20190627.0430

I have posted to this webspace five times in previous years on this date, in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. The first two are prose pieces detailing then-current circumstances; the latter three are poems of not much quality, though perhaps some cleverness of rhyme and meter when they are metrical and rhymed. In none, though, do I see myself as having been particularly inspired. In none do I see some spark of something that promotes more reading, some promise of better things to come, even if I happen to think I did better writing afterward (though a way off; not immediately).
It is possible that this date has been an off day in most of the last few years. Nature tends towards the cyclical, and I am still part of nature in some way or another, indoorsman though I am. I operate on daily and weekly cycles; why would I not have arrived at an annual cycle, as well? I have become more and more regular in my writing here over that time, as a survey of my posts will point out; I have been better about making a daily post, even if there are occasional gaps in the timing of those posts within days. (I still feel poorly about my failure earlier in the week.) So there is some thought that I might, indeed, have a recurring off day.
Such a thought presupposes that I normally have on days, and I am not at all sure that such is the case. I've noted more than once in the past few posts that I am struggling to get written here what I feel I ought to get written, and I know that some of the recent posts have been a bit short of my average or my objective. Word count is not itself a determiner of quality, but it is harder to get ideas across decently in fewer words than more, and there is something to be said for being able to sustain an idea for a longer time. I've not been able to do so in the ways I would like to recently, and I have to wonder if I am losing access to some skill or another that I have had and do not have as much of any longer. It is not a comforting thing, as I am sure others can attest better than I.
It is not only in the insufficient length that I find concern, though. Looking back over the date's posts across the years, I find the quality of writing...lacking. Were I to look over my personal journals at the same date, where I have not flagged due to inattention, distraction, and laziness, I would likely find the same thing. But in a personal journal, at least, there is not an expectation of quality; in writing that faces a public, however small the public might be that my blog posts here reach, there is a demand for more. I write here to practice addressing such a public, but I have been practicing poorly, and I hear in my mind an old professor of mine making a comment about perfect practice and the habituation of error. Another voice from a life I have left behind continues to haunt me; it is far from alone, as seems inevitable when writing about past writing.
All too often, I am my own ghosts.