I said a week or so ago that I didn’t feel like I’d written much on this blog in the past year that’s worth reading. Well, I’ve since decided that maybe I was being a little too harsh on myself, as I so often tend to be. After actually reviewing my output in 2012, I still think I’ve been off my game, both in terms of quantity and quality, compared to the Good Old Days when blogging was a novelty, and everything in the world was fresh and golden. The last few months, when a Friday Evening Video every couple of weeks has been the best I could manage, were especially disappointing. Nevertheless, though, I did find a few entries I think are worth reminding people of. Many of these aren’t so great stylistically, i.e., in terms of the actual writing, but I’m including them anyhow because I admire their honesty, or they contain a good image, or I simply want to remember the events they mention:

• My dad makes me laugh first thing in the morning: Just Say No to Anti-Freeze, Kids
• My dad imparts some fatherly wisdom: The Hardest Thing
• I tilt at one of my favorite windmills: What If You Went to the Bottom of the Sea and Nobody Cared?
• I admit to my shameful flirtation with the art of Thomas Kinkade (forgive me, I was young): I Have a Confession
• Roger Ebert inspires some existential ruminations: “Remember”
• I observe the centenary of the Titanic disaster: 100 Years… and We Still Haven’t Let Go
• I recount some bad behavior: Road Rage: A Case Study
• I remember this one girl I knew in college: The Girl with the Grey Eyes… and a Friday Evening Video
• I get lucky with a blind DVD purchase: Sunday Morning Movie Review: Stay Hungry
• I try to make sense of the senseless: Aurora
• I memorialize my home-away-from-home for the past seven years: Moving Day
• I say farewell to a hero: In Memoriam: Neil Armstrong
• I feel pride for myself and my Girlfriend: Little Victories
• I reminisce about obsolete media: Cassette Memories
• Progress makes me sad: And the World Keeps Moving On…
• Aging and health problems make me sad: Forty-Three
• Weird side effects make me sad: It’s the Little Things I Miss…
• And lastly, I ponder the humble plastic knife: I Think Too Much

And with that, let’s close the books on 2012 and move on to some new business, shall we?

I have no idea if my annual recounting of everything I read and viewed in the past 12 months is of the slightest interest to anyone, but I find it useful to keep track of these things for my own purposes — damn aging memory! — and I can’t think of any better place to enshrine my handwritten notes more or less permanently, so…

***TEXT MISSING***

Okay, yesterday’s entry went off down a rabbit hole I did not intend to visit. Sorry about that.

Getting back to what should have been the topic — the year just ended — I wrote yesterday that 2012 was “traumatic and evolutionary and life-changing, a real personal watershed for me… ” Sounds like a moment in time that ought to be recorded in some fashion, so let’s at least jot down the highlights, shall we?

• The year began with my dad having emergency surgery to remove his gallbladder, followed by complications that led to a week in the hospital.
• The Girlfriend moved in with me.
• I was diagnosed with Type II diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. In other words, I officially hit middle age. Yay, me.
• The GF and I went on a Hawaiian cruise with her parents.

(Note that all of those events happened within a month of each other, and the latter three within just a couple weeks of each other.)

• While still recovering from his surgery and hospital stay, Dad turned an unfinished basement space into a master bedroom for Anne and me, nearly single-handed. (That’s a story I really need to chronicle one of these days… and for the record, I’ve officially abandoned any hope of ever being as competent, useful, and all-round manly as my old man.)
• My employer relocated to a shiny, new, upscale building in a shiny, new, upscale neighborhood.
• And just before my 43rd birthday, I had all four of my wisdom teeth removed, only about 25 years later than they should have been. For the record, I opted to do it the macho way with only a local anesthetic, so I remained aware of pretty much everything the oral surgeon was doing. I could still feel my mouth, it just didn’t hurt. (For the record, the crack of a tooth breaking free of the jaw is… unsettling.) So I guess I’ve got that on my dad.

