"It's amazing how much 'mature wisdom' resembles being too tired." - Robert Heinlein

"You're under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago." - John Roedel

"To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard."- Allen Ginsberg

The sense of being at a crossroads, a pivot point, a cusp, just will not leave me lately. I'm still trying to figure out what it's telling me, what actions I must take to keep my feet as the world spins. That's probably at least in part because it hasn't decided which way to spin, yet.

I'm being cryptic. I hate being cryptic.

You know, because I've finally told you, that at some point in the future I will likely be moving to the farm, three hours northeast of here. As hard as that blog was to write, I had fun playing with everyone's expectations in it. 

Oh, please don't deny you had them. Hell, twenty three years ago, when we first discussed this soon-to-be-eventing eventuality, I had expectations of bailing if and when it happened, and then trying to explain to ice-cold friends and family why bailing was the only logical choice if the other choice meant living in a place with no public transit of any kind, in service to a dream I do not share.

I feel a need to say some things here about the very deliberate way in which I have structured my life. I spent far too much time and energy writing about this over the years, so I'll try to keep it short and blunt. And I think I'll start with: told you so.

Mark and Eva just celebrated their ninth anniversary. He's lived here since May of 2016. Several people made haste to tell me when he came that I was being replaced. I scoffed. I'm irreplaceable for my sheer humility alone. No, seriously, I'm not replaceable and neither is he.

Several people likewise assumed Kathy was and is an Eva replacement, and likewise this is not true at all. How could Kathy hope to replace Eva? How could Eva hope to replace Kathy? They're two very different people, come on. 

Our DIY relationship was mocked, ridiculed and above all minimized. It still happens and it still hurts, but what hurts more at this point is that I sought public validation at all, let alone so stridently. LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME! It does present as showing off. That was never my intention. At all. It's yet another instance of naive idealism: of course they'll see this as I do, when a lifetime has shown me repeatedly that they never see this as I do. No matter what "this" is.

In any event, it's been seven years of family. If anyone's itchy, they haven't said anything. Of course once I'm sent down to the 'farm team', so to speak, seeing Kathy at all will become exponentially more challenging, but she has said she wants me in her life and so I'll be there until she says otherwise. Which, to be honest, I expected long ago. Our road trek anthem contains the line "boldly going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse". This fundamental truth applies as time goes by. 

 Meanwhile, Eva and Mark and I are still talking this out, attempting to devise a way to keep this place too. There are reasons for this mostly having to do with doctors, which are hard to come by in Hastings County. Even if they weren't,  we are exceptionally happy with our current GP,  ophthamologist and dentist. Various scenarios are being explored. In one of them I'd live here full time for six months of the year, likely the winter ones. I'll freely admit I'd prefer to keep this place for many reasons, and it's at least possible financially. But dropping these obligations would give our lives a boost, there's no denying that. 

I spent a weekend up there a couple months back. I discovered a pizza place that's at least on a par with Woodstock Pizza and Pasta and I didn't think that was possible. I found a noisy, cramped home in an expansive and silent space. There is much to detest about the former for me but the latter is attractive and easy to get to. Fifty paces in any direction and the infernal gabble of the idiot box fades into nothingness: fifty more places and five wiener dogs we will inherit become temporarily theoretical. 

(I love dogs, but...five? That together don't amount to a Dolly?)

Kathy's dad passed away suddenly on an Alaskan cruise, and then her best friend since grade school passed away too, and suddenly Facebook didn't seem anywhere near as important as it had been for at least a decade. Every day I went without posting, it became easier to go another. Then when I did post, I didn't feel obligated to post again.

It has dawned on me (at long last) that if I'm to be in an isolated place in the real word, I must rely LESS on the online world to keep me sane. "Dawned" is accurate: by no means did this burst on me like an epiphany. It's also a mental flip. I had (naturally, I think) assumed that I would be shackled to the Book of Faces, there being no other place to communicate with human beings outside my own home.

This is untrue and self-defeating.

You know that saying, "the people who matter don't mind, and the people who mind don't matter?" That's a big lesson learned. My tribe will find me. And incessantly going looking for them, by, say, dropping memes in their mailbox every too often, will probably drive them away. I'm not Sheldon Cooper, but there's a little of him in me and he's annoying. I long ago recognized there's a reason so many people tend to keep me firmly Digital. Maybe some day I'll figure out how to suppress that part of me. 

There's the matter of what I do online, too, and that's a whole lot of pointless circling. With YouTube, Apple Music, or occasionally a podcast in the background, I cycle between Facebook and Reddit, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and round and round the mulberry bush we go. It's little different from how I acted when I first found this universe: confine myself to two corners, ISCABBS and Usenet, and pace between them til I'd worn a hole in the digital carpet. 

It's a waste of an online life. I may as well be flipping channels on (shudder) television. 

I finally deleted my Reddit account yesterday. I may cave and make another, but if I do, I will limit myself to a very few groups, and avoid politics entirely. 

I'm not deleting Facebook, but I am trying to use it more consciously and less frequently. A friend of mine had her account hacked last month and lost fourteen years of her digital life. She grumbled and mourned and started over. If I know her, she took the time to be even more discerning with her account.

I'm not even reading news as voraciously as I did a month ago. Too much of it isn't about what did happen or what is happening but about what might happen and what "should" happen, according to people who generally don't have as much information as they think they do. The agendas are everywhere, they have real world consequences, and nothing I say or do will change any of this. 

What's replacing my online life? Gradually, offline life. Dolly has always been a well-loved dog, but Papa Ken is taking her for daily walks now, and her overwhelming joy keeps me honest. I have lost a little bit of weight and I'll tell you right now I have no hard and fast plans to lose more, because planning anything in my life is a great way of making sure it doesn't happen. I do have every intention of starting up my friend Craig's exercise routine: you start with ten situps, ten pushups, ten crunches and ten of something else (I think it was squats, but I'm going to do jumping jacks); then nine of each; then eight of each; all the way down to one of each. The reasoning is that by the time you get deep into a workout, executing just two of each type of torture is less torture and less like an execution. It works. I got to a point when I last did this where I was starting with fifteen of each exercise and working down to 1. I lost seventy pounds doing that, and then foolishly stopped because stopping is always easier than starting. So no plans, no goals, just gradually changed routines that bring me into the real world and hopefully benefit me.

Whatever comes, I need to face it without crutches.