Something that I still have difficulty processing is writing in summer, in that particular little period between Christmas day and New Years, and then, as an Australian, kiiiinda for the bulk of January because hey look over there, Invasion Day is right around the corner. Like, for the past few years now, Summer has been the season when I am, largely, off work. It is the time when the holidays land, so after a bunch of extremely high-impact days of associating the fuck out with people, I am largely, not under a lot of pressure.
But it also is a time when… like… a lot of things just aren’t happening and the schedule fucks with my ability to chunk up my work and my writing. I have made a deliberate effort to be more explicit about my writing and my work and how those things intersect and that in part includes those days where I can’t get anything done and being honest when some days, no, a thousand words don’t just fall onto the page because something got me annoyed about, I dunno, the footwear in Gears of War or something.
A friend was noticing this on their holiday – they mentioned that without work, there was this weird effect where they would have dinner, then… what? Sit around until bedtime? What was an adequate end to the night? I know that same malingering feeling when I’ve been watching a TV series can get me to keep going well past the time I want to be sleeping, too – how else did I choke down all of Longmire, a series I will always bring up as an example of the worst kind of mediocre television. But I kept watching it because I shouldn’t go to bed after wasting an hour watching this one dogshit episode, surely the next one will be better, but it wasn’t. That’s how they getcha.
Anyway, I bring up this infuriating experience because right now a lot of the things I’d do in my schedule, things I’d do to spend time with people and socialise and just break up the day… kinda aren’t happening. There’s the bomb of post-christmas cleanup sitting around the house – I have a literal box of board games to play, but I haven’t got any place to play them because the table is just covered in detritus that has to find its place after Christmas.
And I am writing THIS at 3.47 in the morning, after being awake for Boxing Day, because I realised I was staying up trying to think about something to write for so long that I didn’t write anything, just browsing the same three genres of random content while I tried to come up with some experience, some thought of the day that I could put down somewhere.