Oh, and somewhere in the midst of all that, I attended my annual Rick Springfield concert, drove solo across the Nevada desert to see my dad put his ’56 Nomad through its paces at a car show, and just a week ago took The Girlfriend to see Donny and Marie Osmond. And last but not least, I also met Carrie Fisher… yes, that Carrie Fisher, the actress, screenwriter, novelist, advocate for mental-health issues, and once-and-future space princess of my adolescent dreams. Weirdly enough, she reminded me a lot of my mom. Another story I really need to tell someday.

Now, when I refer to those events as traumatic, I don’t necessarily mean they were bad. Anne moving in with me, for instance, was not remotely bad. Which isn’t to say we haven’t been through some rough spots as we’ve tried to figure out this cohabitation thing — we’re human, after all, and at our, ahem, somewhat advanced stage of life, we’re both very set in our respective ways — but overall, it’s been a unquestionably good thing. (I’ll also stipulate that it’s long, long overdue — I’m embarrassed to admit publicly just how long we’ve been a couple without taking the big step forward of sharing quarters — and that the delay was almost entirely my fault.) The Hawaii trip wasn’t bad either, except in the sense of bad timing, coming as it did mere days after my health problems were revealed, as well as taking place under some somewhat odd circumstances. (I really ought to write about this whole experience as well; it wasn’t just Anne’s folks we were traveling with, but an entire busload of senior citizens from their community, a social club known as the “Senior Circle.” Needless to say, this trip was quite a bit different from my usual way of traveling.) And even the revelations about my health, as shocking and depressing as they were, ultimately had a silver lining because the steps I’ve taken to avoid having a stroke have also left me looking and feeling a lot better than I have in years, and who can complain about that? (Well, it is kind of a drag to find that many of my favorite clothes are now too big for me, but given a choice between a beloved concert t-shirt and not having a stroke, guess which one wins?)

The thing about these events that made them so traumatic is that they all felt so… mature. They were Grown-Up Things. The sort of Very Grown-Up Things that only a real Grown-Up would face, or would be expected to face, or could effectively deal with. And being a grown-up is something I’ve frankly never been very comfortable with. The sad truth is I’ve spent decades trying to ignore the inescapable reality that I am an adult, and sooner or later, I was always going to have to face adult concerns and responsibilities. However, health problems, suddenly grokking that your parents are getting old, moving forward with a relationship… hell, even going on a cruise instead of a half-assed, spur-of-the-moment road trip… it was like I’d suddenly been promoted to a higher level than I’d been playing at previously. That would’ve been pretty unsettling if it only happened once in any given year, but for all of these things to happen in that timeframe? And many of them within only one month? That’s where the trauma comes in.

I’ve done a lot of thinking since all this started, and the one point I keep coming back to is that I’ve wasted a huge amount of time waiting for my life to begin. You know, that syndrome where you keep saying, someday I’ll do this; when I get my shit together, I’ll do that; one of these days when I grow up… And of course the sad irony is that my life was in fact already underway, whether I understood that or not. I did understand it, in an intellectual sense at least, but I don’t think I really, truly believed it. I didn’t want to, because being a grown-up and having a life — no, making a life — is bloody hard work, man, and I just wanted to play as long as I could. But then came the morning my doctor clapped his hand on my shoulder and said, “You’re a ticking time-bomb, man.” At that moment, suddenly I got it. This is it, and everything I’ve done (or not done) has consequences, and I’ve reached the age where those consequences are becoming apparent.

The consequences are these: I’m not the man I used to think I was, or was going to be by this point in my life. I’m not a globetrotting adventurer, and I’m not a bestselling novelist. I’m not especially tough, and I’m a hell of a long way from self-reliant or self-confident. I’m not any of the things I always just kind of assumed I would naturally evolve into. (Yes, I know how naive and ridiculous that sounds; that’s basically the point I’m trying to make here.) What I am is inescapably, irrefutably middle-aged, halfway through the marathon, a bit run down and neglected, and as a result, in need of a lot of renovation work. I’m broken in quite a few significant ways. I get my feelings hurt easily and I worry too much about what others think of me. And I’ve made a crapload of mistakes, not the least of which is refusing to make choices because I was so afraid of making the wrong one and becoming trapped in a place I would later decide I didn’t want to be. I think I have a fair shot of repairing or undoing some of these mistakes. But a lot of them are done deals, written in stone. It is what it is, as my man Rick would say. And somehow I’ve got to learn to live with the frustration and shame and self-recrimination that comes with realizing you’ve been a real dolt, and there’s very little you can do about it now.

