I have no idea what I’m going to do when my brog is up and running again. Am I going to retroactively timestamp posts I made on the dates in which the impetus stories took place? Am I going to just post them in order as soon as things are up and running again? I don’t really know.
Frankly, I don’t know about a lot of things, and I’ve been feeling really vulnerable and uncertain about my life now, and for quite some time throughout, well, maybe all of this year. The lack of having my brog I think has given me an exorbitant amount of time to stay within my own head and think about things that probably need to be thought about, but I don’t really want to, mostly out of trepidation and anxiety.
For a site that has literally maybe six regular visitors, it means nothing to anyone really, except for me, and it’s got me dealing with some separation anxiety for my greatest and most dedicated hobby over the last 15 years. I imagine to some, it’s a place for me to spout off about opinions and veiled commentary about things in my life, which aren’t inaccurate statements, but honestly it’s a means for me to mentally vent and not just share my thoughts with those who want to read, but to kind of chronicle my thoughts and remind me that these are things that I’ve thought in my life.
To those who care, the site’s downtime was on account of my brother, whose server the brog is running off of, began his move to another state, to start another chapter of his own life. If I were more vigilant, or were more of a dedicated and considerate site owner, I’d have some sort of mirror or at least a broad-sweeping 404 page or something to explain that things will be back in the future, and there’s no guarantee that my six readers will even come back, it’s been down so long.
So with the site down, a part of me wanted to continue to write, on a daily basis, with the end goal of retroactively posting everything, to hopefully the same five-posts-a-week minimum schedule I held myself to. However, life being the never-stopping continuously moving concept it is, with the brog out of sight, it also tended to become out of mind, and then I missed a day. Then another. Then I went on a pre-arranged Disney vacation. Then my birthday came and went. Then my good laptop died, leaving me without even the hardware necessary to write even if I wanted to.
I don’t have the capability to write at work like I used to be able to do in the past, because of the double-edge sword that is actually being busy. It’s great in the sense that always having something to do makes the time fly some days, but at the same time, I sparsely have time to catch my breath, check some stories on the internet, and become current with news. However, I will say that because I’m so busy, my mind is often preoccupied with work matters, that I don’t have time to think about my anxieties or worries or the things that I don’t really want to think about.
I’m calm at work, probably a little more so than I am when I am not, many times.
All while the days passed, with no writing done in any of them, making me feel internally panicked and anxious. I guess to some degree, I’m kind of OCD with the things I like to make sure are taken care of, like my general hobby of brogging. Or maybe it’s just OCD about my brog.
Eventually, I thought to myself to consider the brog’s downtime a wash, and to not bother going back and writing about things that were now further and further in the past, and that there’s no point. Try and tell myself to consider the downtime as something of a blessing in disguise, a means to simply take a break from my hobby and try and do something else with my time. Make a big post when it comes back online, and try and start from scratch.
Easier said than done, I suppose. I’ve been writing fairly regularly for 15 years now, so it does make me anxious when the feeling of being incapable of doing it begins to seep in. But there’s nothing I could do about it while the server was offline, and I didn’t have a working laptop at mythical girlfriend’s place, where I spend a lot of my time when I’m not at work.
I tried playing some video games, and played through The Wolf Among Us, which frankly was a cool game with incredible art direction, and I found it to be enjoyable. It was nice to think about a game in fleeting moments of mind wandering instead of the mental swirls of thoughts that were going unwritten about at the time.
I then delved into some Netflix binge-watching, and proceeded to watch all of the Daredevil series. After the first few episodes, I found it to be really enjoyable, and then my mind wandered back to the things people on my Facebook feed were saying about the series about how much it sucked and how many didn’t like it. I thought to myself, did these people actually watch the Ben Affleck Daredevil, and remember how much of a steaming pile of shit that was??
It’s actually unfair to compare the Netflix Daredevil to the Affleck one, because standing alone, I think the Netflix Daredevil was a very enjoyable series, and I remembered how much fun it was to binge watch a television show again, going through both available seasons. To the point where I wanted to watch more of the Hell’s Kitchen-Universe, and I’m in the midst of going through Jessica Jones as well now.
It’s also why the Daredevil theme is the corresponding link-to for this post, because I absolutely love it. It’s so appropriately fitting for the recent thoughts and emotions I have going on in my head, and it’s basically what’s playing inside of my brain in most neutral points. Usually when binge watching a show, viewers eventually tire of opening themes, and just want to get back into the show, and such has been the case with me, even for shows that I’ve liked, like Dexter, Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad, but I never once tired of the Daredevil theme.
At the time I’m writing this, my brog is still down. I still don’t know when it’s going to go back online. The mythical girlfriend is vacationing in Japan. Some of my close friends are also in Japan, who cashed in on the same travel deal that mythical girlfriend did. I am alone right now, and I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t feeling bummed about it.
However, the one positive thing about being alone, is that I’ve had a substantial amount of time with very minimal responsibilities, to where I could think and reflect on all of the things going on in my head, and be at my primary computer and have some productive time to actually write, regardless of the uncertainty of when I’ll actually be able to post these posts. In a way, I do feel a little bit lighter with every word I churn out, because lord knows that there’s been a whole lot of them that have been wanting some release for quite some time now.
But again, being alone has given me a little bit of time to relax and reflect, and try to sort out the thoughts in my head. Long story short, if I haven’t already said it 50 times already, I have a lot of anxieties when I think about the future. I feel like there are several clocks I can’t see that are ticking around me, counting down things, and I don’t like to feel like I’m being pressured. But we don’t always get what we want in life, and I feel like there are some really arduous events in my future that I feel apprehensive about dealing with, but will inevitably need to be dealt with.
I’m not going to lie, I literally do feel that my mind is a little bit unburdened now, going back and seeing 1,300 words in a Word doc about how I feel about my life. This has a large part of why I do what I do, and why I’ve done it for so long. As I said, I don’t know when the server is going to go back up, and I’ll have access to posting to my brog again. But it doesn’t matter as much anymore, because I’ve already written down all the things that I’d have wanted to write already, and then I can go back and post things in whatever fashion I see fit the most appropriately.
Hopefully when things to do get back up and running, I’ll be able to rectify my writing schedule and get back to posting regularly, and I won’t need everyone around me to leave the country in order for me to feel like I’ve got the time and space necessary to sit down, gather my thoughts, and put words down onto the screen.
