Immovable Feast

So the idea was that I would post something between my last rump of a post and this moment; something of substance in order to maintain my writing discipline and to service all of my many fan* and their needs over the holidays.

In the interim, I've learned a great deal about myself. First of all, that I can still fit into shirts and T-shirts labeled "large." The day you transition to (or in my case, back to) extra-large is often not the best day of your year. I have lots of trouble with Christmas, but this year at least I got enough shirts to confirm that I haven't gone beyond the arbitrary threshold I've set for myself for being to hopelessly and slovenly out of shape. I will say though that this year, I also made my first pie. I brought it to a family gathering, where people load up on mashed potatoes and barely nibble at desserts. Then the kids went with their other parent for the rest of the Christmas weekend and well... five-eighths of a pie later, you can understand that my sizing worries weren't based in a generalized self-loathing. It was a very specific self-loathing instigated by an authentic seven-deadly-sins-type act of indecent indulgence, the kind of which we only think of fondly on our deathbeds. I'm really banking on the idea that the transgressive acts we lug around with all the weight of guilt and flagellation (drinking, drugs, wanton and reckless sex, food binges, actual flagellation, etc.) we get an absolving flash of nostalgic endorphins right at the end that makes it all worth it. I'm still working on the finer points, but I think this has legs as the foundation of a theology.

The second thing I learned about myself is that nondiscipline sort of suits me. I've taken many, many days off of work in the last three weeks, during which I have achieved nothing and turned away every opportunity to grow as a person.** I made the kids put up and take down the Christmas tree, so I can't even say I accomplished that. I guess I can say I got through most of the main story missions on Fallout 4, but even that I'd sort of wrapped up before vacation started, and besides, devoting lots of time to headshot-ing pixel-rendered villains at the expense of parental and boyfriend-ly duties I'm not sure qualifies as accomplishment. Or at least it won't until I figure out how to get the last 11 (of 50) in-game achievement badges. Being stuck on 39 is really starting to bother me.

In my Lost Holiday Weekends of fecklessness and wastrel-ity, I've also put aside my normal Thursday of writing and providing this dim light in the hazy, wintry darkness for You,*** for which I have set an iPhone alarm for a time to feel the requisite shame. That will happen this coming Thursday, Jan. 7, 2016, at about 10 pm Pacific time when I sit down to get back to writing normally again. I'll do the hand-wringy guilt thing, all you could possibly want. Then I'll open up some more browser tabs to watch YouTube videos of other people playing video games I like, look up reviews of the Bose bluetooth speaker I already bought to see retroactively if I made a sensible purchase, peruse Imgur collections of NSFW gifs of Eastern European women doing step-aerobics... But unlike holiday breaktime, the procrastination is part of the process. It's not the avoidance of discipline, it's the thing that triggers it into activation. As far back as my experience goes, there can be no writing without at least one stop to look up something unrelated on Wikipedia. So fear not. I'll be back to wasting my (and, sorry, your) time in a much more productive manner in a matter of days.


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*sic

**except physically. See above re: pie.

***Yes seriously, sic