(Phaysis)

I suspect I’m in a season of silence. Not much to be said that’s suitable for a public journal.

Work is stressful. Sometimes I miss the simplicity of working with mechanical devices instead of mechanistic people. I had a moment of clarity last week; I’m not trapped. I can leave. I’m only existentially bound to my projects and coworkers. As a former manager of mine said just before he left to work for the competitor, “You have to look out for what’s best for Shawn, Incorporated.” But would I leave?

Outside of work, I need to find something to help me relax. Something that I can win. But even then, most of what I do too closely resembles actual work. There’s no relaxation. I mean, I know I have music projects, website projects, writing projects. I have things I could do, if only I wanted to. All of these projects are unified by the same internal drive. Without the desire to generate my own movements and craft my internal desires into external fruits, none of these projects will get done.

That same internal drive also motivates me to reach out and connect with people. I know some of you would love for me to call, to hang out, to spend time with you. It’s nothing against your character that I don’t take the risk. Without that drive, that ache, that itch, that fire, I’d rather sit inert and stare at the screen, listen to the conversation, feel without touching. It bothers me that, at age 39, I’m practicing to be the old man slumped in his chair, staring at the wall of the retirement center. I just want to be passive, for somebody else to push my chair to the garden.

Talking requires The Spark. It requires effort. Speaking in a dialogue takes more energy than random confessions, than verbalizing personal memories, than talking about myself. This blog is easy. Facebook comments are easy. Chat room ramblings are easy. Talking with people about real stuff is hard.

So expect not so much of it from me for a while. I’ll come back around soon enough.

A character flaw has recently come to my attention. Apparently, I have a tendency to tell stories from my life as an automatic response to memories triggered by the current conversation. You talk about being an english major, and I wax on about the three times I took the same literature class. You bring up multisided dice and I’ll unravel an other-people-story about my old gamer friends carrying suede drawstring baggies everywhere they went. If you say “hey, what’s up?”, I’ll rant about how my job stresses me out because I’m doing this hot project and my manager needs the numbers like yesterday and I really really need some coffee would you please serve me a small light roast I mean dark roast to go wait for here.

What alerted me to this was a conversation with an old friend who was chatting with me about a thing she did and how tough it was. She was venting about the circumstance and seeking some consolation. What resulted was me blabbing about a similar story from my adolescence. I fell into the pattern of the coffeeshop conversation, where you can sit and chat for hours and nothing is really said; it’s more like synchronized monologues. But other people know better than that. She called me out. Said I should write down my stories somewhere. Sell them, make money. Our conversation ended shortly thereafter once I realized I’d insensitively hit her tilt switch, and we haven’t talked much since.

If you notice me doing this kind of thing, call me out on it. Let me know in no uncertain terms that my behavior is annoying. Sure, it’ll hurt like hell emotionally to learn this lesson at such a late stage in my life, but I’ll learn. Eventually, I’ll stop talking and return to being the sounding board everybody wants in their life.