Knicq

It was a click. I am convinced of it. AP refuses to agree, but this is one debate he just cannot win. It happens to be about a sound. A sound which emanated from the general direction of my knee, when I was trying to do the agile-panthery-knicq thing, and almost succeeded in hitting the squash ball for the third time in the space of 1.59877 seconds.

Oh yes! I was a blur. Until my being, the blur that is, concentrated itself into my vision – when the world was a blur for a 0.00001 second, which hind sight has painstakingly explained to me was all an illusion – the world becoming a blur that is. On the 1.59879th second, my vision was restored, the world was not a blur, nor was I anymore, and sound had caught up with my speed, and I heard a ‘click’. It was followed by a muffled little thud, which in a squash court is often followed by either a combination of “Yes!” and “Nainyyaarr!” uttered simultaneously in two different voices, or the sound of air being punched from one side of the court while you can hear the sound of eyes rolling in another corner. The muffled little thud is the sound of  the hollow squash ball bouncing a second time before rolling away. The rolling away is often never heard in the deafening noise created by the punching of air, rolling of eyes, and uttering of war cries.

Coming back to the click though. I heard it. I commended sound on its alacrity and a job well done. Sound was panting at the time, very audibly, and it kept mumbling some gibberish about having left rain far behind. I failed to make the connection, and attributed the gibberish to a hightened state of awareness that Sound might have achieved traveling that fast – a state of awareness where memories become muddled and discerning faculties become befuddled, and a state in which Sound can be expected to confuse a click with a thunder, and then, by simple association think of rain. Out of sheer respect for an athlete, and in deference to sound’s dedication to it’s job, I decided to not knock the fellow down. Instead, I extended a helping hand, and helped it out of the court. There it stood then, leaning against the wall, waving its hands at me, and uttering rapid-fire gibberish. Sound, it is funny. It thinks just because it is sound, we must listen to everything it has to say.

All this while when this heart rendering scene was unfolding, AP had done his punching the air and uttering a gleeful ‘Yes!’. I turned my attention to the game once again. Apparently, I had lost a point and handed AP a crucial lead once again. I brought my faculties to attention, brought the requisite level of firmness to my jaw, prepared for the worst case scenario in advance with a slight stiffening of the upper lip, and braced myself to receive AP’s serve. In came AP’s trademark serve, caressing the wall all along, and making it clear that it was headed to kiss the corner – an act his serves like to do, and one I find exceedingly inappropriate, and infinitely inconvenient. Kisses and corners – so teenage, so wayward. There is, of course, the fact that retrieving a ball engaged in public displays of affection with corners requires a back-hand shot which is just not there in my repertoire of squash shots. I made an attempt though, and was about to move towards the corner when… all hell broke loose!

In an instant overflowing with comprehension, realization and understanding, Sound’s gibberish just dawned upon me – through my knee. It was not thunders Sound was talking about, nor of rain. It had been trying to warn me that on its way to my ears, when it was trying to catch up with me to bring me “Click”, it had left behind a huge mean looking guy called “Pain”. Now, because it was big and bulky, and because I was fast and furious, it had taken a long time arriving, but arrive it did, and with such aplomb so as to render me speechless, and if feelings are anything to go by knee-less for sometime. And now here it was, shooting through every tendon in my leg, and roaring and shouting and generally creating a mayhem.

Its a cocky fellow, Pain is, and even though it came in second after Sound, it refuses to budge from the knee which it thinks is the podium where the gold medal will be handed over. We have tried to ignore it and get on with other events, but it is a bit of a problem since he likes to make his presence felt, and whenever it thinks we, my sporting ambition and my limbs, are beginning to have some kind of a rythm in our day to day activities, it starts bellowing out, what it must think sweet melodies, in its hoarse and out of tune voice – and that too at the top of its huge lungs. An absolute nuisance I tell you. Not that we let it bog us down, but we will certainly be better off when this pain guy figures out how unwanted and in the way he is, and walks away.

