20150603.1046

I missed my usual window for writing in this webspace; Ms. 8 needed attention more than my tries-but-fails-to-be-daily update did. At the moment, though, she is having a nap, and the device I use to help me do my freelance work is recharging, so I have a bit of an opportunity to pursue other writing at the moment. Hence, this, now.

At times, perhaps too many of them, I like to look back over what I have written in this webspace. Often, that backward look is used to pull up things that I have said before, either to use them to supplement what I am saying in the moment or to reconsider them otherwise. (I do occasionally find that I have been wrong, after all.) Sometimes, though it is simply to track what I have done on a given day across years. Holidays tend to be good about it, particularly since they offer convenient points of focus and relatively stable occurrence. Some other days are better about it than others; while I did reasonably well last year about writing often, last year seems to have been the exception to my usual practice of skipping out on a lot of writing. Today, for example, has only two previous entries (2013 and 2014) in more than five years of writing. (Last year's still reads entertainingly.) It is hardly exceptional in that.

There are gaps in my recollection, gaps in my record-keeping, gaps in my perception of reality; I no longer know what happened within them, if I ever really did. And I am not exceptional in that. Many people, perhaps most, keep no records of their doings, and for most of us, days run together into a blur that the mind skips over as it frolics or leaps or stumbles from notable point to notable point, although what is notable is not the same in each conception. What the Mrs. recalls and what I recall, for example, even of the time we have been together (more than five years married, close to ten in association), differs. (I think I would rather have hers than mine, for reasons that those who know me can doubtlessly guess.) The same is true of what my brother and I recall. And it is more than the differences enforced by standing in different spots, although those do factor into things. We do not even keep in mind and notable the same situations. Our minds settle on different things and follow different patterns entirely.

I know that I say nothing new or exciting herein. I rarely do, as glances over what I have written here will reveal. But that does not mean it has not been worth the writing. It is the pipe-clearing I have spoken of to students, letting the water run so that the old water or cold water is flushed out and what is desired can be allowed to pour out. And it is at least caulking over the gaps that always and ever threaten to form irregularly under the feet of a mind tripping about its business from day to day to day. Perhaps others will see and avoid stumbling.