Don't, don't, don't let's start

"Have you ever over planned something, just waited and waited to do it because you were trying too hard to make it perfect, that it just never happened?" That was the first sentence of the first post of my LiveJournal from August 7th, 2000. Just a couple weeks shy of 26 years ago. I am nothing if not consistent. I paid for this @pckt.blog a few weeks ago and had every intention of putting... something... on it. I didn't expect perfection. I didn't think, oh yeah, a la Steve Marin in "The Jerk," that 'things are going to start happening to me now.' Like every single blank page I've ever faced, I just sort of clammed up. Which is so far and away from how I am in person. I can't help myself but shoot my mouth off, much to my own detriment. Although, I have gotten a bit quieter. Maybe because I don't have as much opportunity for meaningful conversations any more. I moved out of our home in California, the place I moved to when I was in my early 20s, and back to Michigan about 8 years ago. All my friends, my job, the first house we bought. That was hard, and even though we're close to my family out here now for the firs time in a very long time, I still haven't figured out where I fit. I did, at first, still have the podcasting thing. Which was never as much about me having a "show" but way more about having the opportunity to talk to one of my best friends every week, and all the extended family we discovered and built during our five years of doing the show. But life got pretty hard for a while there, and things kind of dried up. And I'll be honest, it put me in a crummy place emotionally. Not the show. The isolation. And then Covid happened, and that was a whole new level of isolation for everybody. Then I lost my dad, five years ago now. And, a couple of months ago, I lost my second dad. So I kind of keep to myself a lot now. Every once in a while, with a push from some of the people who haven't completely given up on me, I crawl out of my little turtle shell for a short run. But I mostly work (too many hours going by what my wife and my bosses say), and then I come home and stare at the TV and search for something interesting on YouTube. Or I read. I am really enjoying reading more, and that I take as a solid win. I've had more than one friend, including Matt who I used to do PoT with, invite me back to doing the podcasting thing. And I really want to (and hope to) at one point. I'm just a little gun shy. Or shy-shy. Its really hard to want to put myself out there, to be seen or heard, after the length of time I've been in hiding. Hermiting. I've just kind of forgotten how to be a human being. One thing I've realized is that a whole big part of who I am, how I think, and what makes me feel as close as I can get to 'normal,' all that has hinged on how I interact with others. Now, I talk to people all day. I work a customer service (tech) job and I field phone calls and chats. I have a lot of co-workers (who I adore). I'm friendly, I'm attentive. But that's not a conversation. That's not sharing thoughts and feelings and truths. Its a lot of surface level stuff and, not that I'm a big fan of the word, but it's small talk. I also used to supplement the face-to-face talking with things like the LiveJournal. And later (and regrettably) Facebook. Getting my inner voice out in a post or a page, I could sit back after and realize what was bugging me, what was affecting my daily life. Yes, one more white man who will do anything else to avoid going to therapy (this is a joke - I've done a lot of therapy in my life and gotten a lot from it). But the point is, what I did used to be therapeutic in its own way. It wasn't so much me self-diagnosing, but at least I would be able to take stock of where I was, maybe where I wanted to go. Like this. This is not how I intended this first post to go. None of it. But it is what I used to allow myself to do on LiveJournal. Or even Facebook (which I gave up a couple of Novembers ago. Should be kind of obvious as to why). Or when I was young, in phone calls with whoever cared to listen. Or conversations with my closest friends. Or my dad. Point is, I don't know exactly what put me into lock down for my feelings and thoughts when I used to be really good at being honest and open with those things. From what I'm listing here, it may have been one of those 'death by a thousand cuts' scenarios, where it wasn't any single thing. It was all of it. I didn't notice it as it happened, but at some point I realized everything had changed. Frog in a pot of boiling water. I do know this... Some things I can't control. I can't ask someone else to be my sounding board. Not saying I wouldn't have any volunteers. Amazingly, I still have some incredibly kind and wonderful people who have offered to fall on that sword for me. And maybe I'll get there. But I do tend to feel more honest when I'm at a keyboard. When I actually push myself to sit down at my desk and start typing, an act of bravery I don't always achieve, stuff sort of bubbles to the surface and the rusty pipes of my brain eventually start to dribble and then open and flow. (That's a side project. We'll get to that.) So if I make this what LiveJournal used to be for me, I guess I could go back to square one and see if I can make it to the 26 years later without hitting a brick wall this time. Or, just as likely (maybe even more so), I can start this and then abandon it in a couple of months. Or days. This could be the last thing I ever let myself write here. If it's only me, and only really for me, no one else can hold my feet to the fire with it. And I'm not exactly reaching out to anyone to call me on my own bullshit yet. Yeah, this is going on the web, it's public, people can find it if they know or care to look for it. But the social media aspect of LJ at the time brought a certain amount of attention with it. I don't know if this works that way or not. And I'm not asking it to. First blank page is filled up. And, better or worse, I wrote this for me. And yeah, okay, also for both of my dads.