I confess that as more time passes without updating, the easier it becomes to continue the trend. Day three or four without new ironSoap content feels uncomfortable, like underwear pulled from a dryer too early. By the end of the first week I feel nagging guilt and malaise over my slacking. My mind typically reels with possible topics to expound upon, but my fingers do not type. Several days after that is the crisis point: Rock bottom. I refuse to surf any site, fearing the grim reminder of my own neglected web-space. Leisure time is spent in sweaty, paranoid fashion, mind clouded with fear that some gentle reader may note my un-updating self doing something other than work—preferably manual labor.
Yet all I need to do is push past those few dark days and the light at the end of the tunnel comes sooner than I expect and the chorus of angels singing there fills my mind with blissful apathy. After all, if the faceless readership has suffered me this long, clearly—obviously—they don’t care. They haven’t noticed. I am meaningless and not missed and therefore free to wallow in the surf of my own choosing, perhaps under the grey-blue glow of a television sun, or gripping the smooth and luxurious handles of a console controller, or hunched in lounging relaxation over a table of unpainted miniatures waiting to be brought to colorful life.
My mind will, occasionally, return to thoughts of past days where fonts lit the virtual page and my thoughts manifested into drawling gibberish beneath my tapping fingertips. I had and have nothing of pertinence to speak, aloud or by means of digital data transfer and the magic voodoun of hypertext. Something though—possibly benign, most likely dark and sinister because I prefer the dramatic effect it has on my digressions—compels me back, slowly, subtly and without obvious machination, to ideas being communicated. Communication… over vast distances. Need it rend the Earth with its profundity? Do I demand excellence of such unattainable caliber from all others? Of course not. So why, then, not?
Ah, the sweet mistress of sloth! I tend to forget her apathetic coils and their illicit allure. She works in tandem with her brothers representing real, actual responsibility and the most devious devil of all, bartering in unrealized intention. The trio of life, laziness and procrastination have erected shelters in my psyche, once shanties; mere hovels. Now they have lavish mansions where they do their bidding beyond my control and chuckle behind my back as I blame them when secretly they and I know that we all wear the same exact skin over identical faces. We are, indeed, as inseparable as epoxy-bonded steel.
I do, fortunately, have a secret weapon to combat these brutes. It is a vacationing traveller, an occasional visitor who nevertheless bears a welcome grin and a pocketful of ideas; you may know her as inspiration or perhaps muse. I find that where she leads I must follow. Resistance, so they claim, is futile. Truthfully not precisely futile, but at the very least quite unwise. My fancies have always followed cycles whose patterns of comings and goings are incapable of being properly charted: Today’s enamored fascination is tomorrow’s blithe missive and yet several months down the road, I find myself back where I started, wondering why I stopped at all. The comparison between my patterns of behavior and those commonly diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder are not accurate, but they share common characteristics, the only separation coming from the time allotted to each ebb and surge of devotion which is measured in my case in weeks or months rather than minutes or seconds.
As such I return for now, but my fancies and failings may limit my intentions; it’s chronic and I am incurable. At this point you may either choose to simply deal with it and me or not. I like you, so for your own sake I might recommend that you opt for not because I know the caliber of my content. Should you choose to suffer me and should I find a way to stave my inclinations, I can only say that I have stories.
Oh, do I have stories.