I’ve been fretting about indecision and aging and “what I’m going to be when I grow up” for a long time. But during this past year, these things took on a new solidity and urgency. Because… this is it, man. This is my life.

So, yeah, 2012… it was quite a year.

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.

This morning before work, I was reading a year-old Vanity Fair article about the discovery of a cache of Ernest Hemingway’s never-before-published correspondence in his old house in Cuba, which the Cuban government has maintained all these decades since his death as a virtual time capsule/shrine/museum. An interesting story, to be sure, but there was one odd little detail mentioned in passing about Papa’s house that caught my eye:

The connecting bathroom had a doctor’s scale, and on one of the walls, Hemingway had recorded his weight daily. It ranged from 242 pounds on February 21, 1955, to 190 1/2 pounds five years later.

As it happens, those numbers are almost identical to my own weight readings over the past year. That’s neither here nor there, of course, but considering the way I used to identify with Hemingway in my younger days — aside from his final bit with the shotgun, and the fact that he actually wrote fiction instead of just talking about it, the way I do — well, it struck me as an interesting coincidence…

I saw this pic of an “insulin cupcake” on Boing Boing a few days ago, and it’s kind of haunted me ever since:

I’m fortunate not to require insulin myself — I’ve got my case of the ‘betes pretty well controlled with only two pills a day, watching what I eat, and taking an afternoon walk — but my relationship with food has changed irrevocably since my diagnosis, and this picture is a good metaphor for the new paradigm. I am now extremely conscious of everything that goes in my mouth, and every decision I make about food requires a careful cost-benefit analysis. Hell, the mere fact that there is a decision to make is a major adjustment. It used to be somebody at work would offer me a donut or a cupcake, and I’d take it and enjoy it without the slightest worry. But nowadays my answer to “Would you like a… ?” has become an automatic “Yes, but…” I can no longer even look at desserts without feeling a twinge of dread. Rich chocolate cake has assumed an ominous air, pecan pie seems downright treacherous, and I just know the Oreos are plotting against me. And it’s not just sweets, either. I approach white-flour pasta with the same trepidation as pistols at dawn, potatoes may as well be radioactive these days, and I shy away from umbrella drinks as if they were made out of the same green-glowing sludge that transformed Jack Nicholson into the Joker.

In short, I don’t find a lot of comfort in my comfort foods any more. It’s not that I can’t eat the things I’ve always loved. I can, at least once in a while. But I can’t do it with joyful carelessness anymore. Now food is freighted with consequences. It always was, of course, which is why I’m in this mess to begin with, but now I’m aware of them in a way I didn’t have to be before. I am hyperaware of them, actually, as well as the knowledge that I’ll have to adjust something else later in the day to compensate for what I do now. For me, the pleasures of eating have been blunted by anxiety. And I fear that’s never going to change… ever. This is who I am now.

I hate it.

I gotta be honest, I don’t get really “get” Thanksgiving. I like the four-day weekend, of course, and the pies — honestly, I could take or leave most of the traditional Thanksgiving-day foods, except for the pie — but the day itself has always seemed like kind of a second-tier holiday to me, really just a placeholder between the far more significant Halloween and Christmas, and nowadays of course nothing more than a prelude to the insanity of Black Friday shopping. And my personal history with it has not always been… good. And then there’s the ritual that seems to have sprung up of people publicly announcing online all the things for which they’re thankful, manifested most recently on Facebook as daily postings, one item a day, throughout the month of November. Um, yeah. That’s not really me either.

Even so, I would like to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving, and I hope when you sit down at your respective dinner tables, you do find some meaning in it all…

(Extra credit if you get the meaning of that image!)