Just got some flies buzzin' 'round my head.

We'll be fixin' this up right pronto.

I totally forgot to note it here, but this blog turned 9 years old on the first of this month.

I've been running this blog for just under a quarter of my life.

I guess that's some kind of accomplishment, huh?

This response to a 'I'm going to feel like a loser at my high-school reunion' letter to an online advice column included these 'grafs which are currently hurting my brain:

We have a mistaken need to exist in the eyes of other people. We mistake our own sense of existing with the sense of existing that we get when others acknowledge our existence. So you show up at things to maintain this being, this identity, in the consciousness of the group as you understand it. To not be there is to not exist in their eyes and thus encounter your own absence. Your own absence is frightening. It is a temporary nonexistence.

So we seek to be known, in order to exist in the minds of others, thinking that this adds somehow to the sum of our own existence. But it does not. Not where it counts. If we know that we ourselves exist, yet others do not know we exist, we still exist. But if we ourselves do not exist, and yet others think we exist, it doesn't help. We still don't exist no matter how many others think we exist. It would not even be satisfying to be thought of as a god if we did not actually exist. We wouldn't be able to enjoy it.

So it is preferable to bolster and intensify our own existence rather than spend time making sure other people we don't care about look at us and thus confirm our existence.

It's nice, because suddenly my hermit-like nature, especially as we enter this back-breaking, soul-crushing king-hell bitch of a season, is justified. I don't go out and interact because I'm better than all of you people.

But I think we all know that thinking like that is only possible for rank sociopaths and - misanthrope, though I am - I'm just too insecure to be a member of the sociopaths club (quick, what kind of uniforms do you think they would wear on game day in high school?).

So where does that leave us? Making small talk and smiling at the strangers we meet in the elevator, because if we can't make a stranger smile - or at least quizzically look at you - you might as well not be here at all.

And that's where Sundays like yesterday leave you the next day.

I didn't mean that last post as a plea for contacts, honest, but suddenly readers popped up from all over! Thanks, guys!

My promise stands - I'll be a better correspondent in the future.

You know how, sometimes if you haven't talked to an old friend in a long time, you actually start avoiding calling them, out of shame for falling out of contact?

Well, that's me, right now. I haven't written anything here in so long, I'm almost physically frightened to do it now.

It's not that I don't like you - I do, more than you could know - it's just that all I want to impart right now is an anxious, keening, long, guttural wail. We're fucked beyond belief right now and I fear that - even if we make the right choice in 24 days or so, it ain't gonna get better for a long time. If we make the wrong choice, however, or the election gets stolen by the oligarchy (which I suspect may have happened the last two), we fall into the boiling shitpot even faster.

I'm confident that my readership, now maybe dwindled to two, will be making the right choice and I don't much feel like preaching to that choir. The days when random rightwing nutjobs would wander in here and take umbrage at my incendiary comments here are long gone.

I'll try to be a better correspondent. Honest.