Brain fog

I sit at my desk and write this in the waning hours of February 2022.  What am I writing about, and why?  To be honest, I'm writing because I've posted only five essays this month.  This travesty will be my sixth.

I wrote six essays last month, too.  I suppose February's short 28-day length would excuse me for writing fewer this month.  Right?  

Of course not!  Eleven essays, total, for January and February combined?  I posted eleven essays in January alone last year.

What's wrong with me?  I bragged last March that I had posted 148 essays during calendar year 2020.  That was, for me, by far a new record -- but then each year beginning with 2018 had set a new all-time record.

I won't be bragging about new records for 2021.

Yes, I realize that quality counts for far more than quantity.  But quality's a different, more subjective issue.  Quantity is mathematics, easily examined statistics.  And the statistics indicate that while the first three months of 2021 were up there in numbers -- eleven or twelve per month -- not one month after March 2021 has totaled more than nine posts -- and every month since July has come in at fewer than eight.

What's happened?  I can't give you a clear reason, let alone a justification.  Subjectively, I feel that not much interesting happened in 2021, or, for that matter, in the first two months of 2022.  But that's no excuse.  My talent, such as it is, has been to take uninteresting events and find reasons to make them interesting.  Of if not interesting, at least funny.  Interesting or funny, at least to me, which -- God knows -- is all I need as a reason for writing.

Maybe I suffer from mild depression?  Possibly.  But I still bounce out of bed in the morning; I still find daily ways to keep myself amused.  

Maybe the pandemic?  That has some plausibility.  The two years of the pandemic have kept me cooped up at home, although in 2021 it hasn't prevented me from traveling on occasion.  Being cooped has limited the number of things available to write about, and by the end of 2020, those topics may have been exhausted.  How many times can I write about long walks around my neighborhood?  Or the quality and/or quantity of Seattle rainfall? 

Of course the relationship to the pandemic that I don't care to consider is "brain fog."  Maybe, after being immunized, I unknowingly contracted a case of Covid, one that was asymptomatic, or accompanied by very minor symptoms -- but a case that eventually resulted in an inability to think critically, focus attention, be imaginative?  Brain fog?  No, let's not go there.

Let's just call it idiopathic writer's block.  That's a safe diagnosis, one that has a certain distinction by its association with many great writers.  A symptom that comes, but then -- usually -- goes.

Also, I should note that I lost a childhood friend in September -- a guy who himself was a professional writer and a retired newspaper editor.  He was one of the few known regular readers of this blog.  He generally emailed me some clever remarks about each essay as it was posted.  He rarely met the intended point I was trying to make in my essay, but instead remarked at great length and with savage humor on his reaction to some obscure reference contained in the essay -- often something that reminded him of some weird event in our mutual childhoods.

I never wrote consciously for his sole amusement -- who knew at what, in any given post, he would find reason to be amused?  But I suspect that my awareness that he would be reading each post with critical eye and bizarre sense of humor prompted more posts from me than might otherwise have come forth.

But maybe not.  I'm not sure his death had any real effect on my ability to find blog-worthy subjects.  But he would be the first to tell me, with a twinkle in his eye, "Yes, but isn't it pretty to think so."