Thistledog's Farm

I’ve been gone so long from here, I can’t even navigate my WordPress dashboard anymore, there’ve been so many changes.

Yikes.  Time to get the old canoe back in the water and start paddling again.

I am tempted to proffer a phrase by way of explanation for my absence, naming it “writer’s autism” that has kept me from conversing here.  Seems I have suffered from nearly a year of it now, a confounding affliction best described by the common definition of the word autism which is:  self-absorption…characterized by lack of response to people and actions and limited ability to communicate. 

That definition really sums up the last year of my life.

And what a strange, ugly, chaotic, whirlwind of a year it has been.  I am not surprised it left me blog-speechless.  In fact, I feel quite lucky to have survived at all, and grateful just to be done with it.  Never mind all the unwritten emails and blog posts; Real Life proceeds without all of that and the communication hiatus may have, in the end, done me some good.  Maybe a lot of good, who knows.  Sure, I would like to have chronicled the portage just to have made some notes on how hard it was, but most of the time I was just staring down at my own two feet plodding, endlessly plodding, through the riverside brambles, my neck and back aching from the weight of the canoe on my shoulders, my legs bitten to a pulp by the hordes of mosquitoes.  The last thing I wanted to do, really, was to focus my attention on my discomfort.

So I’m done.  After 24 years, I’m done with jumping into a uniform every day and doing a job I had long ago lost my passion for.  There is a saying among career military folks, a salty bit of advice about how long to stay in; essentially we tell ourselves we’ll keep doing it until it isn’t fun anymore.   When it stops being fun, the saying goes, it’s time to leave. 

I had to pay back 10 years for my Officer’s commision, so I really couldn’t leave as soon as I would have liked to, but it was soon enough.  I’d say I made it out by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.  Scraped out the door without getting hit by it, and the last scramble wasn’t all that graceful, but the Good Lord be praised, I AM DONE.