BACK/NOT BACK (Patreon)

So, yeah... I'm back. But I'm also not really back. Or sort of semi-back. If my time away demonstrated one thing... it's that it's going to take more than a week in Mallorca to recharge my batteries. 

It's weird. I've always gotten exhausted around August, taken a holiday... and then been raring to go again... but this year I'm genuinely teetering on the verge of burn-out. 

Actually, that's not entirely true. It's the part of my brain which does written stuff - long-winded personal blog posts for Patreon supporters don't count(!) - that is the most depleted. 

When it comes to videos and stuff, it seems I've a ton of "juice" left in the tank. Editing, or arsing around making videos, feels more like playing. It's restorative, whereas, for the first time in the five years since I launched Digitiser2000, writing posts on there has come to feel a bit like work. Which I never wanted it to do. 

So, I'm just saying... bear with me. I'll get my writing muse back. Part of the issue is that my day job is still rumbling along much later than usual - I normally get the autumn to focus on my own stuff - so I'm conserving resources for that. Two more weeks, they assure me, and then I'm free.

In the meantime... the videos will continue, and we'll be sorting out the Kickstarter backer rewards, and I've a few other ideas up my sleeve for things I want to do as soon as I get time.

And I thank you in advance for telling me to take care of myself and not worry; I'm pretty good at the self-care when it gets to this stage, and won't push myself unduly. I know that I can only run so fast for so long.

OTHER THINGS

I've also had a bit of a punishing summer on a purely personal front. I've mentioned on here about my uncle's death, but I also got the news yesterday that my sister's ex-husband has tried to take his own life via an insulin overdose, and is currently on life-support. 

He was a massive figure during my formative years - more than I've ever felt able to consciously acknowledge until now - and the closest thing I ever had to a big brother growing up. You've possibly seen me write about Jimbob - the first American I ever met, and the reason why I fell in love with Disney theme parks, and road trips, and American culture. As my wife pointed out to me yesterday, I talk about him a lot. More than I was aware until now.

I'm incredibly sad about it. They split up when I was in my late-teens, and I was crushed at the time... but I just pushed it aside, because of how angry everyone was. I've not seen him in 30 years, and the narrative in our family is that the guy is a "bastard" for leaving her with two young children... yet my memories of him are almost all good. 

Sometimes we have that disconnect; that sense of what we actually feel, and what we're told we "should" feel, but much as we may try to honour the latter, the truth usually wins. Much as we may try to fight our own experiences and our emotions, or bury them, they're still there.

I only ever knew the insanely generous, fun, Jimbob who would sit with me and make model space shuttles, or show me how to build rocket launchers, or take me to air shows, or show me around his work. I idolised him, that six-and-a-half-feet tall, softly-spoken, hick from Georgia. Utterly idolised him. He was, for a long time, my favourite person on the planet. 

Directly related to Mark Twain, Jimbob grew up in a swamp, called my parents "Sir" and "Ma'am", and you couldn't have found somebody more stereotypically Southern. 

I even have a tradition that whenever I do visit the US, I can't officially start the holiday until I've heard More Than A Feeling by Boston, because I have such a fond memory of listening to that song while he and I drove through the desert in his pick-up truck.

MY NEPHEWS

I wish my nephews could've experienced that person. I wish he hadn't just disappeared and cut off all contact with them. It feels like such an unnecessary waste of a life, and it makes me sad to think what may have happened to him in the last 30 years that would lead him to this point. It upsets me to think they never got to know the man I knew. They are, understandably, angry, because now they're never going to get the answers he has denied them.

The summer after my niece and grandad died, we visited my sister and Jim at their home on Edwards Air Force Base. It was my first time in America, and it was the first time in months that we had laughed. Because of that trip, we could - just for moments here and there - forget the utter devastation that had been wrought on our family, and it set us on a path to recovery. 

America, for me, has always since had that healing quality; it's a place I can go to forget, to heal, to recharge. Cast aside politics, or the many divisions over there... I still mostly see it as a fantasy place; my Narnia. 

I remember everything about that first visit, from the smell of the air as we stepped out of LAX, to struggling to take in the openness and scale of the Mojave desert, to the magic of my first visit to Disneyland and the way the trees lit up after dark... playing Dungeons & Dragons with my sister's neighbours, my first taste of beef jerky, the weird ringpulls on the cans of Coke... It was so alien, so utterly foreign, but everything was so exciting. 

You know how sometimes we chase that first feeling of something, but we never quite achieve it? Like, that first time you experienced a certain sensation, or a certain song, but you will never entirely manage to recapture that feeling of hearing it, or feeling it, for the first time? I never have that with America. 

Every time I go there, visit a Disney theme park, eat some buffalo wings, watch the Weather Channel - it feels like the first time. And I'm realising now that a major part of the reason why is because it connected me to him, the brother I lost 30 years ago, and appear to be losing all over again, for the last time. 

I'm going over there next month, visiting LA, driving through the desert, stopping off at Disneyland... but this time I think it'll feel different. 

Paul