YESTERDAY, A READER from Tennessee emailed to ask if all was well on my end. The reason being that over a week has passed with nothing new under the Moon.
I rarely remain silent so long, but maybe I will in the future. Am I running out of steam? Perhaps. The older you get, the less steam you generate.
I began this writing effort 15 years ago come January. I started on the Blogger website with a different title. I believe the first post was about a lunch here at home with company, the guests being the inimitable Al Kinnison and his wife, Jean.
(Both of whom are now deceased. They were witnesses at our 2002 wedding. R.I.P.)
Al read it later and told me he liked it. That inspired me, so I soldiered on, mostly writing about my relatively new life in a startlingly different world. Often I waxed lyrical, and people praised it. The list of followers grew, and it was fun.
I permanently pasted some reader feedback on the side column of that blog. Here are just a few examples:
Infectiously personal.
You never cease to amuse and amaze me.
Pretentious dolt!
What a nice piece of heaven you share.
You’re like a drunk uncle.
You’re a right-wing wacko.
You are a treasure on the electron highway.
Dark introspection.
You are so funny. I was snorting in my atole reading this.
You disgust me. (a paraphrase)
Later, I abandoned Blogger and switched to WordPress, a far better platform, as it’s called. And by 2011, I had wearied of writing about “Life in Mexico,” which had become routine. The novelty was gone. Anyway, many Gringos here were writing about “Life in Mexico.”
They had that base covered well. One good example is Steve Cotton’s blog where he never seems to weary of writing about Mexico. I admire his stamina.
I tossed my first blog aside and started fresh with the intention of writing not about Mexico but other stuff. Enter The Unseen Moon, a title that came to me out of nowhere in the process of writing The Old Wolf. The phrase was in the final line.
Speaking of The Old Wolf, I began writing short fiction, which I’d never done before. Prior to 2005, with the birth of the first blog, in spite of being in the newspaper business for 30 years, I had never written anything but headlines and photo captions.
I was an editor, not a writer.
Most of the brief fiction is available hereabouts via links. I also jumped into politics, the good sort, the conservative kind. Leftists, being the rabid bunch they are, reacted as they do, and I had to block quite a few commenters due to rudeness and curses.
My WordPress list of blocked people is laughably long, all because of ill breeding. Sad.
So, here we are almost 15 years after the start. We’ve gone from the novelty of living in Mexico to fiction to politics, and at times it’s all combined. And I have aged. Fifteen years ago my hair was as much black as white. Now it’s all white, and I’m creaky, sometimes cranky.
Am I running out of steam? Perhaps. But not today, it seems.
See you down the line, but Lord knows when.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
— Dylan Thomas
But why not, Dylan? One wonders.