Stumbling Toward God?

It was not my intention to resume blogging regularly. I merely wanted to vent some things that I did not expect anyone to care about, so I decided to post them in a place that I did not expect anyone to read. Yet now, the idea of having more posts in the last week than in the previous six years was too good to pass up.

In the current political climate, scrolling fb just makes me angry, and say things that I regret. I basically exiled myself in disgrace after making some tasteless comments following a mass shooting. Of course, there have been so many more shootings since then, perhaps no one remembers.

I have been active on twitter for the past couple of years, but that has lost a lot of its appeal as well. I challenged myself to post something every day of 2017. I did not quite achieve a 100% success rate on that, but near enough to feel good about it. In 2018, I have not been nearly as dedicated. Partly because that community has issues of its own, but mostly because I wanted to post jokes and amusing observations, but this has been a rough year, and I am not often amused anymore.

So, for this week at least, it’s back to blogging. Going forward, who knows?

I realize that with so many people losing everything in the fires, it is petty for me to complain about my computer. Especially since mine was a completely avoidable tragedy. I am a fool for not backing up. I even used to have a backup hard drive, but it failed years ago, and I never replaced it. So here we are, and if that bothers you, you might as well stop reading now.

I have heard that a habit only becomes an addiction when it interferes with other areas of your life. For me, I essentially decided a long time ago not to participate in life, and I find other things to fill the gap. I get obsessed with certain things to a degree that appears as an addiction, until sooner or later, I completely lose interest and move on to something else.

Before this week, I did not fully appreciate how much I relied on my computer as a distraction. Obviously for surfing the internet, but I don’t even own a tv, I streamed everything, and it was also the only thing in the house that could play dvds. Of course I used it for games, for reading, for writing, for saving things for later. It was my music studio and my sketch pad. Frankly, I have been mourning it like an old friend.

Ironically, I spent the past three months renovating a room into a home office (slowly, because I am very lazy and, as noted, easily distracted), and my computer died literally the day before I was ready to move it to its new home.

It occurred to me that I could use this as an opportunity to refocus on to some other projects that I have been putting off. Then I realized that my notes are gone. All of them. Notes, designs, calculations. Nine years of my life, from the utterly trivial, to potentially very consequential financial documents, and everything in between, gone, in a blink.

Though it goes against everything in which I believe, I increasingly find myself considering the possibility that my house might be haunted.

I don’t actually believe in ghosts, or spirits, or anything supernatural. (That being said, I really ought to rename my blog, but that is another discussion entirely.) However, I am concerned by the continual “house settling” noises lately.

It could be termites, and the house is not settling so much as slowly collapsing. It could be climate change causing more rapid temperature fluctuations. Or both.

I recall that once, in my foolish youth, I went from room to room casting out demons “in the name of Jesus.” Again, this seems utterly absurd to me now, yet I can not help but wonder what exactly caused me think that would even be necessary at the time.

Supernatural or not, there is a darkness to this house. Literally, as the windows are situated such that there is very little natural light, but figuratively as well.

I am not saying that walls actually have memory, but I have lived here for a long time. I started my blog in this house all those years ago. I have been here through so much death, and loss, and failure. So many bad memories, and so very few good ones.

Sometimes when going to the mailbox, I can not help but reflect on the literally thousands of times that I have made that same walk, and I relive so many different things that weighed on my mind during various phases of life. And it hurts so much.

I have tried to leave several times, yet for one reason or another, it never works out. It was always meant to be temporary, and I have never really felt comfortable here. Yet, staying is just so cripplingly convenient. Like the house won’t let me go.

My desktop computer died today.

It’s been over three years since I last posted. Needless to say, things have happened since then, and almost none of it good.

Two years ago, I participated in something called nanowrimo, a challenge in which one takes the 30 days of November to write a 50,000 word novel. My finished story was under 30,000 words, and it was not good, for far too many reasons to get into here.

I started to write a blog post about the process once, but that also was not good.

This year, I decided to forgo the novel, and try to bang out as many short stories as I could, from a list of ideas that I have been keeping and adding to since my college days. Most of these were also not good.

A lot of them were not even finished. For some, I reached my intended conclusion, only to think, “You call that an ending‽ What was the point of that?” One took a unexpectedly dark turn and I was too disturbed to continue. On a couple of others, I just got bored and abandoned them midway through. A few might have been decent.

It doesn’t really matter now, because my computer died, and they’re all gone, along with the master idea list, and really quite a lot of other things that I am going to miss.