What's Next

I’ve been marathon napping for the past couple of afternoons, completely unlike me, because (wait for it) my brain needed to be unconscious for a bit. It’s kind of a trying time, and honestly? Lately I’ve been horrible at communicating what I need. I either tell too much or too little. Mostly too little.

I stopped writing my column, after 20 years. I was getting frustrated with other things, situations in which I felt I was just being a pathetic person. I was feeling taken advantage of and overwhelmed, and sort of nihilistic. I didn’t see an end unless it was, you know, an actual end, and I didn’t want that (end of certain relationships I meant; nobody get alarmed).

That was part of it, then. Mostly, though, it was the same thinking that’s been bouncing around for a few years now. I’ve really said my piece, and all that’s left is more of the same. I’ve had plenty of changes and growth (and whatever the opposite of that is, plenty of that too), and a lot of experiences, but here we are.

I always wondered what it’d be like to document in the weekly pages of a newspaper how it felt to die of something (something painless, of course), and a few thoughts of a re-focus on aging in America, but it’s been done, done better, and anyway everyone knows I’m forever young, shut up.

So it was just timing. Twenty years seemed enough, and it was never anything more than a blip. Only the duration made it stand out as even remotely unusual. There are thousands of these newspapers around the country, even still. I was always going to be blippish.

But none of this is sad, at all, just very strange for me. And understandable, I would think. I did something for 20 years, all week long letting it percolate, dismissing things, putting stuff on the back burner, making notes – it adds up, this practice, and to choose to stop…let’s just say I have a lot of conversations and I’m the only one in the room.

…

I’ve had several emails from readers and responses from others, many wishing me well on my “retirement,” which isn’t inaccurate but isn’t what they mean, I think. Someone suggested I might be following in the footsteps of other columnists over the years, who’ve taken buy-outs from larger papers or otherwise been forced out for budgetary reasons. Start looking for greener pastures, and so on.

Yes and no, then. Maybe here, although, as I’ve said before, I’m leery of continuing to write for nameless readers. I don’t mean I wish to write for only friends; I just want to know that people reading are interested in reading it, not just wandering by. Although that can be fun. It’s tricky, and I haven’t figured it out yet.

For the meantime, though, I may stick with this space, since I’m paying for it. Maybe soon I’ll figure out that newsletter thing, although God knows I’m not a newsletter kind of guy. I’m not sure what kind of guy I am, actually. Kind of an unemployed one at the moment. Kind of blippish.