So it’s New Year’s Eve again.

I’ve been wracking my brains for a couple of days, trying to come up with something to say about the year just ending, but honestly, I don’t know how to begin. The Year of Our Lord Two-Thousand-and-Twelve was traumatic and evolutionary and life-changing, a real personal watershed for me… but it was also mundane and filled with tedium and really kind of a blur. A lot of big things happened right at the start of the year, and then after that it seems like I spent months and months doing nothing but working and commuting. Everything changed for me in 2012, and yet… not a lot actually happened. Or so it seems today from behind my rolltop desk in my home office, surrounded by the wrapping-paper-and-empty-box detritus of another holiday season, as I struggle to find some kind of introspective hook for an entry I feel obligated — but not especially inspired — to write.

I guess that’s part of the problem I’m having with getting started. It’s not just that I don’t know what to say. I’ve also lost much of my impetus for blogging, I think. Looking back, I can see a slow but steady drop in the number of entries I’ve been managing to post, month by month, over the past couple of years. And the posts I have been making have been less substantive, too. Lots of photos and video clips lately. And even though I always try to throw in at least a couple paragraphs of commentary when I do those quick ‘n’ easy photo-and-video posts — something to provide some “value add,” as the corporate types would say — well, they’re still just photos and videos. Aside from a very small handful of entries, I don’t feel like I’ve written much this year that’s really worth reading.

It’s not that I’ve lost interest in blogging. I certainly haven’t run out of potential subject matter. I encounter at least one or two items every day that I’d like to post about. But as always, I have trouble finding the time to do it. At least the time to do it the way I want to do it, which is at length and well-written and somehow meaningful, and not just “look at this thing I saw online.” (Not that there’s anything wrong with “look at this” posts — that’s how blogging started, after all — but I want to do more than just those, you know? Facebook and Tumblr and all those other social network/microblogging sites are tailor-made for the “look at this” thing. Simple Tricks ought to be… well, more.) I follow several prolific bloggers who either post several times a day, or post lengthy items a couple times a week, and just about everything they write is actually about something. Their stuff has value and insight, and reads like the best journalism or op-ed pieces, or criticism or memoir. That’s what I want to do here. I want to contribute something worthwhile to the conversation. But honestly I just don’t know how they do it, unless they’re unemployed and have no other hobbies or interests whatsoever. Because I sure as hell can’t seem to find enough hours in the day to handle all the myriad projects I want to do over and above the chores of ordinary life, and still manage to express myself here, too. To be honest, most days I feel like I’m just barely holding my shit together at the subsistence level, and I don’t have the energy to take on anything else. Stupid dayjob. Stupid commute. Stupid me.

There’s something even more frustrating than feeling like I don’t have time, though, and that’s the feeling that, even when I do find a free moment, I’m no longer up to doing the job. Some days, like today, I have trouble getting started. More frequently, I have trouble finishing. Yeah, yeah, I know… insert the “not uncommon for a man your age” joke here. But I’m seriously troubled about this. I fear that my focus is shot, or I can’t summon the Muse anymore or something. The words just don’t come the way they used to. Well, that’s not quite right… it’s more like I can sense them floating in space around me, but I only seem able to gather so many of them together before they all spring out of my grasp again. To put it less metaphorically, I can no longer easily articulate what it is I’m trying to say, at least not to my satisfaction, so I find myself flailing away at entries, trying to figure out how to make them better and feeling instead like my ideas are growing more and more diffuse the longer I spend with them… and then the window of opportunity passes and the entries start to feel like last week’s fish wrappings, so I just abandon them, unfinished and unfulfilled. And that frustrates the hell out of me. And then the frustration tends to ferment down into ennui. Yes, that’s right, blogging depresses me these days. And that just makes it all the harder to do any of it.

There are times when I wonder why I’m still bothering to try.

But as I’ve said before, blogging is about the only writing I still do, and if I give up on even this… god, I just can’t contemplate that. I’ve identified myself as a writer for so, so many years. To let go of this final vestige of what I used to think was my destiny… it’d be like losing one of the lobes of my brain or something.

