Not that I’d blame you for assuming so, given the utter paucity of activity around here lately. Remember when this blog was a happening place and jasonbennion.com was on the verge of exploding into a world-dominating brand that would be spoken of in the farthest corners of the InterWebs for years to come? No? Me neither. Even so, I deeply regret that I’m no longer able to find the time or energy to blog regularly. It’s been long enough since my last entry, for example, that there are probably virtual tumbleweeds blowing down the main street of downtown Simple Tricks, or at least there would be if we experienced cyberspace as an actual environment with “buildings” and such, the way William Gibson first imagined it way back in the ’80s. Not to put too melodramatic a spin on the situation, but with the slow diminishing of my output here, I honestly feel like the last vestige of my self-identity as a writer — a notion I’ve carried around since the eighth grade, more or less — is finally slipping through my fingers. But then I’ve been thinking lately that a lot of things I used to take for granted are slipping away…

Eh, don’t mind me. I’ve just entered another one of those periodic phases when it feels like somebody’s cranked the treadmill up to 11 and my limbs are flopping around like the Wizard of Oz‘s Scarecrow doing a jig, and I’m about three steps away from losing my footing and going flat on my face. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably noticed this happens every year around this time. The production cycle at my dayjob always picks up toward the end of summer, leading to days (and occasional late nights) of constant, urgent activity that leave me utterly drained. It’s just dumb, bad luck that this uptick coincides with my annual melancholy over my birthday and the changing of the season; the slightly frantic feeling I get as I try to cram in a last few summertime activities while the weather holds; the nagging disappointment in myself for things I should’ve done when I was young and now fear I never will; and of course that weird, rootless sensation I still experience, even after all two and a half decades away from it, because it’s time to be heading back to school and I’m not going. You stir all this together and you end up with a big old bowl of frustration and sadness.

Maybe I wouldn’t have such a hard time with all this stuff if it didn’t seem like so many of my friends and coworkers are privy to some secret that’s apparently been denied me. They all have jobs and commutes and obligations, too, and yet somehow they also manage to keep their houses clean and cook fabulous meals and host parties and exercise and enjoy hobbies and participate in causes. They find the time to go back to school and garden and make things, and some of them — many of them — create art or play a musical instrument or become highly skilled in some craft. Sometimes all of the above. They’re interesting people who appear to be living good lives. Oh, and some of them are even raising kids. And still they manage to pull it all together. Compared to them, I’m a tremendous failure at this life thing.

Hell, I can’t even keep the kitchen sink free of dirty dishes, let alone accomplish anything really worthwhile. I haven’t written fiction in longer than I care to admit. I haven’t yet sorted or posted the photographs from my Hawaiian cruise clear back in February… or any of my other trips for the last several years. The Girlfriend has been living with me for eight months and we still haven’t gotten all of her stuff out of the storage unit we rented in January. I have a list of half-finished projects as long as my forearm, some of them dating back to the mid-90s. Oh, and that movie I mentioned in the last entry, Son of Kong? That was the first feature-length DVD I’ve managed to get through in a single sitting in months. And it’s only 70 minutes long! So much for my hobby as the great film buff.

When I think about all these things, then consider how many of my days consist only of commuting to my dayjob, working my dayjob, traveling home from my dayjob, eating dinner, and collapsing for the night without managing to get a damn thing done for myself… well, I just can’t believe it’s like this for everyone. I’m doing something wrong, but I’m damned if I can figure out what it is. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not just plain damned.

So, yeah, not dead yet… but I’m not sure you can really call this living, either…