In the meanwhile, in all this ruckus created by Pain, no-one had heard the afore mentioned thud – the one produced by a ball bouncing a second time before rolling off. Actually, I had not even heard the ‘Yes’ or the punching of the air, and I tried explaining to AP that I was distracted by the ‘Click’ and its entourage. Even Sound tried to reason with him, but AP maintains that there was no Click, and we were just paying too much attention to thuds, and calling it different names. Thuds do not originate from my knees, and this is a fact even he cannot dispute. The “Click” on the other hand came from the knee, loud and clear and even if pain took sometime catching up with click, it still means that air may rightfully have a couple of grievances about having been wrongly punched. There is no question of punching the air and claiming points, if the other player is having a conversation with clicks and pains.

Like I said, its my knee; and I know what sound it made – this is not an argument AP is winning. Nor is this a game he can claim until we have finished it; and finish it we will after we have ousted pain and stowed away the click.

Until then, he must wait.

My sporting prowess has been one of the most well kept secrets about me. It ranks right up there with my various musical talents, my insurmountable courage, my exceptional culinary skills, my unbelievable linguistic capabilities and myriad others which are too secret for even me to know about. Oh, and lets not forget my super-powers – any of them.  There’s that thing to do with memory, for instance, …

For the most part, these are secrets which were locked away in vaults and the keys swallowed – just as they are wont to get done in animations. Most of the vaults were thrown into the ways of erupting volcanoes. The not-so-great thing about secrets though is that they are hard to keep. Every now and then, a secret jumps up at you from behind a door, and takes your breath away. The sporting prowess secret did that to me today. It sort of did a Kung Fu Panda on me actually. I will stop talking in riddles shortly. It is another well-kept secret, my ability to not talk in riddles, that and perhaps the immense gift I have of summing up the gist of the matter with elegance, panache and class – to get to the point in a hurry. But until I do that, stop talking in riddles that is, and let the cat out of the bag about my love for brevity, you must resign yourself to the fact that riddles are the order of the day.

Fate, it would appear, was going about humming a merry tune to herself and minding her own business in general. The tune was catchy, she remembered the words well, the weather was nice, there were clouds aplenty, sunshine in moderate quantities,  and if the swishing trees and their branches were anything to go by, there was quite a nice breeze too; but she couldn’t really know, since she had her airconditioning on despite the wonderful weather out there. “What is one to do?”, she had mused aloud to herself, “with all this dust swirling about in the air, you just can’t roll the windows down.” All in all…, all was well.

And then… she took that turn, and found herself embroiled in the Dubai-Sharjah traffic jam. Panic began to set in, as she tried frantically to cut her way into the fast moving lane; but people were just mean. They would not let her through, not even when they were driving Nissan Sunnies with the red ribbons tied to the center view mirrors. Generally, this is not the kind of people who will risk a scratch/dent on their beloved Sunny by refusing to give way in a traffic jam. Nor did Nissan actually design the Sunny as a car which could play the nudging and pushing game so often played by the Pathan-driven-Corollas and Egyptian/Syrian-driven-antique-BMWs. But it appeared something was amiss today in the general scheme of things – either that or there was a new element at play.  She smelled a conspiracy, but put the thought away for the moment.

She tried again with the Sunny guy, even brought his attention to her manicured nails as she pointed to the blinking indicator, but he was being anything but sunny. Perhaps the sight of something pretty and feminine had awoken the masculinity hidden thus far behind his sizeable moustache. It was quite apparent this was not a fight he was willing to back out of, and Fate was, at this point in time, not exactly in a mood to pick a fight with the moustache macho. So, she decided to try another route. The other route happened to be on the right side of a yellow line, which was incidentally also the wrong side of the law. It reminded her of that phrase she had heard once about one man’s fredom fighter being another’s terrorist. In her current predicament, she could well understand the whole philosophy behind a freedom fighter, and decided to take the (wrong) route on the right side of the yellow line.

Being fate, as she would have it, there was one of those contraptions installed on the road ahead, which caught her in the act of being on the wrong side of the law. “Why do the flashes on these cameras go off like firworks?”, she thought to herself just as the flash lit up her dainty little car, and blinded her for a millisecond. As her vision was restored, she looked around to find that her costly sojourn on the wrong/right side of the yellow line and the subsequent lighting up of the road had in fact been a source of amusement and comic value to quite a number of people. It was at this moment that something clicked just as something snapped in her. So, she thought to herself, it has all been a conspiracy then eh? It was quite obvious to her that there had been a conspiracy to lure her into the traffic jam somehow, and then force her out on the hard shoulder just so she would have to part with a sizeable amount towards fines when she went in to get her car registration renewed.

