Yes indeed, nothing better than looking over old emails at work to delete ones I don't need and realizing that I am occasionally a damn fine writer. Every so often I look up from my stupor of days and investigate my life, and I realize that I've lost the impulse to write. It never seemed like a big deal when I had it. I'd write long blog posts and emails and journal entries, and I was always pulling out my pocket notebook to write something down, but I very rarely wrote stories. Since that was my benchmark of being a writer, I didn't think I was doing anything worthwhile. Now I look back at how frequently I wrote in my late teens and early twenties and I wonder what the hell happened.

When I started this blog, I saw it as my responsibility to publish things in it, almost like I had been hired to write a daily column for a newspaper. My deadline was midnight every night. I could take vacations without getting prior approval, but it was on the understanding that I might lose my two or three readers.

I later learned that (a few) other people read my blog at various points but never left comments, so I didn't know it at the time. If anybody I don't know personally has read my blog, I still don't know it. Over time, though, I must have lost all of my readers, mostly to my own neglect.

I meet very few new people these days, and I've fallen out of touch with most of the old ones. I became friends with library students the first two years I was a supervisor, but in the third year, I really haven't. I don't feel a desire to hang out with people in my German class, and even if I did, they live in Albuquerque. And I get tired and misanthropic in most social settings involving more than one other person.

Writing is a famously solitary action, but that clearly isn't the whole story. Without a sense of audience, I often have no urge to write. The more time I spend alone, the less time I spend thinking and, of course, the less I have to describe anyway.

Also, I guess, as I get older I'm continuously losing my engagement with the world. My curiosity is mostly intact, but I primarily focus it on things that other people have written. I get little sense of wonder from encountering new things in the world, and indeed very little seems genuinely new. I often seemed to have an unlimited desire (but very limited ability) to observe and probe people, the way they think and speak and dress and move, the bizarre shapes their relationships with each other take, the mystery of personality. I thought about it often, but to little effect. I've been thinking about it less and less, and I don't know why it is that I no longer become fascinated with people any more.

I can still get plenty annoyed with people, though. As I type this, someone in the preceptorial that meets in the study room attached to the library is polluting my ears with his overwrought, high-pitched, percussive laughter. The sound is like an evil clown in a Saturday morning cartoon, only it has a genuine lunatic quality that cartoons can't match. I wonder if it isn't the student Anne dubbed "hyena boy".

So there, I've met my digital quota for the month. Here's hoping I keep it up tomorrow.

Last night I dreamt that M. Night Shyamalan had died in a plane crash, or perhaps it was from a horrible disease. What a tragedy it would be if we lost the worst Hollywood filmmaker of the present era (if not ever), and thus all the terrible movies he'll produce in the future. It is a great relief to check google news and find that the top Shyamalan hits are still about this historically important director being invited to the White House as a guest at the state dinner for Manmohan Singh.

fumbling toward ecstacy

Epicenters of hamhock faces:

Sports Center
Boston, MA
ex-members of Saturday Night Live
high school sports coaches
reporters for Men's Fitness
County Kerry
John Kerry
Kerry O'Malley's brother Mike O'Malley
Martine Kerry O'Michael O'Malley
McDonalds in Ohio
Ted Mc'O'Hamhock Shyamalan Kennedy
within twenty minutes of any cornfield
and, I'm sure, also in Heaven