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…