“So, they like conspiracies then, dont they?”, said Fate. “I will show them conspiracies.”

Now it is a given that when Fate sits down at the drawing table and begins her conspiring, she starts with yours truly as her prime subject. So she began her conspiring, ergo I landed in a Squash court today, carrying a squash racquet, armed to the teeth with ambition and adrenaline pumping through my cholestrol lined blood vessels. My opponent was AP, a life long fiend of a friend. He came in carrying his racquet, armed with his disarming charm, and loaded with his incisive sarcasm and wit which often become his principal allies in a sporting outing. Its a pity he never did play Professional Cricket, or else sledging would hardly have been associated with the Australians. It would have been Pakistan’s second gift to Cricket after reverse swing. The odds were stacked in my favor, heavily. He had never played Squash before, and even though I had played back in 1993, which was another lifetime, I could certainly and safely lay claim to being the more experienced of the two players.

We began hitting the ball. AP relied on his physical fitness and natural sportsmanship to play the game, while I kept banking on my experience and sporting prowess. Seven points into the game, my sporting prowess pulled the “Kung Fu Panda” on me, the ’scroll’ fell as if from the cieling and hit me “bonk!” on the head. I heard Fate collapsing in fits of laughter just as I realized that there was no secret sporting prowess. All the sporting prowess in that squash court belonged to the person who had scored the seven points, and I had yet to score my first point.

Secrets, if you ask me, are over-rated.

Should I, or should I not write? What would I write about?

There is so much heartache, so much death, so much cruelty, so much ignorance and so much ugliness all around that I know I will not be able to maintain my positive outlook if I let it all out. I feel like such a criminal even thinking about staying positive.

For two weeks now, we have sat dumb-founded as Israel has bombarded, and murdered a people; and we have done nothing. Everyone has the numbers, everyone has the facts, and yet no-one seems to have perspective. No-one seems to understand that the tacit approval which Israel enjoys from the whole world makes the whole world complicit in this mass murder. By standing aside, and doing nothing as the village bully not only beats up but kills and maims one of us, we are ensuring that many such bullies will rise tomorrow to subject us to the exact same treatment. Or worse!

I have no energy nor the inclination to wade into a long winded argument or discussion about, or even condemnation of the Gazan Genocide. Everyone knows, or ought to know that it is deplorable and all things indescribable to starve and suffocate a people for months, and then bombard them with the deadliest ammunition at the disposal of one of the world’s most well-equipped fighting machines. (Thank you USA – and then you wondered, why the Palestinians were dancing in the streets when 9/11 happened? ) Do I need to cry hoarse and put up pictures of hundreds of children killed, maimed, orphaned and even generally scarred for life by Israel during this invasion of Gaza to remind people that Israel is killing children everyday with impunity while our lives go on, while our children live their innocent lives?

Has humanity sunk so low, and have political considerations become so base that the world chooses not only to allow a genocide to happen right in its heart, but also lends this genocide legitimacy by consistently telling us that the victim is to be held responsible for all his suffering? Have the purveyors of this injustice and this cruelty completely forgotten that there is a higher power who is Almighty? Do they find it absolutely of no value that no civilization in the history of earth has ever ruled forever? That great civilizations before them have come down to being nothing?

Children! They kill children everyday, and the world knows it, sees it, and nods in agreement!

I wish to God that the world goes nuclear – that they go to war, all of these countries which have sat in a circle and egged the mauling bear on as he has attacked the scrawny emaciated frame of  its starved prey thrown at its mercy, bound and gagged. I wish to God – that they fire all of their nuclear war heads at the same time to all over the world, and that this unfair, unjust, cruel and disgusting world, which has allowed Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Kashmir to happen without intervening effectively, comes to an abrupt end.

Ya Allah! Forgive us our sins, and end this world. Please.

I used to think I was a singing sensation. My mother thought me the next Qari Waheed Zafar. Never mind the fact that every kid in my class could render ‘Fasilon ko takalluf‘ better than me, and most even got ‘Zahe Muqaddar’ right. My mother had not heard them – my classmates, and I did not know I was as bad as I was. Unfortunately, falsehoods perpetuated in childhood can linger for impossibly long times; I grew up under the impression that I could sing.

