Bad news today, in the form of a job that a loved one did not get, after investing a great deal of time and energy in trying to get it.  That always stings, especially when said loved one needs to not be in said loved one’s current job.

Lunch today at 5 Guys will Bill, where talk ventured toward the literary.  We spent a little while bashing literary fiction and then finally accepted its uses, then saw Wally Hannum wandering around the mall and invited him to join us.  Wally’s in phased retirement and has just bought a house in the mountain.  He said that for the first night there, they got a mattress and two rocking chairs, and that was just about all they needed.  (“A toothbrush, too, maybe,” he added.)

Emily came in with a story excerpt from a lesson plan, the best line of which was, “Dave was 6 feet, 250 pounds of pure defense.”  Oh.  My.  God.  Please let them put that on my tombstone.

I have been spurred to blogging again by a stern prodding from Jennings, and this reflection, which I sent to my alumni listserv yesterday in response to the question “How do you continue to write during a dark time in which you don’t really want to get out of bed?”

I’d like to tack on to what Ed said about keeping a journal during this rough time.  During the darkest phase of my life, I began blogging.  I tried to just keep up with what was happening daily– nothing special.  Though I was deep in the throes of despair, I tried not to talk about that so much… I just tried to objectively recall what was happening.  If I was pissed at someone, I said so.  If I found a rare moment of overwhelming joy, I made a note of it.  I kept my blog on a private site that was part of a small online community, because I didn’t want my name on it for the world to see, I just wanted to have some voice.  What happened next truly astounded me: the blog became one of the most-read on the site, and people came out of the woodwork to identify with my daily goings-on.  Some, I think, sensed that I was down and truly in need of some human connection.  Some were just interested in an honest accounting of what was going on in a thoroughly average life.  A few were friends, most were strangers (at that time, though many are now friends in my day-to-day life).

I did not, at that time, anticipate that there would be any salvageable writing in that blog.  In fact, I was certain that the opposite was true.  But I now recognize that those blog entries are infinitely valuable as a source of material for my writing, as a way to know my own mind, and as a wonderfully true record of a time that I sometimes flirt with revisiting.  An unexpected bonus was that I have a detailed impression of my first date with my wife, which happened at the tail end of my dark time.  I kept the record going for more than a year afterwards (and still blog occasionally, though in a more public space and a less honest way).  When I got married, my best man, in lieu of writing a toast, compiled and read entries about our courtship, which was one of the most touching things anyone had ever done for me.

I think the key, for me, was being certain that writing in that blog was a useless, self-indulgent act.  We all started writing solely for ourselves, and at some point, opened up to an audience.  Reclaim the writing for you for a little while, and see what happens.

Speaking of my alumni listserv, we released the results of our survey and there’s been a ton of conversation, and I am buoyed by the diverse responses.  There’s some anger, some indignation, some total agreement (even though the results weren’t uniform)… all in all, there’s a lot of willingness to discuss what we mean to each other and what we want to mean to each other.  I don’t yet feel fully a part of the community (though by no means to I feel fully apart, either).  But I can see how that will happen in time.

Robin and I opened up the discussion boards for tech testing and the first-day response was well beyond anything I could have hoped for.  I mean, I really think this thing could catch on.