I haven’t posted here for a while.  I tried once, and I just couldn’t.  So instead, I’ll just post a bit of an update on how I’m doing, for those who might care, and we’ll just go from there.

I’ve had some tooth problems for quite a while, since before COVID.  Truth is, I hate the dentist.  I have a strong gag reflex (one of the primary reasons I consider it fortunate I am straight, har har) and every time I have to get any significant work done at the dentist they have to put me under.  It’s expensive and adds a significant amount of time and effort to the process.  So a couple of weeks ago, I finally “bit the bullet” (thankfully I live in a time where that is only a figure of speech) and got it done.

It turns out I had a pretty bad infection in my eye tooth, I guess that’s what happens when one leaves it go for too long.  They had to extract two teeth, put some crowns on a couple of others, you know the drill.  Well, I suspect that infection got into my sinuses, and it’s, well, HURT.  Antibiotics are my friend.

As everything clears up, I’ve been in a lot of pain for a week or two, the kind that advil doesn’t really touch.  But the most significant thing is, I’ve found that my brain chemistry or something seems to have changed when I got rid of the infection.  Life feels different now.  In some ways, in a good way, and in some ways, not, but it’s different.  The depression hasn’t lifted, but it’s not the same.

And I really don’t know where to go from here.

I’m trying hard not to make any rash decisions, but it would have been easy for me, over the past few days, to simply click on the maintenance mode section of this site, select “enable”, and put in the line “So long and thanks for all the fish.”  It’s been tempting.  It’s not because I don’t want to share, but it’s because I feel like sharing is futile right now.  Who cares what I have to say?  What do I have to contribute here that’s actually worth anything?  I just blather and blather, never saying anything at all until foam starts coming out of my mouth and I fall over backwards (a little Monty Python reference).  I guess I have some useful stuff to add, sometimes, but mostly I just…  do this.  And as I’m dealing with frankly an amazing amount of pain (which is thankfully slowly receding, today is better than a couple of days ago) that just makes the whole idea all that much more appealing.

But it all hasn’t shaken out yet, and I don’t want to do anything rash.

Here’s what I’m thinking about doing.  Not sure yet, but thinking.  I’m thinking that I am going to spend a little time and plan out some posts here.  These posts will lay as much bare as I’m comfortable with – lay it all out on the table, so to speak.  And then, once I’ve written those posts, I’ll consider this blog closed.  I’ll go back and clean up old posts, move stuff off where appropriate onto other blogs I’ve set up, and then consider this site a testimony to my unbearable hubris.  Any new posts or thoughts will go onto other sites more purpose designed.  And after a little while, who knows.

I’m not entirely sure that’s the direction I want to go, but it seems to be the most… useful.

I’m also considering expanding the scope of Texihabara.  I haven’t quite decided what that will look like, but it’s got the core of a good idea.  The content I’ve been adding to it is really just that, content, and it really only exists at this point to make not entirely boring.  But it has some potential.  I haven’t updated it much lately, but that’s right now because I’m waiting for a certain kind of functionality in one of the plugins.  It may be that I need to look for an alternate solution to that, but we’ll see.  That’s not a site I want to tear down by any means, but I don’t feel like it’s hit its stride, even just in content and scope.

There is another effort I’ve been doing that I’ve been keeping separate from this blog.  I don’t want to link directly from here to there, even though I really wish I could easily tell you where to find it.  Remember that streaming effort I was going to start working on a few months ago?  Well, I didn’t get far with the streaming, at least not yet, but I’ve managed to actually create a story around the characters themselves, and that’s been an ongoing effort for a few months now.  I really like how it’s turning out.  But this is still very much a work in process, and it’s ending up going in a direction I wasn’t expecting.  A good direction, but a different direction  Maybe at some point I can point you at it.

I have a few other sites that are also in the germination stage, but they’ve been on hold while I’ve been dealing with the medical and dental issues that have been taking up all my time and energy over the past few weeks and months.

Truthfully, I just don’t know what to do.  I know that there are a few criteria for how I want to spend the time I have remaining on this planet.  I want to do something fun and interesting.  I don’t want to be constrained.  I want to be able to at least make a living, and the headwinds on that seem to be getting worse and worse.  I just…  am not happy with where I am right now, and what I’m doing.  I need an exit.  No, not *that* way, but in a more “personal fulfillment” way.  And I was talking to my financial planner yesterday, and one thing I realized is that conventional solutions really aren’t going to work.  I need to come up with something entirely different.  So, let’s see what’s going on.

And let’s go Brandon!