The Dark Side of Indifference

I promised myself when I started this blog that I would keep up with it. The internet is littered with barely started blogs. Do a search through blogspot alone and the majority of blogs you will encounter have less than a dozen entries. When I search on Google, I always check out any answers that involve a blog, and 9 times out of ten, it’s a defunct blog that only lasted a few months. Or less. It’s a virtual wasteland of incomplete thoughts, lost energy, and apathetic efforts. I didn’t want to be part of that.

And then I got hit with a small whammy: my blood pressure rose to dangerous levels and the doctor said stay in bed and don’t exert yourself. So I laid on the sofa and watched movies. No cleaning. No cooking. No internet. No nothing but movies. And as quick as you can say, “Bob’s your uncle”, my blog was way behind, slipping into that dark abyss called indifference. It’s an ugly pattern of indolence that I have become more aware of as I get older.

It made me think of the Pink Floyd song Time from the album, Dark Side of the Moon. I was 15 the first time I heard that album and it was love at first sound. I heard it at a party and went out the next day and bought it for myself. It must have been quite a shock to my mother as my music taste prior to that purchase hovered in the realm of Barry Manilow and The Carpenters. But oh what a change. The lyrics that struck me the most were:

“Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day

You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.”

Even at 15, I could relate to “frittering” the hours away in a very careless manner. I had this terrible fear that I was predestined to do such a thing. Another set of haunting lyrics confirmed it to me:

“And then one day you find

ten years have got behind you.

No one told you when to run,

you missed the starting gun.”

I thought to myself, “Ten years. Ten years seems so far away and yet here is this guy in a band, singing about the ten years that ran by him.” And I knew that they would run by me too. Of course, it’s not been ten years, it’s been thirty-three! And they didn’t run by me, the blasted by me in a blazing convoluted blur of everything and nothing until I have landed here eight years into the new millennium, in front of my computer, typing a blog entry for all the world to see. (Or at least the handful of friends who read it and strangers who stumble upon it)

Well I am not giving up nor giving in. I plan to see this through to the bitter end -- whatever and whenever that may be. In all the starts and stops in life that I have encountered, I’d like this blog to be one of my more enduring starts. It’s a little piece of me that I can send out into the vast internet universe and maybe, just maybe, make some tiny little mark somewhere. And who knows, thirty-three years from now I could look back at all this and think, “I may have missed the starting gun, but I ran the race anyway.”