I don’t know if all writers are the same, but I feel that I am most productive when I have a certain level of existential angst.

Since moving to KC, life has been full of many things, but lacking in that kind of internal strain that pushes me to my keyboard for my own version of talk therapy with a world of faceless strangers taking the place of a therapist.

After time, I stopped remembering this site’s existence until the annual renewal reminder popped into my inbox. And every time I briefly considered closing shop. But this writing was so intertwined into the fiber of my life for years after Katrina, that I could not bring myself to take it down. It was a feeling of permanent closure I wasn’t ready to make.

Then came 2016 and the political turmoil that permeated American public life for the next four years added to the constant background anxiety that was climate change. This dovetailed into a pandemic that changed our lives in ways that will last far beyond its end. Like Chicken Little, it was hard to shake the feeling that the sky was falling, and the life I had been living in comfortably was coming to some sort of ending. I used to divide my life into two parts – before Katrina and after Katrina. The Covid-19 pandemic has become another one of those defining markers of my life.

Many times during the last five years, I started writing with the thought to pick up the thread of this narrative that I dropped so long ago, but just as in the year immediately following Katrina, the emotion was too complex and too conflicting for me to adequately find the words to convey the inner turmoil. Even some of the more lighthearted vignettes of everyday absurdities that had allowed me to indulge in my own self-deprecating twisted sense of humor in the past fell flat when they left my head and became words on the page. My virtual wastebasket is a graveyard of metaphorical crumpled drafts.

But the angst remains, so I will just write.

I have no idea what will come next.