I don’t know how apparent it might be to casual readers of this site — were there any such, which there absolutely aren’t — but I’ve been circling WT uneasily for the last few weeks, tentatively sidling up to the idea of doing this again, at least a bit, in however limited and constrained a fashion. There’s something appealing about pausing for a bit of a self-indulgent wallow in the midst of whatever local and global catastrophes happen to be continually unfolding around us, a bit of — admittedly partial and dishonest and curated — record-keeping, putting down the odd marker after such a long stretch of unmoored limbo time, that shapeless, featureless slurry of unhistory.
Glancing back at entries from Walky Talky’s heyday, while one or two are now opaque without some crucial piece of omitted and long-forgotten context, the vast majority of those jottings from the past evoke a level of detail I’m hard pressed to recall for almost any time in the last decade; least of all the indistinguishable temporal morass that has been the Age of Covid. Various things did happen in 2020 and 2021, I think — they must have, surely, there are scars — but even the most drastic and wounding are hard to place now, bereft of mnemonic infrastructure, lost in the fog.
And so, the nostalgic allure of blogging. Might a few cuneiform scratchings in the digital clay of 2022 help stave off the worst amnesiac tendencies of my sclerotic brain? Can I erect some new retentive scaffolding to buttress these failing faculties? I don’t know. I don’t even know if I want to. Lying awake in the graveyard hours of interchangeable nights I concoct mental todo lists of salient posts, but when faced with actually writing the fuckers I tend to seize up. Unconvinced of the merit. Lacking the will or commitment. Unfocused and lazy and weak.
This, obviously, is one of those posts.
Call it a gauntlet of sorts. Thrown down. Demanding satisfaction.
Let’s hope it doesn’t just lie in the dust ignored for the next two years.