it’s nine months
Today, October 22, is the day I long thought I would end these Monday through Friday daily posts, I can’t say it’s so much a lack of subject matter and fear of repeating myself, which I do sometimes and I know I’ve learned much in my life only through repetition so I ain’t gonna apologize if I say “the me of me” 20 times, it even helps me rejoice in the self-awareness, no the reason for the “end it here” thinking is that it was back exactly nine months ago, January 22, also a Friday, when I posted in Couch Surfing I was going to begin posting every day, Monday through Friday, going forward, and that these posts would consider and report on what I called my “daily weather”, so call it the internal milieu of me – make that moi – and sometimes the words would run on something like endlessly and sometimes there could be a single word – how I am that day – and I’m glad to say I have not missed one weekday since that long-ago Friday in the dead of winter, when I was back there in Portland and I thought happily married and living with the kids, Susan’s and mine, and doing the things we’d made our own, one of which was this Blog for me, Couch Surfing at 70 which I’d got going sometime back in 2018.
This particular Friday I was spelling out what felt like personal frustration with myself for inconsistency as a blogger, like maybe I’d write three days in a row and then my life would step forward past the Blog thing and two weeks would pass without a single post, and I can’t speak for anyone else but that didn’t feel right to me, it felt cheaping out on a responsibility I’d taken on when I promised to be blogging, like, regularly, so as I do every once in a while I had a come to Jesus meeting with myself and said I’m gonna commit to write and post five times a week and since I don’t want to run out of material and since from the get-go back in ’18 this Blog was commited to leave politics and other everyday social considerations outside the door, what better than write about how I “was” that day.
So that’s the history and I haven’t missed a day, I said, I think there may have been two days with just photos but it still represented, and somewhere along the way Marie in Scotland – my original Patron – said she loved this stuff – which got rather heavy and more urgent and maybe more cutting edge when the divorce came into my life in mid-April, anyway Marie said she loved it and it would make for a great book, and whether she put that thought in my head or if I’d been thinking about it my own self earlier, pretty much right from then that’s what I decided to do- and here encouraging you to let go any potential feelers of guilt when you already know there’s no way you’ll be buying that book, it’s cool, like Dr. Frankenfurter told Janet Wise in “Rocky Horror” when she sort of dissed his creation, “I didn’t make him for you.” So, it’s cool, we’ll remain friends, and par for the course is losing money on nearly every self-published book and I don’t even care, it’s kind of a “legacy” thing, maybe my kids will think about me and think about my books when I’m gone, or not – but the planet knows.
So, blah de blah, I began collecting all my daily posts from January 22 on and have most of them gathered in what will become a book until a couple of weeks ago when I found myself moving – again!! – yup, for the second time in six months and I am freakin’ weary, kids, and the fact is my desktop computer which holds all my posts and the tentative paperback – spoiler alert, to be titled “Weather” – that computer is in pieces in a box on the floor over there cause I’ve got no desk, or chair on which to sit at a desk I don’t have, and I’m two days into a brand new life – it’s not a new chapter, it’s a brand new life and nothing could be more clear – to me- so there’s a delay and who knows how long it’ll go on and I’m not sweating it, things have a way of working, I mean, here I am typing in a small but way fun room in Golden Hill in San Diego and if you’d of told me that five years ago I would have been dumbfounded and telling it to me this morning veers heavily into some mystical place – which will be its own post here maybe next week – and to get back to the point, somewhere along the way I decided my “Weather” book would be just swell with exactly nine months, which is today, and so I offered the thought it would be all over but the hoopla today.
Then life happened and I landed here, rejoicing all the way, and I said both to myself and to a sunny afternoon, Nah, I’ve got new stuff promising to show up and worth saying, so these posts will go on and you can look for one Monday, but in fact the book ends today, with the final period coming real soon now, and I’ll sell it cheap and if you are at least somewhat hip you’ll probably pick up a copy.
I would.