What's going on with me?

I seem to be regularly missing or skimming over the Friday Hometown Shootout and the Monday Poetry Jam -- and since I wasn't blogging a lot in between...

Worse, I am following the people I regularly follow with less regularity.  (A bit of a tongue twister, that).

What's going on with me?  I'm sure people are anxious to know.   I haven't a clue why I assume that.  I  know that we all develop relationships and friendships and intimacies on blogspot.  We celebrate births, holidays, new jobs, vacations together.  We share the pain of illnesses, deaths (I still miss Barry), lost jobs, and simple funks together.   But we don't take attendance.  If someone drops off the map, somewhere along the line we will notice it and wonder.  But when I read a blog that starts off "I'm glad to be back blogging again after my long absence," I'm always glad to see that person back but usually I admit with a little shame that I hadn't realized they had been missing. 

Maybe the person who is anxious to know what is going on with me is actually me.

Since May when I retired, I've reveled in having long leisurely mornings to read blogs, write blogs, fiddle with photography, watch the sturm und drang of Wall Street unfolding in lines on a blue screen...but lately it has begun to seem, oddly, like work.  

The unthinkable (at least to me) has begun to happen.  I sometimes find myself hurrying to get the  computer stuff out of the way so I can go outside and do yardwork.  People who know me would find that statement to be completely absurd since, for decades, it has been the reverse. 

I find myself wondering, what next. 

Some of the answers are being given to me by the Universe itself, which I choose to call God.  We have a new granddaughter, Kay, who is still in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit but doing well and due home in a month.  Brian and Melody are making plans to buy a trailer about 45 miles from here and move out.  Karen and I are now thinking of downsizing and buying a smaller house closer to where the kids and grandkids are moving. 

And despite the fact that I have been trying desperately to dig in my heels and avoid it, there is an idea I've had for a long long time for a novel that is forcing me (like constipation) to write it.   While I continue to refuse to commit myself to actually finishing it, I can't help thinking about it when I go to sleep and writing on it for a few hours every morning during my usual blog time.  

Even weirder, the novel is not a collection of humorous essays but a kind of combination murder mystery and Stephen King-like horror thriller.  Weird because I hate horror movies and will not watch them.   

And Butler and Bagman seem to be on vacation.   Or at least they don't seem quite as real to me these days as Sandy O'Neal, a 16-year-old girl who has discovered that, through some quirk of Wi-Fi frequency, the dead have been establishing a presence on Facebook. 

Hmmm.

Anyhow, I will check in from time to time but maybe not quite so often.

BAGMAN:  "Yeah.  Right.  You know, Mark, that every time you write a blog that explains why you won't be around, you then enter a phase where you blog more than ever!"

"Where'd you come from?  I thought you were on vacation?"

BAGMAN: "Forgot my bag and had to come back to grab it.  See you later.  Have fun with Sandy.  Just don't forget that her father is the police chief."