I was deeply inspired what seems a lifetime ago by a writer who for some reason thought I was a decent read. I reread a couple of his posts tonight for old-time’s sake, loved them, said so, and then reading through the comments saw that I had already expressed my love for them when they were written and posted in 2018. I laughed when I saw my alter, alter ego–the 3rd (?) iteration of me. Why I hold on to nothing and resurface now and then like a turtle in a pond is a mystery. I try not to read too deeply into myself. Not much good comes of it.

Writing is different for me now, mostly because I have no time for anything but an occasional blurb in response to a prompt that catches my eye. Prompts are easier for me to write a response to than for me to follow up on an original thought. I feel like I’ve run out of those. In fact, that occurrence, the one when all the ideas were used up, likely happened millennia ago and the ideas keep reincarnating and mixing around with other stuff in people’s brains to make new ideas that have also come and gone. All of everything has been written already. It’s just most of the words have been forgotten. Or they’re in books I haven’t read. There are a lot of those, some of which are in a stack on the shelf over there under the ones I’ve reread multiple times. Whatever the case, deep, existential thoughts evade me.

My efforts have detoured the past few years, the last two in a similar direction those efforts took two decades ago when I pursued deep thoughts of a different nature. Ones that require lots of weird math. This blog has been my attempt to hold onto the writer in me. But the space has become an occasional, quick escape. Makes me sad. But time is a thief, and I have so little of the bits between later and now when all the big stuff happens, like work and life-altering events, that writing seems wasteful use of my time. I’ve reached an age when everything I do matters because the clock is ticking faster. I remind myself I have a good 40 years left provided genetics and avoidance of major disasters holds up. That’s almost a second half of life, one whole chunk of time nearly equal to what I have already lived. But less happens in the second half, which makes the clock more noticeable. The ticking is louder these days, and life is slipping by. Do I have time for the tiny details anymore? My sense of urgency to fit the expectations I have for my life in the next four decades overshadows the whimsical world I once lived in my head. Social media has replaced brain space I reserved for the reinvented original ideas I once conjured. I don’t like that word, conjured. I feel its meaning has been altered, though it hasn’t really. I have just allowed it to lean toward a more sinister meaning, the consequence of being led astray by mindless entertainment. Media has contributed to the bastardization of word-craft. Memes have replaced prose, condensing ideas to a single image. We immediately absorb what was once savored, then scroll to the next random (or not so random) tidbit that an algorithm has decided would entertain us. My attention span is not what it was once, and that has had a profound effect on how I spend my leisure time. Hence the neglected stack of unread books under the stack of read ones that, themselves, are gathering dust. It’s not really that I don’t have time for them, it’s that I choose to give in to the instant gratification of social media. Soon I’ll forget my words altogether.

I miss my writer friend who helped me nurture them. I think he has slipped into the ether. Or is buried in a book. Not writing where I can find him, anyway. Who will inspire me now? I need to read those books. I need to reread Bluebeard.