A Post About the Post I Was Going to Post But Didn’t Post Because I Didn’t Finish That Post and Had to Post This Instead Just to Post Something So Everyone Would Know I’m Still Going to Post

January 13, 2021

cathexis – noun : the concentration of mental energy on one particular person, idea, or object (especially to an unhealthy degree)

That it took me so long to post for the first time in 2021 is…regrettable. One of my goals for 2021 was to write a bit more frequently – weekly, in fact.

Oops.

Score one for jettisoning goals before they weaseled their way into a steady routine that I would be anxious about breaking. Failing early is so much easier.

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The reasons for my absence are both numerous and singular.

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My father is declining mentally, and after a trip to his neurologist recently, his mental faculties registered on the dementia scale for the first time ever. And there’s likely no going back up the scale. How long he’ll be (mostly) of sound mind is a complete mystery.

So the past month has been a flurry of activity to try and get him moved out of the giant house he lives in alone (ever since flippantly abandoning his previously beloved cats to the care of his housekeeper) to a place just five minutes away from me. A decent chunk of my time, energy, anxiety, and headspace has been devoted to this endeavor, and it’s felt like dragging a sentient wool coat through a sticker bush. It could be argued that I consider myself the wool coat in this analogy.

Add in the absurd yet completely predictable terrorist attack on the nation’s capitol by a mob of learnproof nincompoops, a few too many house projects/problems, and new responsibilities at work, and I haven’t had a lot of vacant mental storage to roll the blog around in recently.

And yet, I have thought about the blog, but with a focus far, far too narrow in scope. I’m now over a year into my concerted effort to (re)discover the joy of Magic, and I was determined to start 2021 with a post reflecting on how the journey has gone. Other blogging notions appeared and were soundly chased off – I was going to summarize my first year, and I was going to do it with my best, most creative, most emotional post yet, and I was under no circumstances going to post anything until I had that up.

Ha.

Ha ha ha!

I crumbled, pathetically, under the weight of my own demands. That post, like several others I was hellbent on writing around the time I swapped calendars, is not even an outline. It’s not even a set of bullet points on a mental PowerPoint. If I’m being blunt with myself, it’s not even vaporware.

It’ll get written (I think.) Just not in the immediate future. And truthfully, that deflates me. A look back at my first year, written in February (oh, how optimistic of me), just won’t spur the same creativity, the same passion, that a fresh look back would have brought. But it was time to release what kept me frozen, and take the necessary detour that you suffer through now.

And thanks to my overly singular focus, there’s so much from the past few weeks I was going to blog about and…just didn’t. Did my advent calendar cough up more spectacular value, or peter out with a string of 30-cent trash rares? Was my collector box of Commander Legends a ridiculous rally of riches, or a bonanza of bookoo bobo bombs? Did the kid actually build decks from the packs he got for Christmas, and was Magic actually then played? How is my attempt at building my first Commander deck going? How does it feel to go second on Arena for 16 of 18 games, including separate stretches of 5 and 9 in a row? Does anyone else even care one iota about any of this?

If you’ve read up to this point…thank you. You’re a trooper. Or a saint. Or a masochist. Or really, really bored.

I promise my next post will not be a post about what I was going to post but then didn’t post because I couldn’t quite write that post and had to post a rambly non-Magic post instead.

Seriously. Back to my irregularly scheduled weirdness (about Magic!) next time.