I certainly like to think of myself as a connoisseur of the practical. I don’t have much use for extraneous things that don’t serve some reasonable purpose, and yet I still collect some silly things from time to time; alas none of us are perfect.

Recently, it doesn’t seem that posting my every thought for all to potentially see is either productive or even healthy for me to do. It’s not that I’m necessarily afraid of saying something wrong; that’s what the delete button is for, after all. Certainly, many of my musings have been misinterpreted when posted hastily for the sake of feeling I shared something relevant. Perhaps I am simply out of touch with what could be considered relevant. Lately I’ve forced myself to be content privatizing my thoughts except in the most specific company.

For many years I kept he majority of my thoughts to myself, only blathering on when I felt it necessary to try and connect with others for the sake of human companionship, no matter how fleeting those connections may have ultimately been. When I felt compelled to share something, I preferred to scribble it in a notebook, often spiral-bound in some fashion. Many of those scribblings have found themselves transcribed into digital mediums, albeit in a much refined form than they were first captured.

It seemed a somewhat good idea to me within the past few years to pull some of my more interesting phraseologies with the world in the form of short and sweet status updates. This project began in earnest but received such little fanfare and attention that I halted it rather abruptly, instead attempting to collect various aborted thought-children into bastardizations of what may loosely be construed as an article. Some of these efforts have been recorded in the public arena in the annals of The Phoenix Desertsong (or Obscure Curiosites).

Alas in our TikTok viral video fed culture, it seems all of these pretty words are wasted on the few eyes which gloss over them. Many of my recent private musings haven’t transitioned into a public posting simply because they have become so tinged with bitterness and extreme sarcasm that publishing them would perhaps make readers think less of me.

In the final days of the passing year I became obsessed with the uglier side of human nature and reveling in my own shortcomings. I was ceasing to be productive in my overanalysis of social trends and the darkening tone of current events. I’ve felt over the past year or so that anyone who dares to be positive in the face of some pretty awful chains of events are simply braver souls than I to plow forward for the sake of righteousness. 

Meanwhile, I crumble as I watch everything I held dear fade away or be stripped from me. Although I should consider myself fortunate that I’m in the enviable position I am now, there is still a vast emptiness within me. I ask myself daily why I still breathe; my chronic aches and pains remind me of my mortality, and the scars I bear don’t seem worth the trouble. 

What I gave up for my freedom included my very lust for life, my passions have been drained to the point that I’m simply going through the motions; in truth, I am simply drifting through the shadows of various aspects of my former self. There’s no sense of accomplishment for me in writing well researched articles about pocket monsters, baseball, or gathered magical trading cards; they are merely artefacts of a life lived that was never truly mine. I do still enjoy these things, but I only still focus on them because without these diversions I would simply falter and collapse.

For a while, I attempted to be much more academic than ever. I felt like I needed to be more professional in my approach to analyzing relatively trivial things to such a ridiculous degree. There are truths beneath the surface of the seemingly cut and dry articles of interest I write that I haven’t wished to share before now… but at this point, I’m just putting some words together and hope that they get some semblance of what’s on my mind across. My seeking an audience is no longer anywhere near my concern. Whether people read my brain vomit or not is no longer important to me… I’m being pragmatic and my continued act of writing is just a practical way of still feeling useful to myself.