Fragments From Floyd

Two Years Ago Today

I'm a sucker for anniversaries. Not the wedding kind. Those I routinely miss; ask my daughter. And more about that in a few weeks. I remember anniversaries of events I wish I didn't remember a year, or ten years later as much as I recall the good ones. It just seems like one should acknowledge the passing in some metered way, 365 days and a complete earth-sun cycle as good as any marker of time. Something can usually be gleaned from the comparison, then versus now; some take-home lesson gained by remembering one's life-events measured along a succession of calendars. Somebody said God created time so that everything didn't happen all at once. Man invented calendars and anniversaries for the same reason.

Journal, May 17, 2002: In the odd way things work out, both Ann and I are home from work now for two weeks--she, between jobs--again. She'll be moving on, hopefully, from a fair job to a good one. And me: for the first time in my working life, I am two weeks into an uncertain period of unplanned unemployment after being harrassed into resignation. I've left an employer. I may have left a profession. I haven't a vision for what comes next. Two weeks at home now is about as much idleness as I have known since I had six weeks off in summers when I used to teach at the community college. I'm ready to sink my teeth into the next project and there is nothing looming on the horizon. Nothing.

I've started a web log (or blog) and a couple of times I have written out my frustrations and licked my wounds there, but then deleted all of it, the writing having been catharsis enough. I don't want to whine about my plight, but I do feel so cut off from humanity without the daily contacts at work. I am the tree falling in the forest. Can anybody hear me falling? Anyone?

I've just learned that I can put pictures on my blog, and so I will finally be able to do something I've always felt drawn to do: write to an image. Bring in a picture off the digital camera, paste it on an empty page, and let it draw out the story it tells. I've wanted to write, especially since helping Nathan with his book. Maybe this weblog can become an expressive outlet for the photography and the new territory of the written word.

Maybe it can also become a way of making contact with a crowd other than the usual Instant Messaging/IRC/bulletin board crowd. Maybe while I am ex-communicated from the realm of work, I can communicate and find community via the web...first those who live far away, then over time, actually grow relationships here where we live. We'll see.