As far as complexity goes, I do want to grapple with and write something about the Israel-Hamas war going on right now, for example, but I know I'm not the right messenger, at least not at the moment. Anyone can say anything at any time, of course, but I'm aware that I both largely don't know what I'm talking about and am swaddled in a gloopy, confounding, amorphous fog of war situation like everyone else. It's a standard-format joke to say something like "let's discuss something less complicated, like abortion," but this one of those situations where the joke is ruined by it just being true.
Besides, I think I've leaned away from this blog being a reflection or analysis of current events, not consciously because things are awful or inherently depressing, but just because making it more about me is cheaper than therapy. It's not faster than therapy (which maxes out at 50 minutes per session, see above for how long this shit takes), but it does have the distinct advantage of zero pushback or correction from a licensed mental health professional. Sure, the listening and responding to my insane and congratulatory self-reflection--where I constantly conflate introspection with insight and pretend recognizing a flaw or poor behavior is the same as addressing or correcting it--with the occasional empathetic but firm "What? No no no, that's actually crazy..."* could be helpful. But why subject myself to that when I can instead shout my conclusions into this void, then sleep well after exhausting myself with a long series of unnaturally vigorous pats-on-the-back?
Unfortunately "complicated" is kind of my default state, so a 30-minute blog session is pretty much never in the cards. I have to either REALLY know what I'm talking about before I sit down to type or I have to have to be somewhere, like a concert in LA, that Thursday. It's amazing what you can do when the disincentive to linger is the idea of compounding urban rush-hour traffic.
The last issue tends to be feline, which is kind of automatically complexity-defeating. You've all seen the memes and the gifs and the Instagram videos. A cat lives in my house. This means literally everything I attempt is 10-to-70% more difficult. Most of the time she is entirely indifferent to me as a co-inhabiter of this 2,000-square-foot colony enclosure that happens to have my name on the mortgage. But cats have a sense receptor somewhere in their bodies (given which bit she typically faces toward me when she first climbs onto my lap, I hate to speculate where exactly) tuned specifically to sniff out endeavor, which activates whatever internal systems are necessary to defeat it.
So far today, she's insisted on being inside the one room in the house she is expressly forbidden to spend any time, my bedroom, which I of course immediately obliged. She has mercifully decided not to sit directly on the keyboard as I type today, however, so as you can see the distraction has been all my own, in the form of meandering nonsense. This of course raises a question I'm not certain I can answer: either this makes me a capable, near-professional jobbing-type writer where I can write something, no matter the level of inspiration or investment, or it makes me the worst kind of dribbling amateur unable to curb my basest indulgences. I think I can say with as much assured certainty as I'm able to muster that the answer is "somewhere in the middle." Like I'm glad I was able to produce something out of nothing, but re-reading it, I'm self-aware enough to be sufficiently embarrassed about the outcome. Writing about writing? I'll do better.
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*It seems unlikely my therapist has actually ever said these exact words, but at the same time, I'm certain that's what I heard.
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