And now I see that I’ve killed an hour writing about how I can’t seem to get writing, and it’s time to go start getting ready for this evening’s festivities. Typical. Exactly what I’ve been trying to express.

Happy New Year, everyone. See you on the other side…

I just snuck out of the office for a few minutes and went downstairs to Kneaders, a local chain of cafe/bakeries that pours a decent cup of joe. We do have good, fresh coffee available in copious amounts here on the 13th Floor — of course we do, we’re an ad agency; this place would grind to a shuddering, miserable halt without a steady supply of java — but sometimes a change of scenery and a little variation in flavor can be just as stimulating as the dose of caffeine itself, you know? I usually pop down there once a week or so, or sometimes if I’m feeling a little more ambitious, I’ll hike a little farther to Starbucks or Beans and Brews or even the Roasting Company. But today it was just straight down to the food court my new office building looms above, and into Kneaders.

For a simple coffee (as opposed to an espresso or one of the froofy-type coffee drinks), the process at Kneaders is pretty much self-serve. I bought my paper cup at the counter, then walked over to the soda fountain/condiment area and poured my own from the big pump pots there. Since I was indulging in “outside coffee,” I went ahead and added a generous splash of half-and-half, and a couple packets of Splenda, and then… I couldn’t find anything to stir the mixture. None of those little red things that resemble miniature straws, no wooden swizzle sticks. The only tools available seemed to be the plastic flatware offered for people who buy food there. So I pulled out a knife, circled it through my coffee a couple times, and was just lifting my hand to chuck the used knife down the garbage hole when something occurred to me.

About 140 million years ago, some dinosaur dropped dead in a swamp somewhere and decomposed into organic sludge, which then sat unmolested in a rock stratum for eons until some enterprising little bipedal mammals sucked it out of the ground and rendered it into this knife, which I then used for exactly three twists of my wrist before preparing to discard it forever. And suddenly the weight of all that time and energy and effort collapsed down around me like the gallons of hot molten marshmallow that enveloped the dickish EPA guy at the end of Ghostbusters, and I… I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t throw away that unremarkable sliver of black plastic, not after the thought that all that potential added up to such a pathetically brief action.

So I kept it. And I brought it back up the elevator with me. And now it’s sitting on the side of my desk, silently mocking me and my oftentimes ridiculously overdeveloped sense of responsibility for, well, everything…

I love it when you special order an item from your local retailer — because you’re cool about supporting your community that way — and you arrange with the guy to call your cellphone when this item comes in, rather than the home phone number that’s listed in your account, because the item is supposed to be a gift for your cohabiting significant other and you don’t want to blow the Christmas-morning surprise. And then what happens? You find a message on the house phone this morning telling you that your item has arrived and can be picked up anytime, and oh, by the way, just in case you don’t remember what you ordered only a few days ago, let me tell you exactly what it is. In this message that may be heard by the cohabiting significant other for whom the item is supposed to be a gift. Rather than the private message to your cell, as we agreed upon.

Good thing I got to the house phone first this morning, isn’t it?

If you haven’t been reading a web comic/blog called Zen Pencils, you really ought to check it out. I discovered it this past summer — you may recall that I reposted one of its cartoons back in July, if you can really apply such a pedestrian term as “cartoon” to these wonderful works of art — and since then it seems like it’s only gotten better and better. The artist is a chap named Gavin Aung Than, and what he does is take a quotation or a poem or some portion of a great speech, and then he illustrates it. The results are usually charming, occasionally brilliant, and often deeply moving. Here’s one that brought me to tears: I’ve never before encountered this poem, never heard of Charles Hanson Towne, but the lines about life being “a swift and terrible race” and “now we are busy, tired men” resonate terribly with my own preoccupations and resentments. Add in Than’s simple, evocative, and beautiful art… well, I thought this piece was one of the truest and most heartbreaking things I’ve ever run across. I’d seriously consider buying a print of this if (a) I didn’t already have scads of artwork needing to be framed and hung up, and (b) I thought I could look at this every day without feeling cold fingers flicker across my heart…  absolutely devastating.

Original source here.