I was just chatting with my friend Stephan about social networking sites, blogs, etc., and he said he’d noticed that I had a blog and that I hardly ever update it. I said, “Well, the shit I think about is generally stuff that no one would want to read.” He said, “It depends.” I took that as a challenge.
Here’s a “pssible blog entry” (it must have been late) I had scribbled on a notepad that’s been sitting in a desk drawer for a couple of months.

Whenever I’m around family, what I call “the casualty list”, a roll call of the dead and wounded, eventually makes its way to the top of the agenda and names and ailments are called out in a ritual of commiseration and warding. My cousin (once removed, elder generation) Louis is suffering the later stages of Alzheimer’s, and doesn’t know his friends or his children or how to do things like tie his shoes or drink from a glass. He occasionally looks at his wife of fifty-plus years and asks her, “Where’s Mary?” to which she can only reply, “Louis, I am Mary.” He’s prone to fits of rage, he is sometimes found standing in the kitchen in the middle of the night, nude, eating raw food with his hands. He shouts. He pounds on walls and doors until he bruises his hands. He can’t stand to let Mary, who I think he must recognize on some level, out of his sight for even a moment. She must serve as some kind of landmark, something familiar in a totally unfamiliar landscape.

So I think of this man, a former bank president, banging around the darkened, damaged labyrinth of who he used to be like a wounded minotaur bellowing at shadows and listening for changes in the echo, and I think almost any other end would be better. I’m hard-pressed to think of anything much worse.

Who wants to read shit like that? That’s why I don’t post more often.

(I’ve changed their names, by the way)