Stall tactics

I still remember Seth Godin’s blog post of a few years back, “Are you stalling?” It made me uneasy, no doubt because I sensed the answer is “Yes.”

Ironically, less than a month earlier I had passed the 100th day of my 92-day challenge to myself. On Aug. 1, 2020, I had quietly set myself on a quest to see if I could post something here every day through the month of October, or 92 days. It would be a while before I said it out loud, but I sailed right through 92 days, crossed 100 days, and kept on going. This particular post represents my 2,182nd consecutive daily post.

I often convince myself that this regular writing habit is proof that I am not stalling. After all, in these last six years I have published a novel, a novelette, a flash-fiction collection, and six collections of blog posts.

But I must admit, I have been stalling.

I stand up and say to the room, “Hello, my name is Warren Bluhm, and I’m stalling.”

“Hi, Warren,” the room responds.

Now, my instinct is to continue, “I have decided to stop stalling, and by the end of this year, I intend to …”

But remember the part where “it would be a while before I said it out loud”? There is some wisdom in the advice not to announce anything until you have succeeded.

And then again, I have, several times in the past, outlined this same logic and announced that I wasn’t going to announce anything but I might be working on something, and even then the work I was hinting at fizzled out.

And I have now written nearly 300 words about stalling, when I could have simply stopped stalling and gotten busy.

More than 50 years ago, a psychoanalyst named R.D. Laing wrote a very wise book called Knots, in which he illustrated various ways that the mind can twist itself into pretzels. I believe my mind’s ruminating about stalling would have fit very neatly into that book.

I’m still stalling, aren’t I?

“Yep,” says the room.

With apologies to Frank Herbert

I must not scroll. Scrolling is the mind-killer. Scrolling is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my scrolling. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the scroll has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Summer is Five

I’ve already told all the best Summer stories — about how on the way to pick out our new golden retriever puppy, Red and I talked what we would name her. We went through dozens of possibilities, just like the process that led to the naming of Willow the Best Dog There Was™ before her. Willow was a character in one of our favorite TV shows.

We were going through the characters from another Joss Whedon classic, and the actresses who played them. Kaylee? Jewel? Zoe? Gina? Inara? Morena? River? Summer?

There was a long pause, and I said. “I don’t know why, but ‘Summer’ passes the choke-Warren-up test.”

There was a longer pause, and to my surprise Red replied, tearfully, “Me, too.”

And that’s how Summer became Summer.

Then I spent 45 minutes at the breeder’s house sitting on the floor and letting golden retriever puppies climb over me while I asked, “Which one of you is Summer?” It was a hard decision, but the one with the yellow collar — code name Mimosa — won the day. Summer came home about a month later.

The pups — eight girls and two boys — had been born the night of July 19 and the early morning hours of July 20, 2021. We weren’t sure exactly when our puppy was born, but the papers say July 20, which was good enough for us.

Summer is a very kind, very loving, very strange dog. There are 10 steps down from the deck to the backyard, and she negotiates those stairs all the time. But she has never, in all these years, come down the 10 steps to the basement, no matter how much I try to coax her.

We have been through a lot together, not the least of which was losing her human mom, who died a month before Summer’s second birthday. But with her big sister Dejah, Summer has been a constant source of joy and amusement for five years now. How is it possible that that wonderful origin story was already five years ago now?

Happy birthday, Summer Sum Sum, my amazing little pal.