You never realize how long a month is until you try to write every day for a month.

Also, once you fall out of a habit it’s very easy to stay out of a habit.

Somebody emailed me a few days ago like “is everything ok because you haven’t written anything all of a sudden?” Here’s what I’ve been doing:

day 1 of not writing — trying to build an entire website in two days for a new client

day 2 of not writing — see: day 1

day 3 of not writing — driving up north to church camp

day 4 of not writing — glorious and complete absence of connection to the outside world.

day 5 of not writing — see: day 4 (also, laziness)

And now here we are again. The moral of the story is: go to the woods. Also, be lazy if you feel like it.

I’m not sure where to start with talking about how I am.

I feel like there are two parallel levels of life happening right now. And I’m not going to do a very good job of explaining it. So let me just say this:

On the surface, things feel mundane. There’s work, a lot of work, and work is good and I’m grateful for that. There’s reading the news every day and watching that godawful election burn down in slow motion, and I feel distant from that but it seems like the only public conversation left these days (even conversations about other shit is often framed as “a break from the election shit”) and at this point maybe all you can do is hold your breath and ride it out. There’s the rhythms of being a person who lives in a house with kids: it’s trashed, I clean it, I feel good about my life and myself, I cook and eat one meal, and it’s trashed again.

(don’t think about it too long or you’ll catch existential angst.)

there’s this whole other level where things are slowly stirring and aching and stretching and reaching and it’s happening to subtly it could be nothing, it could be imperceptible, but I feel that there’s more of life to be grasped and lived and my heart wants to be more open again but right now there’s not a lot to do but wait, and while I wait I order Halloween costumes for my kids on Amazon and try to get enough sleep