The past week in review.

I can't sleep, so I thought I'd come here.

I'd consider this a half and half kind of week. On the productive side of things, I not only managed to get my winter coat cleaned [a first for the garment... which is really sad if you know how long I've had it. Let it never be said the grunge thing is totally dead] but I also got a new pair of shoes, desperately needed after I took the curb at the convenience store wrong and blew out the back of the heel. If there was a "Randall's Guide to the Inanities of Everyday Living," then the merits of a good pair of skate shoes would probably be somewhere between the chapters about the versatility of black socks and the importance of breast pockets. I like them because leather or suede water proofs really well, and unlike Chuck's there aren't great big holes in the side of the shoe for ventilation, which means rain, snow... any weather the tend to hold up pretty well. I'd even go so far as to call them "durable" ... or at least I would, if it weren't for my lithe 180 pounds destroying them on the same piece of angled concrete two pairs in a row.

Now, I know what you're thinking -- new shoes and dry cleaning are a little insipid, even for the vast amount of uninteresting things I tend to talk about here. Creatively though, it hasn't been much of a week. The high points of any sort of output on my part are my own entries just talking about this blog, and even then I haven't put as much out as I expected to. But on one level I thought spending a week blogging about my blog would get old pretty fast, and if I'm honest with myself, I think even though it's been a year officially I might still need some time to figure out exactly what that means, and whether this has been all worthwhile. I also promised a "special thanks" post, and I'm still planning on doing that, but I want to put some good work in to it, gather up every one's links [if they have any], and most importantly, not half-ass it.

My head's just not been together this past week, and while I've talked to a few people about it, I've also been trying to keep it from souring my mood, or at least not bring it up every single conversation I have. I'm still losing sleep over it though, and it's been hard to sit down and write without everything just feeling insignificant in some undefinable scheme. It sort of sucks all the inspiration and energy out of me, and I spend a lot of time looking at old work, unfinished outlines, or blank pages. And in a way, it certainly becomes a self-sustaining cycle where I'm already bothered by something, and then I let that interfere with work that might take my mind off of that, and then that bothers me, and gives me something else to worry about, rather than trying to tackle the original problem.

Not that I'm actually looking to tackle anything. Most cases, these funks are just a matter of weathering the storm.

Still, I have had a few ideas the past several days, especially as it concerns doing more work in prose [or that essay/article style]. "New Hooverville" was really satisfying to get out, and some people seemed to like it [or at the very least, have strong feelings about the subject matter], so I've been thinking I might try more in that style. I have a slightly older piece that I wrote back when I was staying with Kyle that I might take another run at, and then a couple of different ideas involving a single narrator, who just a normal guy who can't stop thinking about porn. And not in a Chuck Palahniuk/teenage boy sort of way.

On the upside, I've gotten a lot of reading done.