The Everyday Dust of Life

So it's been a few years since I updated this blog, for a multitude of reasons, none too interesting to note. I lied; I like to note everything, so see below reasoning. And wow, in the elapsed years since my last post, everyday tech has changed so much! I mean, Instagram wasn't even around then (and seems so passé even now) and I hadn't yet discovered the (ironically annoying) convenience of the DSLR-replaceable iPhone camera! Indeed if I had foreseen how my lazy self would banish the clunky Canon DSLR from daylight forever, I'd have saved major bucks splurging on various lenses. But I digress.

So why has it taken me so long to get back? For starters, I think I fell into a serious detour with Facebook, using it as the pensieve for my "artistic" (loosely used) output. Being a creative type, I've always found it necessary (for my mental state) to relentlessly produce -- crap or not, I was seized with thoughts in various permutations (photos not the least of which) -- and FB just made it so easy to dump the excess reflexes of my musings. For a while it worked; I liked having an instant audience for -- to steal from Beauvoir's* biographer -- the "everyday dust of life." But it's an empty sort of receptacle, isn't it? A shallow feeding bowl, lacking in thoughtful sustenance, so that again and again I came up starving, creatively malnourished.

Enough. This staycation has shown me that left to my own devices, given ample blocks of time, I still have it, whatever that is. So I've returned to my memoir project, and I'll keep returning to this blog to deposit the first and last vestiges of my everyday dust. It feels good to write again.  

* I'm currently reading "Letters to Sartre" by Simone de Beauvoir and reminded again of how much I love peeking into other people's relationships through their personal letters. Almost as good as Ted Hughes' "Birthday Letters" to Sylvia Plath.