NaNoWriMo wrapped a little over a week ago, but I didn’t write a single word for its 2022 running. In fact, I’ve written precious little since NaNoWriMo came to a close in 2021. It’s not that the much-embellished yarn of my neighbor’s cat exhausted me and all I had to say; rather, it’s been a question of pairing the right mindset with the needed amount of time to pry thoughts from mind and put them to words on a screen.
It’s currently a quarter past eleven in the evening, and I should have been asleep an hour ago in order to be ready to rise in time to be on the bike trainer by five, but I wanted to commit, first to writing something down because I feel like I need to. I owe it to myself (and my three followers here on WordPress, I suppose) to do better and avoiding doom scrolling through the hellscapes that all social media channels have become—except for Strava, of course, but there’s only so much scrolling that can be done there. Plus, I wanted to break in the new keyboard I finally convinced myself to buy in order to use my iPad as I had initially planned to when I bought it…nearly five years ago.
Ubotie’s keyboard has a nice-ish feel to its keystrokes but falls short of the tactile efficiency of Apple-branded keyboards. Its size and style and price, however, made it an attractive enough of a purchase, and it at least has me typing in bed by low lamplight as I had envisioned happening. All that’s missing are the sounds of wind and rain outside my window.
I’ve started & restarted this paragraph nearly a dozen times over the past several minutes, with pauses growing longer before each introduction. The pressure on my forehead tells me that it’s time to abandon this, turn out the lights, and go to sleep. The alarm clock will be sounding wretchedly soon enough, and then there’s still the responsibilities of being dad, caretaker, and schoolteacher awaiting me on the other side of the bike trainer.
This hasn’t been much, but—after what feels like one hundred years since writing anything resembling substance—I’ll call it a start.
Thanks for reading.
Watching Me Fall 