Contrary to what a lot of people concluded after this post, I did not quit blogging. I was just suffering from a humongeous writer’s block, which is funny, since I don’t believe in writer’s block. I mean, I USED TO not believe in writer’s block. Way back when, when I also didn’t believe I would one day spend almost an entire year stuck at home due to a pandemic. Way back when, when I was still convinced nobody I knew would ever align themselves with virus denying anti-vax creepfests. Yet here we are.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to write about. On the contrary, I would say. I spend a lot of my time Thinking during normal circumstances, but now that I’ve been spending 99% of my time at home hanging out with Willa, I don’t do much else. Sure, I take online courses to make sure my brain doesn’t turn to mush learn new things, labor over the book I don’t want to write, and clean up/out stuff, but none of these things have thoughtstopping properties. The Thinking just happens on the backburner. So there should be a lot to write about. And there is, but getting things on paper is a bit of an issue.

A lot of the thoughts I have, aren’t suitable for public consumption. They’re the things I write in my journal and that stay there. I do read through those journals regularly to see if there’s material that I can turn into a piece I can share with the world. Turns out, I mostly have a lot of questions. Practical ones, but also about human nature and the world in general. I decided to go for a list:

• When do I get my vaccine?
• Why can’t any of my doctors (including my fancy mega super-duper specialist doctor who works in that one internationally acclaimed medical center close to Amstelveen) tell me when I get vaccinated?
• Why does everyone agree with me that this is completely ridiculous and does nothing change regardless?
• Is the world ever going back to “normal”?
• What is “normal” anyway?
• Were people always This Way, and did I miss it, and if so, what is it? (“It’s it” – Faith No More, ed.)
• Are those bouts of deep, unadulterated hatred that I’ve been recently feeling towards certain fellow humans with disturbingly illogical opinions  ever going to go away?
• How did I get disconnected from life and how can I reconnect?
• How much of this disconnection can I blame on the pandemic?
• How much of this disconnection happened a long time ago already?
• Can I reconnect?
• Do I want to reconnect, and if so, how and on which terms?
• Because who am I these days, and most importantly, why?

And then there are of course The Life Issues, like:

• How much perfume is just way too much perfume for one person to own?
• Will my office ever be accessible without first having to move crap around?
• When will I finally quit writing?
• Are the Daft Punk robots still friends?
• How did Willa get her wonky whisker?
• And the most important one (and a throwback for the people who have been following me since the days dinosaurs roamed the earth): What do I do with my hair?

You get the picture.

All this Thinking and journaling is getting exhausting, which is why I have decided to start writing for public consumption again. The big advantage of Writing for An Audience is that it forces me to get to a point. It’s like tossing a coin: you either immediately think “Oh, I want it to be THAT” once the coin hits the air, or you don’t care either way and the coin decides for you. 100% success guaranteed.

In order to challenge myself a bit, and also to Get Through The However Many Days/Weeks/Months Until I Get My Vaccine Without Going Completely Bonkers, from today on I will be posting three blog posts a week. I will continue to do so until one of the three following things happen: 1) the pandemic ends, 2) the world ends, or 3) my folder “Things to be posted” is empty. Let’s see which one happens first.