I am trying to start creating one blog post and one podcast episode per week, but I am off to a poor start.  Anyway, why do I want to blog?  Well for starters I have been so overwhelmed trying to decide what to write for the last 10 years (a novel, a screenplay, comedy sketches, content blogs, articles, sales copy) that I haven’t written much at all.  Why can’t I decide what to work on? I have even tried writing each project on separate shreds of paper and whichever one I pulled out of a hat I was to focus on that and that alone for three months or so.  what happens is eventually I realize the endeavor is foolish and vain and never made sense to begin with, and somewhat simultaneously I have a re-epiphany, or a re-re-epiphany that a previously discarded project was really what I should have been working on the whole time (how could I have forgotten?!). This cycle spins around and around, leaving me with a few thousand words of a novel, some precariously written short stories, whiney journal entries of repetitive frustrations and abandoned to-do lists/exercise plans, a couple of avant-garde mixed-media posts, and some bad crypto investments to name just a few of my premature fits and starts. The recurrence of this word start in this first paragraph seems telling.

I will not be showing this to many people.  The idea is to go one tiny step beyond a journal– a journal with a potential audience but by no means a real and ready one. Maybe one day the posts will become more regular, less self-involved, and more concerned with actual readability.  For now, this blog is my free therapy, seeing as Medi-Cal cannot seem to provide me with a qualified, native English-speaking therapist (no offense to ESLers, I am an ESL teacher after all). 

Let me tell you what I’ve been up to (as the phrasal verb goes).  For the last month or so I have been volunteering at an Official Translation center in the remote hills behind the Caribbean city of Santa Marta, working hard during the weeks, and taking weekend trips to nearby destinations: Tayrona, Minca, Palomino, etc.  Maybe if I write down the things I have done, or am doing, I won’t feel so nonexistent (as I often feel between my daydream fantasies).  The daydream is the only place where I feel real.  Real-life is a blur. After all, I was already here in Colombia last year, talk about deja vu. I am surprised the deja vu blur has not swallowed me whole.  It helps that I am working more this time. But still, the pandemic is ending and I choose to perpetuate this limbo state of financial easy mode, thanks to the affordability of South America.

I am now in Manizales in the coffee region and I am not too sure I want to stay.  The town is cute and all, the people are friendly, and the weather is crisp, but I find myself repeatedly asking the question: what am I doing here?  I think I will head for the Amazons. That ought to recalibrate my appreciation for the little things.  Dopamine reset or just diarrhea cleanse, either way: into the heart of darkness.

Well, until next week.

xoxo