Endings

This is the 365th day of this blog's tender life.

One year old. This is the 470th post, containing nearly 300,000 words, and I don't know how many images.

I've gotten a few dozen comments, a few emails, a phone call or two. I've made one extraordinarily good new friend.

But I've never reread what lives here, freely and digitally, courtesy of Google. That enormous company owns this space. The ads on this site come via Google, and are loaded automatically via keywords that the search engine's crawler recognizes on my site.

Thus, you will find many ads for Katrina relief, relationship advice, parenting, and sports, plus geographically sensitive ads for Biloxi, New York City, San Francisco, and Tokyo.

To underline this point, I do not have any direct control over the ads that appear, but I do get paid a tiny amount of money when a visitor chooses to check out one of my sponsors.

Sometimes, ads appear expressing choices I would never advocate. Today, I noticed an ad for a service about how to "discreetly" date married people. Close readers of my blog will know I don't believe that relationships based on secrecy have any hope of coming to any but a bad end.

I wouldn't do it. But, ads are like free speech. I'd be a hypocrite to denounce them. And I am grateful for even a modest opportunity to earn some pocket money.

***

Today, I again experienced waves of self-awareness, and the experience was not a positive one. By mid-day I was in a serious revisionist mode about my life. Today, a year after the breakup that precipitated this blog, I reviewed everything I know about myself and pronounced myself a Big Idiot.

My ever-vigilant oldest daughter caught me in the act, so I removed that label from my ever-beckoning green dot, since negative comments about oneself apparently are a sign of psychologically unhealthy behavior.

(And here I always thought it was humor!)

***

What I have come to appreciate this past, painful year, is the importance of knowing how to let those you love go. That is the true definition of love, we are told. Not the clutching close, holding on for dear life.

I've made so many egregious mistakes, seeking love. It's worth saying it out loud -- in all of the wrong places. So many brush-offs, so many rejections.

Tonight looking at my hands, all I see are the advancing wrinkles, the blotches, and the unattractive lines of age. Do my hands even know what to do anymore?

I feel ancient. I feel like a big idiot. Every time I've reached out, once things follow their natural course, it's turned into a disaster.

All of a sudden, I see what an isolated, lonely old man I am fated to become. It's as if the world has its own relentless plan for each of us, and my path appears to have been set.

Then again, other signals emerge through this fog of my own making. My dear 12-year-old called me tonight to say goodnight. It is the first time in weeks he's done that; maybe he had an intuitive flash, he sort of said that. Yesterday, in Oracle Arena (corporate names suck) I was surprised that he held my hand for a while, though he did let it go when he saw people approaching. He tried to link arms, and the to awkwardly throw his arm over my shoulder. Though he is growing rapidly, that doesn't yet work, so I put my arm around him instead.

What an amazing boy! Entering puberty and still able to express physical closeness to his dad! His call tonight pulled me out of where this post was doing -- down the hole of self-pity and despair.

Instead, I have taken a deep breath. I need to remember that those who reject me often are only following their own trajectories, life journeys created by others who've hurt them in the past, not me. As I try, in my own strange way, to forge connections, especially with women, things often explode in my face.

I was feeling the shrapnel earlier, but now, thanks to my son, I feel serenity. I'm not going to be here long enough to matter to anyone other than those who truly love me. So I'll let the critics go, and embrace my closest people, the family and friends who catch me when I start straying (which is all too often.)

I have stories to write. I'm not sure this blog is the right place to write them.

I have long contemplated ending this blog on this date, even as I slide a ring off my finger. After all, as I said, I have learned how to let go, maybe too well. It's over -- everything that initiated this blog is done now. Perhaps the most graceful thing would be to quietly exit this scene, and continue my musings elsewhere, under a different identity, with a new voice, masking my identity so I can explore less constrained literary forms.

Before deciding the fate of hotweir.blogspot.com, I owe it to you, dear readers, to solicit your opinion. Shall this cease? Please add a comment below, and sign in only as "anonymous." I don't want to know who says what. But if anyone wants me to continue, I promise that I will.

Otherwise, it's been a good ride.


-30-