What a pleasant surprise! Missed your writings!
Missed you sir!
Why, thank you!
I got a little, um... shall we say mentally ill for a while there... no, not officially... but, I dunno... hard to explain. Basically, I became convinced most if not all here decided I wasn't worth communicating with... I think having worked remotely so long - plus the year+ of COVID insanity - did a sort of "frog boil" on me.....
COVID-related mental illness is very much a thing, and it will be interesting to see what happens to people once the world fully "opens up."
I want to say COVID played a sort of "black icing" on a couple-decade-old, increasingly fly-infested "work remotely cake". I've had far too much screen in my mental diet for far too long.
Another thing I realized is I'm more of what might be called the "longform tribe". So whereas those of a contrasting "shortform tribe" might love the heck out of txt messages and other assorted little blips/bursts of textural splatter, I nearly lose my mind attempting to navigate such - to me - context-less terrain. The blips seem not much more than sharp shards I mostly cut my ankles against than actually get any-communicative-where traversing.
While I'll of course miss places like this (especially the really quality long(er)form pieces), I want to get to the point where I truly don't even remember these screen-y portals to context-starved madness ever existed, happily perusing bookstores as though hunting beach gems again.
Well, and of course reading them.... :-)
In related news, I never really needed to know what most others thought anyway - not so much because I don't respect their opinions, but for just plain not having the mental capacity. Overloading my mind with lo-context-fi "burnt kernels" seems to bake its circuitry into a sort of silicon coma, culminating in a rather short queue (software sense) where it's all I can do to quickly browse the surfaces of its contained elements as yet another incoming pushes one I almost maybe sorta kinda grasped out the queue backside. I'm in a constant state of "but! but! but! but! but!..." whilst raising my hand in vain to hopefully get the attention of the element just about to go oblivion, followed by a head-down, shoulders-shrunk, face-side-to-side depression knowing I'll likely never remember that element again.
That situation is somewhat remedied when engendering sufficiently context-soaked engagement. But that's rare, and seemingly hard to find through the pixel glare - in quite stark contrast to how it is to sit in, say, a "beer garden", and leverage varieties of behaviors or stray phrases overhead (I'm a huge fan of serendipitous coincidence..) to strike up conversations causing each party to soon feel truly blessed to be alive.
I share some of your preferences, at least in terms of long-form vs. short-form. But I have to say I would miss the engagement of spaces like this were I to forego them entirely. I love reading books, don't get me wrong, but there's an inherent passivity there that means I could never subsist solely on them. Maybe if we weren't in the middle of a pandemic and I had more options for people to hang out with....
We did that last night. And it was fun. But the absolute value of the cost (not just the money) was greater than the absolute value of the fun. So, regret and such. I've likely some music to face when my wife awakens for sending her rather angrily depressing txt messages from the bathroom around 2:30am, especially knowing the alarm would go off at 6:20am, but she could sleep in. I... I... aye yi yi....
But we'll find a way. Find our way.
Or maybe not for having just said that.
<winks to those who know Murphy as personally as I>
What's really interesting about it all, though, is that such tends to be in the wake of what seems like deeper understanding, as though illusion wants to return with a gift-bearing vengeance. It's sort of an inner joke that I know I've gotten too close to what this seeming reality is when it's soon thereafter kicking my teeth in orthodontist-salivating ways.