Let's Just Give This Nonsense Another Try

 Happy 2023!

In keeping with the situation, I'm sure.

Drunkards, I haven't posted here in almost a year and a half, and I'm really, really sorry about that. Surely I'm more sorry I haven't written a post than you are that you haven't read a post. I get that. 

But because I should care more about whether I'm writing than about who might possibly read my words, I need to get back at it. And here in the year of our arbitrary timekeeping mechanism 2023, I'm going to try.

To start off, just a brief anecdote. 

My Precocious Daughter, who was in, I think, the fourth grade when I started this blog, graduated from high school third in her class and is now a graduate student in a Very Large City. I'm so freaking proud of her, you guys, and I miss having her around. She's been home for the holidays, which has been wonderful. (More on me being an empty nester in a future post.)

Lol, the eggs have long since fled this nest, though.

When she got here, shortly before Christmas, she still had one final paper to write, which she banged out over a couple of days, with all the frenzied energy of a graduate student who has left their final paper to the very last moment. Although I never went to grad school, I remember the energy required to make those deadlines as an undergrad. I remember actually having that energy. Wild.

Anyway, although PDaughter is working on a degree in High-Tech Whizbang Stuff (the actual name in the catalog, I believe), she also is taking film classes, being a film junkie of the highest order. Her final paper was in this area. She let me read it when it was finished.

Damn.

My kid can write.

Like, she's a better writer than I am.

The paper was a review of a movie I feel confident few of you have seen, by a director I feel confident few of you are familiar with, in the context of a critical framework I feel few of you have considered. I'm not being condescending to any of you amazing readers, I'm just saying that this paper was...niche. But PDaughter nailed it, and it was interesting and informative even to me, who felt pretty much in over her head while reading it.

I am delighted that my kid is a talented writer. I'm also fucking mortified that I've allowed age and stress and discouragement and alcohol to turn me away from the one thing in my life that I've ever been good at. 

Other than composing for the theremin.
Wait, that wasn't me.

So I'm going to give this blogging thing another shot. Please be patient if I start off slowly. There might even be a few Best Of posts while I figure out if I'm capable of reconnecting to my writerly self.

Oh, and there may be poetry. It's the only thing I've written on a semi-regular basis over the last 18 months. (The one I've linked to is much older than that, however.)

And monkeys. Because I still love monkeys.

And I love all of you. Let's do this.