Our sincerest apologies to dedicated followers of this space. It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything here, but hopefully this will be the first baby-step back toward regular publishing.

There’ve been many disrupting circumstances, the most significant to my writing being the moving of apartments I recently completed. The upheaval of it all—your whole life viewed in boxes—set me back. I simply can’t concentrate when set adrift a sea of dishevelment, but slowly I’m managing to put things away and get back on track.

Over the past while I’ve thought a lot about writing on this space. There were some culturally significant moments: April 5th was the 20th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death, a person whose music and symbolic presence impacted my adolescence greatly. During my move I even found the yellow Memorex dubbed tape cassette which someone gave me when I was 14 or 15, the first time I’d ever heard Nevermind, Nirvana’s breakthrough and the first of many grunge albums that would make up a huge portion of my high-school listening.

Yesterday, April 13th, was the birthday of Samuel Beckett, another huge impact on my life. I read some Beckett in high-school French class, but it wasn’t until I was out of college that I really discovered what an astounding writer he was. (In addition to being one of the 20th-Century’s greatest writers, the records indicate that he was arguably one of its nicest and kindest people, from serving as amanuensis to an increasingly-blind Joyce to risking his life in service to the French resistance.)

I remember working through his great trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable, and shaking my head, wondering how the hell he was pulling this entire project off. I still can’t exactly say. It’s rare to find such a combination of intelligence, sensitivity, creativity and uniqueness, and if you’ve ever read these books you’ll always recall the closing lines, so despairing and yet somehow oddly hopeful: “You can’t go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Sadly, during this time I also lost a friend and co-worker, a young man who got wrapped up in a drug-addiction nobody was able to measure and ended up going on a crazy spree that ended with him being shot by the police. It’s a long, wild and complicated story, some details of which are still emerging, but tracing its outline isn’t my point right now. It’s been difficult to remember that none of us is only-one-thing. We’re multifarious, and integrating those facets into a whole can stump even the most open of minds. It’s a bad thing, this one, and a kid with a future that was brighter than he was able to see is now dead. I’m sad.

There’s other stuff going on: more thoughts and etc., and now that I’m settling-in hopefully I’ll be able to keep a more consistent record of them. I wrote this hoping to get things back-on-track, and with a little luck we’ll get there soon. Until then: stay tuned.