Time for a new blog?

I have no idea who on the great digital high seas actually reads my ramblings and rantings, but A Flubber Room, in my mind at least, is a book I'd just as soon shut and put on the shelf for future generations of psychiatrists to study.

I've tried before to start a new blog, free of self-pity and bile, and look how that turned out. What's to say a new one now won't degenerate anew into pathetic navel gazing?

Well, the past is the past. Lessons have been learned, software has been updated. I can't say that I'm a different person, exactly, or that the wounds have shed their scabs completely, but I've found other, possibly more satisfying ways to express my personal mess that won't grate on the nerves of the few people who actually bother with my blogs. Poetry, for one. Songs, for another.

It's been a year and a half since I moved back to Columbus. The New Jersey chapter of my life represented in A Flubber Room is thankfully over, done with. A lot of my old assumptions and aspirations are history. A lot of it didn't work, some of it disastrously so. It's time for something new. I'm currently somewhat adrift, unsure of where I stand in the world and what to do with the rest of it. There's no skirting around the fact that at 43 I'm now in early middle-age, unemployed, broke, single, childless, living alone again in the same house as when I started blogging in my late 20s, feeling that the world has left me behind and now struggling to find my way back onto the road, never mind "catching up", whatever that means. I still suffer from depression, but now the panic-stricken desperation to fit in and "make it" has been replaced by a kind of resigned, jaded lethargy. I'm now free again to pursue what I was really meant to be, but I have no idea what that is. It's like the first year after college all over again, without the benefits of youth and its attendant boundless optimism. There is something liberating about no longer feeling obligated to play the game that society has forced us to play but has not equitably prepared all of us for. Sometimes the best way to survive a losing--arguably rigged--game is to walk away, and find something else to prove your virility and cunning. There is something liberating in being able to say what you are, but even more so what you are not. I am not a graphic designer. I am not a corporate prostitute. I am not a loser. Useless, perhaps, but at least I don't spend my days playing XBox and complaining about poor Mexicans taking all the good jobs that I should have instead. They're not the ones writing the candidate requirements in the online job postings, or programming labyrinthine web-based employment applications that read more like Homeland Security border interrogations.

Oops, I did it again. I'm done ranting. And yes, I'm going to leave it up, not delete it as being exactly what I didn't want to do. I spent all that finger-energy typing it, and I LIKE my way with words, dammit. So there.

Maybe I WILL start a new blog. But not today. It's too hot. My mind isn't on the wonderfulness of my new outlet; I have a gig with my band in Las Vegas this weekend. I'd rather think about good things. Some bad things have happened in the last week. I should be disgusted by it, and I am, intensely. The Neo-Nazis and Klansmen and the rest of the alt-rightwads can shove their bullshit right back where it came from. They want to start a race war. I want to play music and do art and go bike riding and make things. I want to leave the country and the planet a better place than I left it. I want people to be happy, including myself. That starts now.