Dear Friends,
This is it! The last of my promised 365 days of 1000 word blogs. I’m sure I will do more in 2023 and I’ll crank out new content on the regular. I’ve gotten used to it. Admittedly, it will feel really weird not doing these all the time. I might not be able to stop.
However, I will be less of a stickler about how much I post. This is true. It has been a struggle some days to reach the self-imposed word limit and I’m sure it has shown. Those of you who have stuck with me all along are real troopers. Cheers to you!
As I look back at the year, I am so stoked to be able to go back and read through the 2022 entries and start editing them. There is a lot to add to many of the stories and I still have a lot I’d like to share about my life and the life of the people around me. Some of the things I have written are about as complete as they are going to get, and some need a lot more detail. Either way, though, my attention will be focused on making it all better.
Back in January, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I feel like I was just sort of exploring what this medium could be. We did our final Father Figures show on Ryan’s birthday and even though we didn’t know it was the last one at the time, I’m okay with it being our last time playing live together. We had a very good run. This is something I will write about in detail during 2023.
February is a blur. Mainly because of the death of my friend and former boss, Stephanie, and how busy I was with work. I was really hitting my stride with my class back then, I think, and I look forward to reading what I wrote about my teaching experience. I wish I would have been writing all along about my classroom experience. It would have helped me a lot.
In March, we went on a pretty fun camping trip, and I wrote a lot about Hillbilly Devilspeak. It was fun to explore that stuff and the camping trip brought up a lot of memories about other excursions. I’m interested to see if I mentioned being nervous about Rhondi and Doug heading back to Maine during that month, as well. They didn’t go until May, but I started to stress a little about it in March.
April is a blur, too. I know from looking at the calendar I made of my posts that I got more into posting fiction that month, but I was so busy with work that again, my memory is hazy. I wrote about the fictional band, Bukake Culkin, and also about the Noisy World beginnings. Those stories are connected, and I look forward to getting back to them. I love the idea of fictional band bios. I don’t know how many you could write or how it could be a fun book, but it could be something. You never know.
The first episodes of the Baseball story appeared in April, too. Then May arrived and I was all over the place, subject-wise, according to my records. That will be a fun one to go back to and check out. I had full-on short timer syndrome going on in May with only a about 10 days of teaching to do in June. I told my Army story, too, in May. That could be something that I expand on a lot. It jogged my memory quite a bit.
June saw the kids and I heading to Maine, and I settled into writing a lot and loving being on vacation. There is something to be said about the water in Maine that is conducive to writing. Okay, maybe it’s not the water, but whatever it is, I was focused on writing for that first month of the summer, for sure. As July began, I stayed focused but was also getting ready for teaching online.
I can see those days of sitting at the table at Doug’s very clearly in my head even though it already seems like another lifetime ago. Changing jobs does that to the brain, I think. It’s easy to compartmentalize a bit and put the former stuff in a nice box and think of it like it was another time and place. In this situation, it really was. I started teaching while I was in Maine. How cool is that?
We got back home in August, and I settled into a nice routine of taking the kids to and from school and teaching online. I had dived into the Trees pretty hard in June and kept it going in August, as well as telling the story of Pinky that month, too. I was in a good groove and much of that was the easy schedule I had. I was only teaching about 15 hours per week. That gives a guy a lot of time to write. I miss that.
Well, sort of.
As the summer faded and turned to fall (in most of the country), I continued telling the story of my music life and kept cranking out the Trees, too. Of course, I added a bunch of other stuff, too, and started getting a lot more random stuff in there. It seems weird to be writing about the most recent months, for some reason.
I guess when I look at it, this “year in review” thing is really kind of cheesy. I didn’t intend for this last post of 2022 to be type of thing. I think what I really wanted to say was that I learned a lot from this experience. I learned a lot about writing and myself and what it takes to put more practice into my craft.
I realized, more than anything else, that I love to write. I love telling stories, whether they are about me or someone else. It is an honor to get to do it and I look forward to being able to keep doing it.
Happy new year, everyone. Not sure if I will see you tomorrow, but you never know. I will see you soon, though.
Peace. Here’s to a great 2023.
Selfie - Christmas morning 2022