Reading, writing, ...

There are gaps in the chronicle. 

I pay for a vanity URL and don't even put up a post on a regular basis.  Why is that?

Writing is hard.  Thought must be formed into writing in a way very different from the way it becomes informal speech.  That in itself can exercise the mind beyond its comfort level. 

Writing is long.  Anything worth spending any time on seems to double and double into something that may not be worth spending a very long time on.  In the daily triage of energies applied to possible tasks, writing seems to be a thing that gets set aside "until I have time for it" -- and then there never is. 

Writing demands content.  Not Great Ideas, perhaps, but some subject to be fleshed out.  Writers who have been paid to produce daily or weekly content for the legacy media (newspapers, magazines) revert to tricks to get their column inches.  If three paragraphs complete the thought, but fifteen complete the space, fill the intervening dozen with screeds, peeves, or irrelevant entertaining asides (cough - Chesterton - cough). 

Jane Austen's writing desk

To hammer the content-thought into written words, the writer must be able to recall, when he sits down to his little writing desk or laptop, what the matter was -- what was that thought this morning that so begged to become a blog post this afternoon? 

Alas, gentle reader, the Crowndot brain seems to get as completely reset as the onboard memory of a 1980s PC encountering a power failure.  You may have experienced "portal amnesia" -- you get up from the comfortable chair and walk into another room to get something, only to have that feeling of pondering the hereafter:  "What on earth did I come in here after?"  Well, I have Rôle amnesia.  This is a condition in which the memory banks are wiped clean when switching from work to home, or from husband to father, or from coworker to sibling.  "What on earth could it have been, what was that thing that seemed to cry out to be turned into written words?"

Writing is long and hard and demands the capture and taming of elusive thoughts.  No wonder it is so seldom started, so rarely completed.

Never. The. Less.

There is a consolation in the thing.  There is a balm in answering, however poorly, that entreaty by the author, critic, or poet in the soul. 

That is why I am bumping the blog thing up on the triage list  (I hope).  For the good of the thing.  (My good.) Even if the product turns out -- meh -- not so good.