Apologies to everyone who has recently clicked on my blog to find stale thoughts from many months ago. I have not been lying on my back in that forest clearing staring straight up all this time. I got up some time ago and went back in the house. Since then I've been busy, you know.
Over these last few months, I have not entirely neglected the blog. I've taken periodic looks. This is in part to see if anyone posted a comment. But I also hope to find a new post (Wow. Look at that. I hope it's good). To date, this hasn't happened.
No, it's not a self-destructive hacker-fantasy or a guest-writer fantasy. I just hope to find something I've written. Something good, too.
An irrational hope, you say, and one that should be reconsidered.
Well, yes; but you see I suffer from a condition (common in immature males) gently termed "refrigerator blindness." This is the absent-minded swinging open of the fridge, in search of nothing, followed by a swinging closed and walking away. The door-swinging motion is accompanied by a blank mind. There's no expectation, no desire, no disappointment. Victims simply swing the door open, look inside, then swing it shut without any thought.
I've often pondered why I do it (sometimes even while I'm doing it, though that intrudes on the required blankness)--what do I expect to see? And if I see it, what will I do with it? I'm perfectly familiar with what's inside the fridge. I've put most of it there. And I know what my wife and kids put there.
It's the same with my blog. I get an email notification of every comment posted, so I don't have to look. But I still do. "Thank Goodness" is still the last post? Oh, how disappointing. I wish I'd write something again. I'll look back in a few days.
Perhaps refrigerator blindness stems from a gut-level need for confirmation that the interior of the fridge (and my blog) are still there. Perhaps I am heartened to find the interior still there. But the stronger desire is to find something that shouldn't.
A friend suffers from a related condition in which he opens the fridge looking for a specific item, such as the butter. After a full minute of staring, he calls to his wife: "Dear, where's the butter?" And she will call from the other room: "On the second shelf on the right, next to the jar of strawberry jam." At that point he will see the butter, at which he has looked directly several times but not recognized as butter. "Oh!" he will exclaim, pull the butter out, close the door and then brood for an hour over how he could have been so dense. "It was right there! Why couldn't I see it!"
This refrigerator blindness is the opposite of the one I suffer from. In mine, I look for what isn't there and don't see it. In my friend's, he looks for what is there and doesn't see it. Two sides of the same coin.
Helpless in the face of my affliction, I wait for my blog to produce. I look but I don't see. Oh, the humanity.
Yes, yes. Instead of whining for improbable sight, sight that creates something just by looking for it, I should just start writing. No more hiking tales to tell; but I'll start posting entertaining fragments of this or that, and hope it finds an audience. Who knows. Maybe everyone who visits this blog has a case of refrigerator blindness as well.
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