Remember when I used to post?

So do I. Those were fine times, the bees knees, and the salad years. You logged on while sucking down a cheesesteak or healthy alternative tofu product. I wrote about the mundane but ubiquitous normalcies around me. It was a relationship worth holding on to. It was a union that could’ve resulted in something nice. Like a blog about cheesesteaks or tofu.

My last three posts have been about insomnia, Glenn Campbell, and television ratings. Anyone out there get the feeling I’m not writing honestly? Anyone out there think maybe I doth protest a little too much on the ratings wars? Maybe missed the boat on the real tragedy and symbolism behind Campbell’s arrest and embarassment?

Yeah, me too.

One night–back when life was mundane and normal–I bought an child’s old bank at an estate auction. It was an impulse buy based entirely on belief I could resell it on eBay for a larger sum than the few bucks I paid for it. It is a painted, wooden clown. I never sold it. It now sits on the edge of my desk and smiles at me. I don’t know why I like it so much. But for some reason I’ve come to value it as much as I would if it had belonged to me as a child.

I catch myself every now and then wanting to slip into a brooder’s lament about how everything I know and everything I loved has changed in the last six weeks. If I weren’t so grateful for my dad still being alive, I think I’d be pretty pissed off at everything else that’s gone on around me.

But you know, I’m not pissed. I’m not depressed. I’m not even all that disturbed. I’m simply way-tired and a little confused. And as a result, I’m having a bear of a time writing.

It’s not for a lack of stories, because I have a lot.

A man, nearing 90, wanting to find a job. He wants a tiller to turn his garden this spring. Nine months ago he had $240,000 and could’ve bought as many tillers as he wanted. Now he has nothing. 2003’s answer to robber barons took it all and left him and his sweet old wife with nothing but a little brick house and creased bible.

Two brothers who look very different are repeatedly mistaken for twins. Four years separate them. Somehow they become adults at the very same moment.

A man, seemingly happy in his life, finds himself on the verge of losing everything and doesn’t understand why.

Colleagues disappearing, friends discovering themselves, a wife getting very, very sick.

I could write until the sun comes up and still not be close to finished.

But for some reason I can’t. I start and it looks fake on the screen.

And still, in the light of only the computer screen, that little clown still smiles and clutches the orange ball in his hand. He knows that everything is going to be okay. He knows that life is too good to be bad.

And if he could talk, I think he might say out loud…we are too good to be bad to life.

If only we can all remember that.