Penultimate Calendar Year Post

Dear Loyal Readership,

I am going to start another one after I publish this which will be dated 2010, but it is unlikely I will finish that before a week is out, especially as I will be away from a computer, or at least will not be near one in any capacity of composition, for the next few days.

I need not tell you that 2010 was not a banner year for either my writing or thinking abilities. My skill in each of these areas continues to deteriorate, as in the former, or grow more confused, as in the latter at an ever more precipitous pace. A great part of it, I know, is the incessant demands and toll which work, lack of sleep, endless domestic tasks and the multitude of people who now live with me make and have taken upon my concentration--even now I have someone jabbering at me as I try to dash off this note. A few hours of quiet with a rested and calm mind... these last few years, too, my mind is always as if hopped up, anxious, unable to see or arrange its thoughts quite clearly--I never foresaw this happening to me either.

I have kept up to the extent I have here because--like many of my countrymen, I should add--I am sick with the idea of being a certain kind of person that I increasingly have no claim on being, and it has proven very difficult for me to let that go entirely, though rationally I am all but resigned to this truth.

I thus look for 2011--what, as I will be 41, the historical record indicates should be the year I attain the pinnacle of my powers as a writer--to be an even slower and less lucid year at Bourgeois Surrender than any we have had yet. I thank you for your support and hope you have found and will continue to find such mild amusement and diversion in these pages as you seek and as most of us need from time to time.

Yours sincerely,

The Editor