it’s been a month since my last post. what happened? where did i go? am i ever coming back?
back now, with a round-up, some excuses and some reasons, and treats.
first, dog treats! (you know– pictures of dogs.)
good.
now–
reasons and excuses:
for the first few days of blogabsence, i was simply in the holiday swirl. christmas, then a family gathering in williamsburg to celebrate my parent’s 60th anniversary. that looked like this:
all the while i thought about this online space and how best to use it, but truly (mostly) why to. i started out here to help with my writer’s block, as antidote to solitary, endless effort. scare up some readers, keep a hand in, i thought. i began with a form i found interesting (this list of 50 things) and imagined using this as a parking space at the intersection of the daily and the life lesson.
here’s what i learned: finding and naming life lessons is hard. bending daily experiences back around to illustrate them, and doing so briefly and breezily and frequently (with images to match) is very hard, the seams and the strain showing up easily. i am neither alain de botton nor diana vreeland, those great modern philosophers of the quotidian.
another thing: the lack of response, the dead-silent audience bugged me. i could track page views, but how many of those were bots or spammers? maybe all of them, if the weirdly disjointed names of the site’s registered users were any indication. (every one of them with a yahoo email address–what’s up with that?)
so i went up to my room, swearing i wouldn’t come back down till someone missed me, a childhood tactic which (i now remember) seldom proves satisfying. the length of time it takes for someone to notice you’ve gone and to call up the stairs after you is always very much longer than you think it should be, no matter how loudly you stomp on the floor, subtly punctuating your absence.
for a month no one said ‘i wonder where johngibsonis.com is.’ or ‘when did you see him last?’ (at least, not so i could hear). then yesterday, out of the blue, a favorite neighbor said she was reading her way through the blog, and an oldest and dearest left a flurry of comments. which means i get to come back.
yes, i know, there are least two ‘part ones’ that i left dangling (this one and that one); i promise to circle back round to those. today, though. . . it’s snowy. extended thought is beyond me. i’d rather indulge my short attention span. so here a few things from the last month:
two lessons:
friends help friends move.
nothing looks crisper than black mullions.
my favorite new word is paraprosdokian.
as in–
“i want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers.”
that, plus comedy theory, plus a list of rules, plus chuck jones–
this seemed custom-made for me.
jb has settled on a recurring gift that may be my favorite ever: ‘the thrift-store art shopping spree’.
for christmas, he gave me x amount (not a lot, but not nothing). i found this:
paid 80 bucks for it at an antique mall in north carolina, pretty sure i got a deal. the challenge? an illegible signature:
veracity to the rescue. a modern miracle. in five seconds, this reverse image search app brought up four auction records (including this one) for the piece i now know as ‘nino en la cuna’ by the argentinian master carlos alonso. how did i ever do without it?
here’s another piece, a teaser. i’ll tell what i know about it soon:
here’s one last shot from williamsburg (not the hip one; the one in virginia), looking through the rear window of a cobbler shop, at shoe lasts in the front window.
till soon (for real– i won’t stay gone so long this time. even if there’s no one out there but you spambots)