They began being less polite about it all once I got to teenage years, but then those were the years when I thought people disapproved of me on purpose, to spite me. I was never much of a rebel – outwardly. I did stick to my guns though – it was much later when I found out that the technical term for this behavior was passive aggression. As much as passive voice was loved by me, it was no surprise that a sense of proud satisfaction was allowed to overcome me by me upon this discovery; but like I said, this was allowed to happen much later. At the time, I had no idea I was being passively aggressive in persisting with my yodeling despite passionate pleas for respite from my intended and unintended audiences. I was just being confident of my talent. One only has to imagine what an ordinary 13 year old sounds like without trying to sound melodious to understand the true measure of my victims’ agony.

For some reason, we never had a cassette player in our house for a long time. My parents are no music enthusiasts, and given the very nominal role they played in world affairs and Pakistan politics, they had never felt the need to tune in to BBC Urdu Service in the evenings. To borrow an expression from Mushtaq Ahmad Yousufi, they knew and understood that whatever anyone was doing in whatever part of the world was doing so without their express permission or council. They only concerned themselves with making ends meet, and ensuring none of us ever stood second (or third, or fourth, etc.) in his or her class. Unfortunately for them, they got the tougher part right, the meeting of ends that is, but they failed where they thought it mattered most – whatever the other siblings scored, I was too polite to bump the guys ahead of my in class and take their spot and hence their limelight. My parents misinterpreted my courtesy and politeness as passive aggression, and tried to counter it with assertive persuasion at first and active aggression later on. Soon, however, they figured out how inherent these traits were in me, and how impossible a task it was for anyone to persuade me to push people around.

I reckon we must have had a cassette player early on, but it must never have been replaced after it broke down. It was the same with the car audio systems – as long as the “tape” was fine, we got some music in the car, and when the ‘tape’ went out of order, which it invariably did on those Mazdas and Toyotas my father loved, it would sound the death knell for our music as well. Once the ‘tape’ became useless, all that was left of the car audio systems was radio, and back in mid-80’s you did not get much by way of radio. There were no FM stations (Alas! The good old days when people were not being paid to murder common sense, good language, and brain cells on air), and the only Urdu service was Abu Dhabi urdu service, which if I am not wrong was a three or four hour service. Incidentally, the three or four hours co-incided with our homework time, and that was that.  No radio or music for us.

The long and short of it all is just that there was a serious dearth of actual opportunities for me to figure out my shortcomings in the crooning department. Sure, I never got a tune right and I should have taken the hint then, but I always put it down to not having heard the tune enough number of times and not having sung along enough number of times.

Then there came a tim when we bought a Panasonic cassette player, and I went about collecting all kinds of music to play on it. And I sang along. For hours. They say there was a mysterious epidemic in those days, which killed many many bats as far off as Ras Al Khaimah, and it was driving the dogs crazy. The mysterious thing was the dead animals all seemed to be in excellent condition, except for their ears. Apparently, it was a noise that killed them, and left their ears swollen.

And this is a completely random bit of information, which has nothing to do with this sorry excuse of a post. But, that is what you get from me when I have been up all night doing nothing, and decide to update just as the morning updates today’s sun.

Once upon a time, not very long ago, I used to be less than 30 years old; but it is a distant memory. I am not one to pay a lot of attention to the number that is age. My parents have always complained that I never act my age, or to put it more accurately act one of my ages for too many years to come. I have always seen that as my innate ability to stay evergreen. Green is good, we all know that. It is the best color for a passport, a flag, and one’s favorite cricket team. Parents know their children best and if mine thought I acted a certain age for ages, who was I to argue with them?

Personally, I have never been able to understand people who act or are able to conduct themselves as wise beyond their years. Where is the fun in that? Life permitting, we all grow up to be ‘beyond’ our years. Some of us even get to be wise. Why expedite the inevitable? It is the difference between chewing one’s food properly, or gulping it all down in a haste – which do you think is a healthy practice?

Let me not trick you into thinking that I ever got stuck in an age on purpose. Its just that I am like that. It is hard for me to move on, and some numbers were harder to move on from than others. There are remnants of some of those numbers still in me, and sometimes I wish I had some remnants of some other numbers. It would not hurt me for instance to have a little bit of the cocky confidence of the 21 year old knicq, or the ironclad convictions of the 18 year old knicq, or the hunger and drive of the 24 year old knicq, or even the sense of humor of the 29 year old knicq. Oh, 23 years and five months old knicq was just the right shape for two weeks as he transcended from celery to pear in no time. It wouldn’t hurt to be a more regular shape.

