I don’t understand it. My brain is, I think, locking up on me. Or I’m just getting old or something. It’s terrible.

One thing I’ve noticed is that I don’t have the patience to figure out subtlety. Not that I was ever one to appreciate subtlety. As many have pointed out, I’m probably the stupidest smart guy they’ve ever met, and sometimes you need to come at me with a large blunt object to get the point across.

But I miss, mostly, the joy of crafting subtlety. It takes something like it to write, certainly, poetry, but really, it takes something like it to write at all. I vaguely recall some joy in being able to tease out the exact words I want, being able to arrange them in particular phrase and sentence structures.

Maybe it’s because my job involves the dreaded task of “documentation.” Indeed, I do need to exercise a certain amount of descriptive exactness. The task of finding the correct adjective simply becomes another chore, not something I can do at leisure until I get it exactly right. Most of the time, I am forced to use approximations, of using words that are “good enough,” usually just barely.

As I’ve anticipated, “documentation” has made some parts of writing excruciatingly tedious.

I suppose that it was a double-edged gift that I realized that I still needed to exercise precision in my words. While writing poetry and prose, this is much of what I like about it, but in writing these utilitarian notes, it just becomes another odious task. It’s terrible.

Anyway, the other thing (if you haven’t noticed yourself on reading this ramble) is that I realize that I’ve really lost my control of being able to keep my thoughts in order. If I reflect upon the past week, if not the past month, I feel like I’ve just been staggering like a drunkard from task to task, no dedicated, sustained rhyme or reason in anything I’m doing. Like, I brought with me all these maps that I wanted to work on, or something. It was never really clear what I was going to do with these things. But I haven’t done much. I started, but then it didn’t grab me like sometimes these things do.

I don’t remember the last time I was engrossed in an activity.

Sad.

One other thing that has happened is that I have become rampantly and perhaps morbidly anti-social. I have not returned a phone-call for nearly a week now. I haven’t gotten in touch with friends I said that I would visit. Jesus, what the fuck is wrong with me?

My vacation is more than half-way over (although, in all fairness, a good chunk of it was spent getting over illness) and, to put it quite simply and bluntly, I haven’t done jack shit.