In another lifetime, when there was no child in the house and no earth shattering financial obligations threatening to annoy us with calls from wronged creditors, I wrote a lot. My recent posts have demonstrated that straying away from writing anything more substantive than Post-It notes for years at a time does not make attempts at resuming aforementioned practice seem much more than a contest against the inevitability of a vacuous middle age entirely removed from academia. I don’t mention academics because I feel they’re necessary in order to write well enough but because focus is much easier to attain when driven by the fear of humiliation and failure.

There may be an admission of mortality concealed in there somewhere — the not so devastating resignation that comes with the realization that you’re never going to do anything great or interesting to more than a handful of people that you already know. I’m trying to disprove the (my own) notion that this surrender to suckiness is inevitable yet still avoid editing like the curse on the drinking class that it is. Is the moral of the story to gleefully embrace mediocrity? Not really but I’m coming to terms with the idea that it beats an utter lack by a wide margin. ‘Missing’ fear and failure as a sincere motivator that produces the good stuff is another thing entirely that I’ll avoid discussing for the sake of keeping up the whole dignity facade.