The truth of it is that I’m probably overcompensating right now…

I mean, I haven’t really blogged in over a year. And I do mean blogged. Really blogged. That act of just opening up a blank bit of screen and letting the text run freely, not so much concerned about opinions as much as marking a point in time, and then hitting publish and letting the words float into the past for some impossible future, a self-referencing journal of narcissistic whimsy. And I kinda have this urge to get it all caught up — trivial as it is — like I missed telling so much and now I need to fill in the blanks. Like I need to back fill for the last year, tell all the stories I missed between then and now, about being unemployed for six months, about the contract work I did, about my new job, about being a dad to a ferociously smart little girl, about grandma’s funeral, about traveling to the Dominican Republic and Hawaii a few months later, about new friends, lost friends, past ideas, thoughts, ideologies, about what I’ve been reading, writing, building, and playing, about running, running injuries, pains, and doubts, about dealing, diverting, distracting, and dismissing the angsts of months gone past, about new thoughts and perspectives, and about all the trivial life events in between. About everything that has filled the year.

There’s just so much.

Such as, for example, I just this morning transferred over my “2010 New Years List.” Yes, it’s May 2011, but back in December, feeling both rested (just back from the first of those aforementioned vacations) and nostalgic for the turn of the year annual recap, I wrote out a revised attempt at my annual New Years Recap gush timed perfectly for post, and albeit in a shortened, tighter, revised take on the list, posted it on another blog. Less fluff. It was delivered being more stuffed with introspective, and carefully crafted thoughtful replies — I would argue — but delivered nonetheless. I backdated it, but noted atop the list a brief explanation of the history.

And there’s still so much. And so much I’ve already forgotten. Dust, as some might say, in the wind.

This will probably be the last of the ‘retrospective regret’ posts. I’ve given myself this twenty-four hour window to do this thing I just called overcompensating. Twenty-four hours to catch up on a year of missed musings. Twenty-four hours for an unapologetic gush of this-is-why-I-changed-my-mind blurts of text before it’s time to move on with the much less meta postings. Twenty-four hours before I return to the regular musings of life, the universe, and everything.

It will pepper throughout, of course, this missed history. But that’s another matter.

But, as a final — official — word on the topic I wanted to share one last reason. I might even call it the metaphorical straw that broke the metaphorical back of the metaphorical camel: in other words, what tipped the balance on my flip-flopped decision to resurrect this blog? See, I’d been thinking about it for a while now. Pondering. I was supposing that it having been a year or more after the events that tipped the balance the other direction — thoughts cooled, circumstances changes, perspective bought and paid for — minds might be changed. And by chance, my Facebook feed prompted me up the motivation: a friend linked to a posthumously published posting of a west coast Canadian blogger, the short essay called the last post. If the link still exists when you read this, I encourage you to click over and read it for yourselves. A blogger — a dad, husband, artist, musician, etc — just a few years older than myself, who’s blog I’d unfortunately never read until after he died of cancer a few days prior to this very post, the one you are reading now, wrote a beautiful goodbye to his readers and everyone he loved, and asked that it be published after he died. It was. And like all amazing and purposeful messages, it touched a lot more people than he probably ever intended, and went viral on the net. Which is where I came in: as yet another tourist to his concluded life. And, perhaps like had happened to others too, the message, literal and sub textual, got to me. His perspective in the end was not so much different from my perspective, all of creatively, expressively, and ideologically: and in the end his words hearkened to my own nuanced feelings on the topic of both the risk and responsibility of keeping a blog or any public writing, and the reasons for assuming such risks and responsibilities. It hinted at a purpose in a life that might not be measurable in much more than the wake one creates traveling through it. And I noted that I’d been doing little more than trolling in that respect, though that was never my intention, never something I wanted to have happen, and never a responsibility I wanted to forsake because of fear or feigned offense. It made me think it might be time to pick up those oars — to extend my boating metaphor just one inch further — and test them back in the waters of this digital life I’ve cherished so much, and missed even more.

A few minutes later I flipped the switch back on for this space, and wrote that first reloaded post. And the rest? Read on, I guess…