More Than One Week

I still haven't written in my new journal yet. But I'm back here, so maybe that's better.

Terrence McNally died today. For some reason, that news wrecked me more than anything else I've read so far about this crazy, heartbreaking disease and the mess it's making out of the world. I have amazing memories of seeing his plays, and it just seems so very wrong.

I wonder if someday I'm going to re-read this blog and have to Google Terrence McNally to remember how he died. Somehow, I don't think so. In fact, I hope I don't, because that will most likely mean that something more terrible came after this mess to erase everything that I'm thinking and feeling right now. I want this time to be a distant memory some day, but only because it got better and went away. Not because it was dwarfed by a lot of other disasters -- personal or global -- that make it seem insignificant.

I do not do well in the absence of deadlines and the presence of uncertainty. I'm having a hard time making "until further notice" work for me. At the moment, I am regretting every day in the past six months that I closed my office door to "block out distractions" and "get some work done." I would love right now to be distracted by someone other than myself and the sense of focus that I can't seem to find.

I also can't find a pork chop recipe that matches the particular combination of stuff in my refrigerator at the moment. I was looking for one when I remembered that I had started this post about two hours earlier (see above about my lack of focus). So now I'm wondering if you can substitute dried cherries for dried plums and trying to remember if the squash in the fridge is delicata or something else. I'm about to find out, I think.

More Than One Line

When I was traveling last month, I saw a book called "One Line a Day." The idea is that you write one line each day for five years, cycling through the book five times so that you're writing on the same page for the same date each year. I really liked the idea, but talked myself out of buying the book because -- let's face it -- I'm bad at journaling. I've tried diaries, notebooks, apps, and this poor neglected blog, and the result is always the same. Which is to say, there's never much of a result.

When I got back home, I still found myself thinking about the book. I've taken to looking at my "Memories" on Facebook, and I've realized that, more often than not, they're way more than five years old. As I post less and less, there's going to be more and more of my life that I don't get to revisit in that way. There are also a lot of days when I don't have anything to say that's going to be all that interesting to the other 600 people who get to see my posts.

I finally decided to buy the book and give it a try. And... it's still blank. Last night, I realized one big reason why: there's no possible way to sum up these days in just one line.

So I'm here again, at least today. There's a lot more that I want to say, and hopefully will say, because the world needs to remember these days. We need to remember all the ways that we were strong together, and how devastating the losses are, so that those memories will shape the way we handle our future together.