Welcome Back, Squatter

I looked for photos of actual squatters, but felt the ones I found were demeaning. This photo features a woman doing squats in a snazzy lavender outfit. By the way, honey, love the shoes! (Image from thegreatfitnessexperiment dot com)

I’ve been gone from this blog for a while.

I’m tempted to come up with some elaborate tale of intrigue to explain why I’ve been absent.  Kidnapped by land pirates, I’ve been held hostage in their underground lair and tortured daily as they tried in vain to get me to divulge the passwords to my 403b and savings accounts.  With that knowledge, they could abscond with the few remaining nickels of my nest egg which may still be been left since the Target data breach and laptop theft from the offices of my dental insurance company in Newark a few weeks before that.

Alas, I have no such story.  There is nothing to report of my overcoming adversity to acend from the ashes like a bald phoenix.  There’s been no bravery to report nor any triumph of spirit against overwhelming odds.

It would be easy to pin this on the holidays.  Who could blame me for caving in to the impossible pressure of trying to live up to the uber-consumerism of Lexus commercials or the Norman Rockwellian family bliss of nearly every one of my friends’ posts on Facebook?  Surely it would be easy to connect my lack of productivity to jolly old St. Nick and the hollow feelings which hover close by nearly every December.

If the holidays weren’t daunting enough, I could blame the weather.  Though many people have suffered far worse weather than I in recent weeks, the lack of sun and chilly temperatures could be the problem.  Seasonal affective disorder could be the root cause, but it’s not.  If anything, the lack of any excuse whatsoever to go outdoors should be making me write more, not less.

It would be ludicrous to think that my dwindling posts have been due to a lack of fodder.  Anyone who reads my blog with any regularity knows better than that.  I can crank out 800 words whining about damn near anything at the drop of a hat.  In the past week or three, there have been more slow-pitched, beach ball-sized topics lobbed over my blog plate than I could count.  Even if I swung my giant cartoon bat like a girl, I would have had home runs nearly every time.  Yet, I never even made it to the on-deck circle, preferring to sit in the dug-out gnawing on sunflower seeds and ignoring the game.

I will admit to having spent more time than usual tending to my seasonal duties, putting up and then taking down Christmas lights and decorations.  I was also relegated to the kitchen for 3 straight days, cranking out feasts for the usual suspects.  Still, those tasks coincided with my being free of my work-for-pay responsibilities, so there was ample room in my days for a little blogging, and yet I didn’t write a stinking word.  In fact, I’ve barely read any blogs in weeks.

I just haven’t felt like writing, or reading, or participating.  In reality, I’ve been nothing more than an intellectual squatter in these parts for these past weeks.  Squatters by definition reside in empty or abandoned locales, so it wouldn’t really apply to WordPress, where the rest of you appear to be very active occupants.  I consider myself a squatter more because I paid no rent, made no contribution and had no business being here.

Alas, with the coming of a new year, comes grandiose promises.  If I’ve learned a damn thing over the past 50-odd new years, it would be that it’s wise to keep my foolish promises to yourself.  Rather than set myself up for failure, I’ll just leave it at this: I’m going to stop being a WordPress squatter.  Hopefully, I’ll accomplish this feat by writing again.