling deeply burdened by the standards I set for myself in trying to read. I’ve got favourites who have been neglected as far back as months.

And slowly, I found myself losing my voice. The words are there, and frequently sentences too, but I’d sit to write and entry and the point would leave, the impulse would disintegrate. There has been no flow.

Without reading, without writing, without words, what’s left of Serinus Serinus Jack? Beats me. Except that it’s one more eroded edge, pulled in and difficult to re extend.

I’m simultaneously experiencing exultant success and crippling self-discovery. I’m trying to save all of this for next winter so I can have a very successful midlife crisis, but apparently my mind is impatient, even if my voice is dessicated from lack of use.

This diary is my lifeline. It is an outboard sanity, and to fail to use it or some equivalent is to fail at being me, in some ways. I’m aware of that too, because some of my worst times are come contemperaneously with that deep withdrawn internalization.

But I’m alive.

And I’ve been here, sort of. Lurking. Just a little.

To my favourites and to you Gentle Reader, I apologize for my silence. I could have explained sooner, perhaps, but I didn’t know what it was. And I didn’t know I had a plan till I did some random stuff and decided to call it a plan just so I could feel like it was a controlled choice. Mostly the plan was a date on a calendar. Fine, Jack. You can’t write, then embrace the suck and make the silence yours. And on the appointed day, I could come back all triumphant.

But a few quiet nudges and I’m once again conscious of being apart from friends. And that seems a silly place to be and so here I am.

Kind of.

Feel free to tell me things you’d have me know. But I’m just planning to start reading again.

And as for me, not much to catch up on. Not nearly enough. There is an apocryphal story of a weatherman who made better forecasts than all his colleagues without using the radars or the computers or anything. And all he’d say, every day, was this:

“Same as yesterday.”