Check-In & Commemoration

I haven't been able to sit down at a computer for any length of time in a few weeks. I have a lot to catch up on, though for me the process of actually writing anything requires me to slow down and just let the essays come out at the pace they need to come out at. Before my recent week off (winter vacation, though due to the new baby we did not go to Florida this year), I saw that Lloyd Fonvielle, a writer whose blog I had linked to and who was a friend of this site insofar as he linked to it and one or two visitors a week drifted over from his site, died, suddenly from my vantage point as I do not know what the cause of death was, he had been posting on his page up to about a week before he died, and had gone on a pretty active road trip around the southwest as recently as the Christmas season. I liked that guy, or at least I liked his site. There aren't many blogs, to be honest, that consistently deal with the kinds of things I am interested in, and even fewer that do so in a congenial way. So I feel a mild compulsion to acknowledge that. When I was looking at the pictures of his road trips, where he seemed to have all the time in the world out among those open spaces in the west and was able to go out to bars at night and eat in cool-looking restaurants I was quite envious and thought, oh, for the day, if it ever does come, when I will be able to do that sort of thing, some of it again, some of it almost for the first time. But the nature of things for most men anyway is to be occupied with some other business than what you want to be occupied with right up to the very last. It is necessary, for you at least, if nothing else.

Anyway I hope to be putting up more posts here soon. I have not quit the blog.