Well Running Dry

I was about to post this yesterday, when all hell broke loose in DC, and it seemed like nothing would ever be the same. But now that the election has been certified, it looks like things will go on as usual, and until January 20^th we will resume our watch for the daily presidential outrage. So what I wrote earlier in the week still applies. 

Out walking Bisou in the murky grayness, I detect another human coming in my direction. From the butterflies knitted into her woolen hat, I conclude that it is a woman, possibly one I know well.

“Hi!” she mutters into her mask, “how are you?”

“Well, you know…” I shrug. “And you?”

“Could be worse, I guess,” she says. 

About half of my interactions these days are like that one. The other half take place on Zoom. Those conversations are longer, but they hinge on three topics: the awfulness of politics, the horrors of the pandemic, and how grateful we should be that we have it so good. 

I am all for gratitude. It can make us more contented, kinder, not to mention better company. However, when I hear people reflect on how lucky we are and how grateful we should be because things could be so much worse, I am driven even deeper into the slough of despond. 

I know that, compared to the rest of humanity, I am immensely, even grotesquely, fortunate. But I don’t see how that is supposed to cheer me up. When I compare my life to that of people dying alone in ICUs, their weary nurses, their disconsolate families, the unemployed in danger of being evicted, and the single parents trying to work from home in the company of their terminally bored toddlers, I feel not only sorrow for their suffering, but guilt because I’m not out there making things better. And on top of that, I feel guilty for not being a more positive, optimistic, glass-half-full kind of person. 

The two other topics, politics and the pandemic, are inherently depressing. And, to make matters worse, they have stayed soul-killingly the same month after month. Sure, there have been moments (Biden! Vaccines! Georgia!) when the sun has parted the clouds, but mostly the two topics elicit only moaning and lamentation: “Can you believe what he did today?” followed by “Did you see those clips of people in bars, with not a mask in sight?” 

Round and round we go, my friends and I, shaking our heads until they are in danger of falling off the frail stalks of our necks. What else is there to talk about? Nothing comes to MY mind, that’s for sure. 

I look desperately around my cottage/hermitage for topics to write about: the dog (done that); the cat (ditto); the spouse (out of bounds); my past (can’t remember a thing). The squirrels, the birds, and the houseplants have remained mind-numbingly constant in their habits. My brain is like a house after the movers have left, where only dust bunnies and a tangle of forgotten wire hangers remain as evidence of a once rich and active life….

 

How I Watch the News

This is how I watch the news these days. First, the cat, the dog, and I jockey for position on the loveseat. Guess who always wins...

Then the daily blend of despair-inducing catastrophes, outrages, and cataclysms assaults my ears and threatens my sanity:

But when it's over, I put my arms around my comfort critters and things don't look so dark.

Milestone

Google Blogger, which keeps track of such things, tells me that as of last week I have published one thousand posts on My Green Vermont. Other than breathing and sleeping and brushing my teeth, I can’t think of too many acts I’ve repeated a thousand times.

Back in 2008 the friend who got me started (thanks, Indigo!) had to explain to me what a blog was. Wanting to avoid unnecessary gaffes, I consulted a number of websites about the rules of successful blogging. And they all said the same thing: you must post frequently. Daily, if possible. Several times a day, if you’re really serious.

I took the advice to heart and gradually increased my output until by 2010 I was posting over four times a week. That was the most I could manage, given that I’d also taken it into my head to accompany each post with a drawing. None of the how-to-blog sites recommended this, but I did notice that most blogs featured photos, many of them beautiful, sensational, or both.  Apparently, online readers expected to be served pictures along with words.

I had a digital camera but its battery was unreliable, and rather than deal with that I decided that it would be simpler and more creative to illustrate my posts by hand. (Now, after all these years, I could paper a room with the originals of my little drawings.)

How did I come up with so much to write about? It turns out that blogging is like finding a loose thread in one of those factory-made hems—you give a little tug, and it just keeps coming. I would start a post about one of my pullets laying her first egg, and that led to memories of being in bed recovering from the measles, with my pet lame chick hobbling and cheeping on the blanket.

I wrote endlessly about chickens and goats and gardens and woodstoves and the wonder of having made it to Vermont, where I could finally live “close to the earth,” as I proclaimed on the blog’s banner. When it became apparent that I couldn’t sustain my homesteading way of life indefinitely, we moved to a retirement community, and for a while I wrote about the dramas of downsizing, and the necessity of letting go of beloved objects and remaining flexible in spirit if not in body.

And then, one day, there seemed to be nothing more to write about. Gone were the goats and the milking pail, the hens and the egg basket, the compost and the wheelbarrow. The woodstove gave way to an efficient gas fireplace and my garden was reduced to a couple of potted citrus trees in the sun room (I gamely squeezed out a post about those).

What was the meaning, if any, of my new life? What occupied my mind? There were my fellow residents, obviously, and the shock of living in a kind of village where the only people under sixty-five were the staff. Plenty of grist for the mill there, but what if a neighbor took it into her head to read my blog?

Between 2015 and 2018 I only managed a measly total of sixty posts. And, just as the advice websites had predicted, my readership all but disappeared, drawn no doubt to livelier, more committed bloggers who managed to post every day, or even twice a day.

Then this year, in the dark of winter, I was spending my days in a miasma of politically-induced despondency. I badly needed to shake myself out of that state. What if I started blogging again, maybe only once a week? I could pretend that it was a real job that required me to post every Wednesday, except in case of emergency. What did I have to lose?

And so I tricked myself back into writing, and once I gave that initial tug, the thread kept coming. Now my week has rhythm and shape.

With a feeling of dread approaching nausea (what if, this time, the thread has broken, the well run dry?) on Thursday morning I force myself to spew whatever is in my head onto the screen. On Friday I piously gather any crumbs worth preserving and ditch the rest. I spend the weekend adding more crumbs and worrying about how I’m going to wrap the thing up.

On Monday I ditch some more and, if I’m lucky, come up with an ending. Tuesday is for drawing and for fighting the improvements that Canon insists on making to my scanner. On Wednesday, just before I hit “Publish,” I ditch some more (how could I have let this ridiculous sentence almost make it into the finished piece?). For the rest of the day I bask in the relief-- reminiscent of the way I once felt after my daily run--of having written.

And because I fret daily about meeting my self-imposed deadline, other worries, such as about the fate of the nation, not to mention the planet, are temporarily forced to take a back seat. It’s going to be a long, angst-filled political campaign. The way things are going, I may have to start posting daily, just to keep my sanity.