It's been a while since I've posted. I'm not one that can just sit down and bang out a couple paragraphs of thoughts. I have a tendency to dither, edit, delete, rewrite and eventually abandon ship. It doesn't help that I work on a computer all day long (I don't want to talk about it), so cozying up in front of this is the last thing I want to do when I get home.

I was reminded of this by my great friend Jeff, who, similarly employed, said as much while noting that my blog was languishing.
(Thanks for the reminder Jeff and fuck you your blog isn't exactly teeming).

It's been particularly hard the last few days as it's grown uncomfortable hot around here.
(Uncomfortable hot in Portland, Maine in late September is high 80s. People from the South who cannot understand this, I will assure you that I do not understand anything about you). Which makes it hard to do anything other than drink American urine beer (I'll bore you about beer at another time). Ultimately though, I have to remind myself that it's not Mogadishu here and the weather means little more than a few moments of discomfort and the occasional screwing up of the eyes as I walk outside and fail to process the discordance associated with seeing yellow and red leaves blown about by a breeze nearly ninety degrees.

I guess that's pretty much the whole point of this post, trite as it sounds and faulty as it is. It's not Mogadishu here. I was going to write a nice little lament about the melancholies of middle age life in America: family, mortgage, work. The letting go of youthful aspirations, the abandonment of secret artistic pursuits, the seepage of energy into anger, the final and complete acceptance of the long-held, quiet, suspicion: I have failed to do what I really wanted to do. Ergo, I am a failure. I was going to write that and wrap it nicely around one of Walt Whitman's wonderful inscriptions to Leaves of Grass, Me Imperturbe. There he etches a preemptive headstone for the anxiety of modern American life that I was to celebrate. But having read it over enough times to begin, just to begin, to imagine the force of life impertube in trees and animals. Having read that, and having vented anger here, and having read today about the sacks of grain in Mogadishu. Fought over in the baking heat with machetes and handguns. Having had my weak American beer. Not out of thirst or hunger. But in the quiet of the self-balancing night. Where I am outside my occupation. Where everything is less important than I thought. Here I have perspective and must practice it if I hope to use it sometime when my problems are more than trifles.