Just a quick post to let you know I won’t be posting for a few days. Tomorrow I’ll likely be swamped, and the day after I’m heading out to observe some school visits and an evening author event by a few children’s writers, specifically J. Scott Savage (Farworld) and Janette Rallison. Lesson, boys and girls: the best time to arrange school visits is apparently in May. This means that starting next month I’ll be approaching schools, proposing that they let me loose in lunchrooms full of impressionable children—with a microphone. Yeah, watch your evening news for aftershock.

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I just realized something: this is the first time in, what, eighteen years that I have no plans to watch the NBA playoffs.  It sounds almost heretical to say it.  It’s also a pattern I’m falling into.  I didn’t watch a single NCAA Tournament game either.  For a former ball coach and lifetime fan of the sport, there’s definitely something sacrilegious about all this.  But there’s no avoiding the truth: I simply don’t care.  I don’t have enough caring in me to care.

I’ve noticed this building up for the past year or so.  As I become busier and busier, and invest ever more endurance and energy in trying to establish my writing career, things that were once near life and death issues (such as sports) are losing relevance.  In the past, a tough playoff loss would put me in a funk for a week, especially of an elimination game; now I’m painfully aware that I don’t have the emotional investment to spare on any game.  All my reserves go into patience on submitted work, and fighting off the omnipresent fear that everything I write is deserving of nothing less than a bullet to the brain (justified homicide, for writing this bad), and every moment of every day working at my desk, or at my work, or in a meeting, or on my weight bench, or somehow fitting in work between these instances of “real” work.

You know something: fun takes energy.  And I don’t got it, at least not enough to spread around beyond all the pies I’m trying to keep from burning black as pitch (or leaving doughy cold).  How long can one go without doing something pleasant for its purposelessness?  Whatever the duration, I’m certain I’m straining it.  Maybe I need to go see a movie or something.  Yeah, that’s an idea.  Make time to have some fun, do something deliciously unproductive.  I’ll just let something else go.  Not so difficult.

Um, I could ignore… no…

Well, I suppose I could delay… on second thought…

Oh!  There’s… okay, bad idea…

…

Quiet you.  I’ve got work to do.