June 29, 2006

• What am I up to?

  Hmmmm.  I was typing my title before I saw the double entendre in
  it.  “Up to,” in the lexicon where I grew up, can mean either,
  “capable of,” or, “engaged in.”  In the latter of those two
  senses, there is a connotation of subterfuge, nefariousness, or at
  least ulterior motives.  Mama would frequently ask me what I was
  up to, and she wasn’t asking if I felt motivated or energetic enough
  for something.  She was trying to get me to make my subtext
  overt.  It was in that subtextual sense that I meant my tagline
  today, even though the other sense has been an underlying theme in my
  last few days’ entries.

  Some of my readers may have noticed that I was largely absent from
  Xanga for a while.  This weak (that was a typo, but I decided to
  leave it — it could be a Freudian typo), I have been forcing myself to
  sit here each day and grind out a blog entry.  Uninspired, I was
  writing about what has been on my mind.  It is mostly stuff I
  don’t particularly want to discuss, or even think about any more, since
  I’ve already thought it to pieces.  Much of the writing was
  stream-of-consciousness, just a little dipperful out of the current
  flow.

  I understand my motivations in slacking off on the blogging.  It
  was more a matter of engaging my mind elsewhere, than it was one of
  avoiding this occupation.  After months of occasional desultory
  play on Disgaea, a game I’d mastered and with which I’d become bored, I
  let Doug persuade me to start a new one, Phantom Brave.  That was
  more challenging and engaging, more interesting and fun, for a
  while.  It wasn’t until that addictive play began to wind down
  that I managed to drag myself back to the keyboard.

  The motivations that led me to drag myself back here are more
  complex.  I felt that I’d started something and it wasn’t right to
  just let it dangle.  I saw it as an already monumental investment
  of time and attention that would come to nothing if I didn’t continue
  working on it.  And, of course, with the initial novelty and
  challenge having worn off the new game, I needed something different to
  do and I wasn’t quite up to doing the physical work that needs to be
  done around here. 

  It is quite possible that if I had the coordination and stamina to
  undertake the house and yard work, I’d choose instead to use it to play
  Hit Man or another of the interesting-looking shooters with which Doug
  occupies himself.  Maybe, in that sense, it’s a good thing that I
  am not up to playing more interesting games and must content myself
  with these simple, relatively unchallenging and uninteresting
  pastimes.  It’s easier to drag myself out of them.

  Nagging at the back of my mind ever since I started writing my memoirs
  is the task of finishing them.  Next week (got it right on the
  first try that time), Mercury goes retrograde and it is my intention to
  get back to work on the memoirs.  That is real work.  It may not be of any intrinsic value, but it requires a definite effort. 

  Both dangling ends of my story, as I grew into my teens in the
  mid-1950s and into my thirties in the ‘seventies, were relatively
  insane times in a life not particularly noted for sanity at any
  time.  I used rationalization and denial to carry me through some
  of those times.  I have transcended the denial and rationales, but
  telling the story from my current perspective wouldn’t convey the real
  sense of what was going on then.  That’s a challenge I have met
  thus far in this memoir process by pausing occasionally for some
  retrospection and self-psychoanalysis.

  I don’t know what I’m going to do henceforth.  I’ll take it as it
  comes.  Today, this week, right now, I am revving up, shifting the
  mental gears, forcing myself back into the keyboard routine and getting
  back into letting my thoughts flow out through my fingertips. 

  If these daily stints at the keyboard don’t totally knock out all my
  stamina, I’ve got something else for these fingers to do:  Greyfox
  is down to the last 18 pairs of my earrings to sell, and it’s the start
  of the selling season, so I really need to make more earrings. 
  There’s also a backlog of readings waiting to be done, both for me and
  for Greyfox, but I don’t really want to think about that right now, and
  to judge by his responses when I bring it up, neither does Greyfox.

  Stay tuned… or not.  It’s up to you whether you read.  If
  you do read, though, and you have any feedback, any thoughts in
  response that you’d blurt out if we were talking face-to-face, gimme
  that feedback please.  I’m not asking for support or
  criticism.  When I say feedback, feedback is what I mean. 
  Whatever….

  

  

  • 2:35 pm
  • 6 Comments