I’ve been struggling to maintain that routine I wrote about in January.
Routines are difficult. And they’re even more difficult when a person has to reckon with attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder. I don’t really know if I have ADHD, but when I was younger, I remember my doctor telling my I did have the predecessor, ADD. It’s more or less the same thing, but without the hyperactivity qualifier.
Regardless, I don’t do routines well for, well, that aside above really nails down how fast I can switch tracks.
“Oh, I guess, I’m just gonna do this now.”
It’s likely why I’ve struggled to find a job that interests me, and it’s likely why I struggle to “fucking get on it” with the blog. Writing takes a lot. It drains energy. And it drains more energy than it used to because I have less of a battery than I used to. Maybe they told me this about turning 30. Maybe I noted it. But now I feel it.
And I feel it extremely hard when I try to write a Casual Ramble. To be fair, my posting schedule has been nothing if not casual. Much to a degree that I almost wonder if I’m being too presumptuous in having a Patreon. But I have to remind myself: my Patreon is a challenge.
It’s a challenge to myself that I can be more regular. And it’s a challenge to the idea that just because a ramble is casual, doesn’t mean it can’t be regular. This all come came to me during my run yesterday in a thought. It’s the first time I had run in two weeks after tweaking my knee, and as I came around a switchback in Washington Park, the thought just appeared: “I don’t need to do these three-thousand word mini-manifestos anymore.”
And that’s where this weirdly semi-diagnosed attention-deficit disorder no longer becomes a curse. I have so many thoughts that just come and go like boats in a harbor. And I watch them go, while sitting on the dock in the bay, but I never just… write them down.
It’s no wonder I’m frustrated.
Instead, I can just write a small thing. A five-hundred word thing. And those can be every day things. They can be blogs. And I can wax on them with ease. Seriously: this only took thirty-minutes to write as opposed to the ridiculous three-day oddysseys I undertake and then never publish. Many thanks to the Zombies for that wordplay.
So that’s what I’m gonna do: I’m setting a 500 word limit. It’ll revolve around a particular thought. And I’m going to challenge myself to do it every weekday.
A part of me thought about jotting down five of these kinds of posts first, scheduling them and then taking a screen shot for this post. But then I realized how unnecessary that is; I plan five-steps ahead and, after all that planning, I forget to do step one.
No more.
And with that, I’m hitting the word count.
Post Script: speaking of 3000 word odysseys. I have been working on two story ideas. I actually have a chapter finished for one story, but want to follow it up with some more and let that marinate. Otherwise, I have a short story about the Blazers that I’ll be publishing next month. It’s happening guys, and you’ll be able to access it via the password from my Patreon. I can’t wait to share it.
The Casual Ramble 