Unfortunately, though, the remnants that have refused to go are the ones I would rather have liked to see leave me. My lack of self-discipline is just as pronounced today as it was when I was 14, my blabbering is worse than it was at 13, my sporting inability has refused to let go of me despite the best of my efforts, my penchant for making a right fool of myself in front of people I really need to like me has never left me ever since I achieved perfection in it at 16. Lets not kid ourselves, there are always people who we need to like us. People we adore, admire, care for, or just plain love. When you are knicq, there are scores and scores of people who fall in any one or more of those categories. When you are knicq, you are always getting blessed with amazing, beautiful, and too good to be true-but true, people. Except the few who take it upon themselves to never let you forget how long ago it was that you turned 30…

Yes, there are those then. Not many, but a few. Privy to the intimate details of the drab drama that is knicq – the life, they use that information to their advantage and to my detriment – or to be more precise, to my self-esteem’s detriment. They are the friends who would lay their lives for you, and make you wish sometimes that they would get on with it and do so already. They are the friends who know just exactly how to wind you up, and never let their ability to do just that wane. They are the friends, who were not perturbed in the least when I put my new strategy to counter their morale-busting tactics; a strategy which had repeated proclamations of human greatness on my part as its cornerstone. An excellent strategy that should work on the premise that when someone is at his confident best, and refuses to even allow you to pull him down even when you remind him that one has been asked to leave by an ex-employer quite unceremoniously, that his next employer had not really been completely heart-broken or broke or both when he resigned, and that he has been un-employed, euphemistically self-employed, for over five months now. It backfired. All they had to do was ask me this: “So, even before you had got married, exactly how many expressions of interests did you have in you from the better half prospects?”

It should not have mattered. But it was meant to matter. It did.

Below the belt. Mean. Vicious. True.

I found letters. Scores of them. My father’s little collection, including letters from relatives, his friends, my mother’s friends, and from my brother and me when we were both in Pakistan and the rest of the family was here. Most of the letters were from ten years ago, but there were some dated as far back as the 80’s. There were Eid cards, letters of congratulations, letters of condolences when our grandfather had passed away, and letters full of demands from the two of us – the last part was exceedingly embarrassing and made me see just how much of a challenge I used to pose to my parents; it wasn’t easy being happy about being my parent . It brought back memories and mixed emotions.

What I found most interesting though was the language in which those letters were written, even my own letters. It is hard to believe those letters were written only ten years ago, the language is so refined by today’s standards, and the style so intriguing. A letter was structured, not written. There were nuances that every letter seemed to pay attention to. And did I mention the language? Oh! The Language… I read words, I had forgotten existed. Such lovely compositions. Such grace.

It drove home the realization that with letter writing going out of vogue, a beautiful aspect of life as we knew it may have been lost forever. Letters were written to appraise others of ‘haal ahwaal’ and ask theirs in return. There was subtle humor always at play, and the wordplay was delightful. The very nature of letters dictated that they be detailed. And they were all hand written – a letter from those days was indeed half a meeting with a person.

Today, the emails pale in comparison on so many counts, and the networking sites like facebook, ryze, Orkut et al with their two line ’shout-outs’ rather than ‘haal-ahwal’ have taken the little semblance of personal touch away. Compare the standardized “Wassup? How’s life dude? Where have you been?” to three or four pages of a detailed account of how things were, and how they had changed since the last letter, and how delighted one was at having read about this and how very concerned one was about that, and you will see what I mean.

I think I will go and write a letter to someone.

It feels strange. Blogging. I am not sure what it is that keeps me from updating.

We get to know a little bit more about ourselves as we go through our lives. If most people are like me, they have this image of themselves in their mind. It is a nice image, this self portrait. It is made of all things good. Of all traits and things one thinks highly of. For a large part of our lives we go through our daily lives taking that self portrait to be a true representation of who we know we are. Then… life happens.

Something we had not counted on jumps at us, and we respond to it. Our response defines who we are, and for the lucky few the response comes as a pleasant surprise. They go one up on their self portrait in real life. They find themselves to be better people than they think they are.

