Ship's Librarian

Here we are, four days into 2024, and my Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is kicking into overdrive. Because of it, I like pristine, blank notebooks, am terrified of using every device I own, and view new books, CDs, and DVDs with abject dread. I am loathe to mar anything I touch, and so it should come as absolutely no surprise that the idea of a new year freaks me out a bit. Every January 1st represents this blank canvas, this unruined thing, and then it's gone. By the second, third, or fourth, my brain sees the potential as diminished and asks, “Now what?”

This is rather melodramatic, and I readily admit it; my brain is so often not exactly a rational space. I had such high hopes for New Year's Day: finally kick off this blog, spend time reading and writing, and make a renewed effort at breaking my internet addiction. In actuality, I was sucked into the Twilight Zone marathon on the Heroes & Icons network, during which I spent far too much time idly browsing on my Macbook. Not an auspicious start on the surface.

Still, my wife and I stowed the Christmas decorations, reopening the corner of the living room where the tree goes each November. We moved her grandmother's writing desk into that spot from the bedroom, creating an actual surface for the old Alienware laptop that serves as our media PC. There's also a spot there for my Macbook, a place where it can go to get it out of arm's reach when I'm sitting in my living room chair. As a result of that move, the bedroom now has a cozy reading corner, for those frequent times I don't want to read in the living room.

None of this felt like much of an accomplishment on Monday, because I knew how far short it fell of what I wanted for myself. Tuesday was my first day back at the library for the year, followed by another day off on Wednesday, which wound up occupied by a morning vet visit. In the afternoon, I had little energy to do much more than spend time online—a bout of executive dysfunction that didn't do much to dissuade me that I'd already made a mess of my hopes for myself in the new year. Never mind that mental health and the regulation of my neural pathways don't observe a calendar, or that I might possibly have been demanding far too much of myself on a holiday.

Which brings us to today. It turned out that that little bit of rearranging on Monday made it possible for me to have a clearer path forward when it came to tidying and organizing our space, and facilitating the sort of streamlined, minimalist, and less online life I keep trying to build to. Things were picked up, stowed away, and arranged more sensibly. I now have a stack of paper on the top shelf of my desk, ready for my typewriter. Instead of lying on the floor by the router in a heap, an ethernet cable now winds from the living room to the bedroom, along the wall and behind furniture, out of the way and permanently hooked up to my Power Macintosh (yes, I know I was just saying I want to be online less, but we're talking about a computer with Netscape Navigator 2.2 for a browser). This afternoon, I finally felt good enough about my desk space to sit down and type this out, my first blog entry after my About post. And what's more, I'm drafting it on my Remarkable Tablet, which I regrettably haven't used enough in the few months I've had it, out of the OCD-fueled fear I'll damage it or kill the battery far too soon.

All of this has been light on context (just why are these things important, again?), and if you know me, you know that's probably triggering an impulse to abandon this post right here and never publish it. I want nothing more than to write about the Power Mac, discuss my ongoing thought exercises surrounding digital minimalism, and explain why it's so important for me to read and write more...and yet there's not really a place to insert any of that in any sensible manner. My objective in sitting down to write was simply to get something out, with some vague intent of touching on those things, and this is the result. Context will come in time if I can just get started, but I hate starting in medias res.

Maybe this is where I needed to start, thought, going back through these first few days of the year and demonstrating to myself that January 1st itself was and is only part of a process. My strange, strange brain needed that reminder.