Return to Blogging

The things we do...especially to ourselves....

When I started this blog, I had an idea, a vision (please consider "vision," in this case, to have a good deal less inflated importance as is its usual association), a vision of what function this blog would serve, and how I would go about making that happen. The idea was that, along with normal blogging, I would also discuss some of the things that had happened in recent months, things that had a fairly large impact on my current interests.

I am fickle at times, particularly in regards to blogging, in which I can be so inspired as to have a running list of topics to blog about (and their order) or have a frustration-fueled distaste for the notion of even trying. Knowing that, it wasn't entirely surprising that some time passed with nary a word typed. Then more time passed. It became increasingly difficult to pick it up again, as is the point I'll get to shortly.

I had made the decision that I would tell things in a particular order, and when time passed, some things changed, and new things happened, it began to seem a tall order. Because of my (bull-headed) stricture to this self-imposed plan, and the increasingly daunting task I was creating for myself, I essentially rendered this blog dead. Useless. Wasted. And what guilt or despair (no matter how minute) do you suppose that breeds?

The issue was, in part, that some things I considered pivotal at the time were, in the end, things that I became far less enthusiastic about and some, in fact, turned out to be far less rewarding than they initially seemed (brought on by my finding out how people can ruin them, as is too often true, just by being...people)

...(unfinished)...

And Then It Happened

I was driving to work tonight, listening to Bon Iver's "Re:Stacks." It was nearly 6 o'clock, so had been dark for more than an hour already. As I noticed the barely-there, flurried example of the little snow Tennessee ever gets, dancing and swirling about on the pavement and in the light from passing cars, something happened. I was washed over with a rush of nostalgia. Almost sorrow. I had an image of riding in a car, surrounded by a crisp, blue nightfall in Michigan, doing much the same thing; staring at the swirls of snow, feeling safe and comfortable and hazy. I'm sure that it wasn't so much a specific memory, as remembering that feeling, which I experienced many times, when growing up there. More than once, I have had overwhelming feelings of loss, from leaving that place, but am usually acutely aware of when it is truly missing my teen years and the friends I had then, and when it is just missing...there.

I don't know what it is about that song. There is an inherent tone of longing for days gone by, regardless of the lyrics, and perhaps only for me. Nothing in the words seem to suggest nostalgia. I suppose it comes across by simpler means.