The Lost Season

I didn’t post last weekend, so I thought I’d do a quick “lost weekend” post this morning. I was pretty sure I had written one before and a search shows that I have done several. One was in a June and another in a July, so maybe it’s a summer thing.

The term alludes to the film directed by Billy Wilder from 1945. Unlike the Ray Milland character, I did not go on an alcoholic bender for the weekend. I can’t even use the excuse that I was very busy with other things. I just didn’t have anything inspiring me during the week that I wanted to share.

That brings me to a bigger feeling that I have which came to me this week as I did some catching up on my physical journal with pen and paper: spring 2020 was lost season.

For that, I can point to the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking back and ignoring that, the only event I seemed to write about was the birth of my first grandchild in April. And yes, that should be the big event. It was strange occurring in the center of the pandemic here in the Northeast. There was a question about whether or not my son could even be present at the birth. Happily, he was there and the hospital locked hem down and got them out in 24 hours and all is well.

But in these sheltering-in five months I have had more “free time” at home then ever – and yet I have been less productive. I have written less. I ambitiously set up all my paints and easel and took out sketches I wanted to paint. They are still piled on a table in the basement. I started measuring out wallboard for some basement redo. It’s still there. My To-Do list of big projects is longer than ever and nothing has been crossed off. I’m behind in my journaling and I don’t know that I can even recall what happened in the past weeks to write about it.

Is it just me or has this strange time had this effect on a lot of other people? I’m not depressed. I’m not ill. I haven’t lost my way literally or in the “finding yourself” way.  I’m not even very displeased with myself about not getting things done.

It’s not that I haven’t done anything at all. I do write, though less than “normal.” I have completed things that had deadlines – web work for pay, online consulting, teaching commitments – and things I enjoy doing that are time-sensitive such as getting vegetables into the garden.

It’s the calendar midsummer in Paradelle. I still have time to finish things before another season passes by. I plan to write some posts here this weekend, but there’s no a lot of pressure to do so other than my little blog calendar where I keep track of what is being posted where. Maybe I’ll be like Don in that old film and have a few drinks.

Lost in the Overload

This seems to happen to me fairly regularly. A lost weekend. That can be a bad thing in the Billy Wilder movie way (alcoholic fog, but that’s not what happened. We had house guests and I didn’t get time to sit at the computer and think in words.

Sometimes being lost is rather wonderful (see this popular post on “Getting Lost” from an earlier summer). There’s a bit of terror when you’re lost that inspires attention. This works literally and figuratively.

Eventually, one wants to be found or to find their own way. “i once was lost but now I’m found,” says the song “Amazing Grace.” I wrote about the art of finding your way in the wilderness, but that article did venture into the land of “finding yourself” by deliberately getting lost.

This weekend was just too busy. That’s a problem for a lot of us these days. So many distractions. I have a personality flaw in that I find it hard to leave things undone. When I look at my email, I want to clear out the inbox. I have a pile of unread magazines and I can’t seem to recycle them without at least paging through them. And then, I tend to pull out articles “to read later” that pile up in one of those wire In baskets that never gets moved to Out.

There is a pile of books I want to read next to the bed, and some on my iPad. Technology does not help at all with this overload. I use Feedly to follow other blogs and that queue always seems to have a few hundred posts to consider.

I gave up on print newspapers last year. That created the same problems as print magazines, but they came more frequently.

I didn’t take a tech holiday this weekend and I did still look at Facebook and twitter and some websites via my phone or iPad, but there just wasn’t time to sit down and be thoughtful online.

“Weekends” and even “Paradelle” have never been literal, so perhaps I’ll weekend it mid-week. Do you ever feel that weekend is a state of mind?

 

A Lost Weekend

It was a lost weekend in Paradelle. Not like in the 1945 film directed by Billy Wilder (with Ray Milland and Jane Wyman). That one is about a writer who goes on a booze binge one weekend. I wasn’t in an alcoholic haze. Just a few beers with barbecue.

I got caught up in two family birthdays and the July 4th frivolities and never got to post here. I did start a few things during the week, but never got to finish.

Now, it’s 2 am and I’m checking email and such. Got a doctor’s appointment at 8:30, so I should get some sleep.

It’s going to be a hot week around Paradelle. 100 degrees F. predicted for several days. But I’ll be in my sealed windows, air-conditioned office, so…

Maybe those weekend posts will get pushed out mid-week anyway.

Hope your weekend was fun – or productive. I doubt that it was both.

Lost Weekend

Yeah, no posts this past weekend in Paradelle. A lost weekend.

Not a lost weekend like in the novel by Charles R. Jackson that was turned into the better known 1945 film, The Lost Weekend, directed by Billy Wilder and starring Ray Milland.

I didn’t spend the weekend in a drunken state. Maybe that would have been an improvement.

In the novel, the protagonist is on a five-day alcoholic binge. He’s also a would-be writer (he uses foreign phrases and Shakespeare quotes, so he must be). A famous scene (parodied in The Simpsons) is when he tries to pawn his typewriter for drinking money.

I was on a seven-day work binge. Just too much to do last week after a week’s vacation. Do you find that whatever recharge you do get from some time off drains much too quickly when you return to work? It must be my human battery, because the charge seems to be shorter every time.

I was a week without the Internet and did not feel any withdrawal symptoms. I had queued up 15 blog posts on different blogs that I do, so that things would appear “normal”  for the week. That worked. But writing anything last week was painful.

This week, this month, doesn’t seem too much better.

But here I am drinking my morning coffee and typing, trying to write a post before I head out to teach a class and then head to my office to work on a big report that’s due in a week, try to prepare two presentations for conferences this month and do my day-to-day work. Hopefully, I get to finish this post sometime today…

And that’s just work. What about home and family? Spent a chunk of the weekend helping my mom deal with all that being 92 means. (I dread getting old.)

And I ‘d rather be walking a beach, or even working in the yard clearing out the frost-zapped vegetable garden, raking and mulching leaves. But no time for any of that.

I wrote a post here called “Getting Lost” back in July and since then it has consistently been in the top 3 read posts on this blog. I don’t know if it’s the title, the book that inspired it or my tales of feeling lost literally and figuratively. Something connected with readers.

I wrote another post as a kind of answer to that post and I called it “Getting Found: The Tracker” which was ostensibly about the well-known tracker from New Jersey, Tom Brown. Still, that post was also about “finding yourself” – which you can do with a compass, but you can also do by wandering aimlessly in the woods.

Now, it’s a weekday evening in Paradelle and I shouldn’t be writing on this blog. Not because there’s any law against it (I do post full moon posts during the week already), but because I have so many other “more important” things to do.

More important. There’s the rub. Is my homework for my classes and bill paying more important than writing? Yeah, I guess so. If I don’t do those things, bad things will result and my life will worsen. If I don’t write on my blogs… nothing good OR bad happens. My butterfly flutters it wings.

If only I didn’t so much enjoy writing online. So much so, that I would sell my laptop in order to be able to write on it.