Then, there are those who are like me. Everytime, life throws something at me, and requires me to respond, I bungle it big. The portrait hangs there smug and shiny. It is Dorian Gray inverted. The portrait stays beautiful and life peels layer after layer of me to reveal a me I would rather not discover.

At first, I was able to convince myself that I had been setting my standards too high, that I needed to cut myself some slack, that I was indeed a better painter than I realized, that the painting was unrealistic. But if I were to redraw the painting now, more realistically, more in line with who/what I think is achievable, I am convinced I would be left with a hedious portrait just the sight of which would send my own sanity packing.

I seem to recall a childhood, and childhood years are all full of potential. I just do not know when and where did the slide begin. Or where it ends?

With all that I had going for me, the parents, the education, the friends, the opportunities; I should have grown into a better person.

Perhaps, I will end up with more than necessary possessions. I am truly blessed in the people I have in my life – even after the few I have managed to lose despite their efforts to hang on.

But the question remains: Will I ever get close to that portrait?

I should probably not be writing this post. Now, don’t we all know that we should actually stop writing when we start a post stating we should not be writing it? And how many of us actually do stop? If my guess is any good, not one. Either that, or all of us – but when we do stop, we just write that post another time. Right after the glass of juice, cup of tea, slice of an apple, bite of a candy bar, or whatever else it is that works for us.

The long and short of it, the gist, the point I am trying to make here, call it what you may, is that posts that should not be written do get written. One wishes this would suffice as an explanation for all the digital diarrhea (with apologies to JB, who introduced me to this term) that plagues blogistan, and one would ride too were wishes ever to be classified as horses. In case, you were thinking we are trying to set a new record for the most cliches cramped into a second paragraph, give yourself a pat, and smile that contented smile that comes only in acknowledgment of being told you are right.

It is intriguing, isn’t it? When you think about how so many of us do the wrong thing knowingly. It is ridiculous, if you ask me, when we do the wrong thing thinking we are absolved of all wrong doing if we start by admitting we know what we are doing is wrong. People! It becomes wrong-ER, when you commit a wrong a) knowingly and b) admitting such knowledge. Actually, technically speaking, it becomes wrong-er-er, but I am trying to avoid sounding like a complete dunce, so lets just leave it at wrong-er. Now, when you factor in the fact that in the current discussion, I am the one who started with one such admission, it just leads to the conclusion that I am ridiculous-er. Which is more than a tad lame, but hey! I am being ridiculous-er, and I am admitting it, so I am allowed to go ahead and add as many ‘ers’ to ridiculous as pleases me.

I am battling insomnia these days, which is a 180 degrees turn from a year ago, when I was battling somnia, which I presume is what excessive sleeping disorder is called. Just to keep the record straight, I say “battling” because that is how I have seen people describe such matters. I am not really battling. I was not either – with the somnia that is. If I were hard-pressed to use a more apt word in this context, I would probably choose ‘experiencing’ or ‘discovering’ or something along those lines. But, like I said, we are going for that record for most ‘cliches’, and may be using ‘battling’ will help us qualify.

It is hard to tell which is better or worse. Insomnia or Somnia. I mean sleeping is good, we all know that. I probably know that more than the next person today. And if you look at how I have been able to get some reading done, and see some movies in the past few days, you cannot really argue that not sleeping is all bad. It is just the irony of it all. It was not very long ago when I had got fed up with my ability to make “I-can-sleep-before-your-hat-hits-the-ground” claims without garnishing them with more than a dash of exaggeration, and had hoped, actually hoped, I had insomnia. I recall having thought, “Wouldn’t that be nice? And wouldn’t I get so many things done in all the spare time I would have on my hands if only I were not wasting all these precious hours not staying up?”

Well, guess what? Its time for another cliche!

‘I like Drew Barrymore. Very much.’

‘I should have wished for something esle’, and “I should have been careful what I wished for – it just came true’.

Which is all very well. I mean getting one wish instead of not getting any is still good, isn’t it? I just need to figure out a way to get that nagging “I have to go to work in the morning” thought out of my head – I can sit back and enjoy the insomnia then.

I just noticed the wrong cliche up there. Now where did that come from?

Insomnia has its peculiarities, I guess. I should stop writing. I should, probably, not be writing this post.

Not that a new place guarantees new posts, but it is certainly a good sign when I can get a few words out on a page titled New Posts.