I’ve been trying to get into these rhythms. Healthy rhythms. Like going to the gym for an hour directly after work and telling myself it might be worth my time thinking about what I want to write about then setting aside time at a designated time at a natural time at a necessary time later that same day—after binge watching something with the wife, of course—to sit down and attempt to do this so called thing I was supposedly fairly decent at once upon a time.

So, here I am. There’s hope for me yet.

That’s not to say I’ll live long enough to make any decent contribution to the landscape that is human endeavor. I’d love to get back to a level of health where I could sit down and work on my book again, maybe even finish the damn thing. Actually, first and foremost I need to get back to my compilation of poems and short stories. Next to last draft. Then self-publishing. Somewhere in there I’ll get this web site back up. But instead of being under the moniker of “Temple of the Green Pygmies” it will be reborn, in a way, as SKABS, a.k.a. Stone Knives and Bear Skins.

However I digress. That’s not what I had written in my head and that’s the thing, back before Lyme I’d write entire stories in my mind, commit them to a logical flow and framework, then sit down with an inhumanly amount of cola, and write until I was done or my head hurt, whatever came first. Now, especially after this last year (which has, as you’ve probably read, done a number on me), I’m struggling to regain some semblance of health. Life really isn’t worth living, if I can’t get my thoughts out in some way, shape, or form.

Yeah, that’s part of what I was thinking about. Back when I was healthy (or I should say “healthy”) I spent a significant amount of my waking life sitting at a desk in front of a computer monitor writing. My first computer, which I bought in 1992, was a 386sx33 running on 2mb RAM and an 81mb hard drive; I spent my first week trying to get Windows 3.1 to run on the damn thing before coughing up another $100+ (a shit-ton of money for me at the time) for another 2mb which gave me just enough to run a proper word processor (Microsoft Word 2.0) which I would only be able to afford years later when I started at LCC (PII,IK). During my college years I only had one monitor (remember when that was a thing, says the guy who typically has 3+ at any given time now) so there’d be an old television on my right tuned into one of three stations I could get over the ol’ rabbit ears. Yeah, those were the days. Then around the time I was working at Dynamix they came out with TV cards so I could watch actual fucking television stations (or the output of my VHS or later DVD player) in a little tiny window on a desktop that was literally 1024×768 pixels. This, my friends, was the dark ages. And goddamnit, I liked it!

So anyway, what was I saying?

I’ve spent a lot of (personal) time behind a computer console writing. I mean I was doing other things too (I’ll leave those things to either your imagination as well as future blog entries), but writing was one of the main things. And besides dealing with loneliness and depression I was pretty content, especially when I learned about BBS’s and later the Internet snuck in the picture. Writing while surfing while watching a movie while chatting with one to five people on ICQ (one of the best instant messengers of all time, you young cuties), Lord almighty, yeah, I could be pretty content with the world. I mean, and I guess what I’m trying to say, is that if I weren’t married and I didn’t have so many physical issues sitting at a desk for hours at a time, I’d probably be spending a much more significant part of my life sitting here and doing just that (and maybe getting a wee bit better at it).

And I didn’t just blog and write short stories and poetry. I wrote letters. A lot of letters. It was probably a sickness. I mean, imagine you’re a socially anxious person anyway and you’re going to university and you’re poor and you’re tired because when you’re not studying or in class you’re struggling to get shut eye but for whatever reason you’re just not great kicking off friendships with people (especially people in groups—what a fucking nightmare!). But hey, there are these computer things and it’s easy to connect with people on these computer things without the monkey ducky doodle dancing (well, it was back before 2000, at least if you were being honest with yourself and others) and well, I had a lot of pen pals all over the world. I’d sometimes spend hours in-between studies on letters. And I’d rush home with anticipation after classes so I could hear that sweet sound of the dial up modem just for that oh so sweet letter from whomever.

Letters were a regular aspect of the previous incarnation of this site. I’d sometimes write letters to famous people, celebrities, etc., alive and dead. I’d write letters to people from my past who I’d lost contact with for one reason or another. I’d like to get back to that again. Maybe, I’ve come to realize, it’s part of the autist in me: by nature I need to overshare. In fact, I think that’s a major difference between so-called “neurotypical” and autistics: we’re not really “oversharing” anything, we’re just honestly sharing how we see and experience and perceive the universe—and as a group we’re generally more tuned into objective reality than “typicals” (or “Muggles”, as I used to say, tongue-in-cheek Wednesday style)—so when we (autistically inclined folks) talk we’re almost always going to step outside the socially accepted boxes of what we “should” be talking in any given situation and, well, I’m rambling now.

As you can imagine, if you read between the lines there, life for me has been hell for a while now. I used to be screaming-sharing from the rooftops—or at least my small corner of the internet as well as anyone that’d care to share a drink with me. I don’t do that anymore and it’s been, like everything else lately, slowly killing me. And we can’t have that (okay, some of you are possibly more than happy with that eventuality—be patient, my dear mother fuckers!).

That’s the other thing about setting aside time to think about what I’m going to write and maybe even taking notes—as opposed to just sitting down at a blank screen. I’ve tried that any number of times over the last so many years but it’s never worked; I always end up writing about how my health is or how I’m going to write. And I suppose that’s part of what this entry is about. Okay, that’s the bloody theme of this mother fucking entry. Sue me. At least I’m a little out of the as of late in life rutty-tut-tut. One baby step at a time. Tonight I write for (nearly) an hour. Tomorrow night it’s the world!

*meniacle laugh*