“He’s only mostly dead.”

– Billy Crystal, The Princess Bride

I wasn’t sure whether to go with the above or the famous Mark Twain line about “reports of my death [being] greatly exaggerated.”

Suffice it to say, I am presently undeceased – although February seemed to be keen on testing that proposition. The past month has been what an old friend used to call a ‘Mongolian Clusterfuck.’ Apparently, that is an actual term of art not of her coining. I looked it up on the interweb. While its provenance is murky, it is generally understood to mean ‘a clusterfuck – only even clusterfuckier.’

February fit the definition.

It was a fairly disastrous month primarily consumed with a single issue that I have been wrestling with for quite some time. Months. Six of them. Eight.

The issue isn’t one I’ve talked about – I haven’t wanted to – but now need to for a variety of reasons. High among them: doing so will put this thing of ours here back where it belongs. I have had five major things to wrestle with since mid-2024. Four were resurfacings of the residual after-effects of past ‘worsts’… traumas, losses, hardships. The fifth was a present issue running beneath the other four – with shades of each all at once.

It is the fifth that I haven’t talked about. To be very honest, I don’t want to now either. It is loaded with emotional weight; is nearly impossible to navigate; and comes with an impossible tangle of competing considerations.

I’ve lost nearly all of the past month trying to navigate it. It had been eating me alive for months. In February, it swallowed me whole. It started as a minnow; grew into a whale; and then knocked this poor Jonah from his ark. It has been the most dickish of Moby’s.

Thankfully… mercifully… I seem to have crawled out of the belly of the beast a little beaten up and beleaguered but nonetheless happy to have exited through the front door intact rather than through the back door in pieces among the fish bones.

I’ve spent the month trying to write about it without success after having spent the prior five months not writing about it without success. I’ve been caught in a discomfiting No Man’s Land where either of the two states came with significant pain and no potential route out was without risk of making it far worse. It has been a little frog-in-pot. Even as it neared a boil, jumping from the pot seemed likely to land me in the fire.

It has sucked. It has hurt. It has cost me in a wide variety of ways. It is the primary reason why I have subjected you good people to a maddening Whack-a-Mole these past six months where I would pop up here confident I was ‘back’ only to disappear again.

I am in a place where it is time to broach the subject, however fraught that might be for me.

I need to open up about it, let you in, and let us get back to what we very much should be doing in this right and goodly place: meeting for our noisy dinners… gathering around this long table to be human and present as a community of kindred souls of greater match than the flatware.

I am putting the finishing touches on a piece about the issue that I have been withholding in my little hour of suffering in the dark. I aim to have it up by Wednesday at the latest. It requires some external review before posting, thus my lack of absolute certainty on its publication date. It will be best read in one go, but will likely be split across multiple posts for length and ease of digital readability. Since it is a single body in terms of narrative and content – and really needs to be consumed as a whole – its pieces will all be posted consecutively. I know that is a little imperfect. There is no better answer when it comes to delivery via Substack though… I apologize in advance for the serial messages in people’s inboxes.

In the meantime, I will be posting a piece within the hour on a totally unrelated topic. It’s one I had drafted before I got roundhoused in the head by the fickle footwork of a vengeful February.

If nothing else, it is a rather compelling demonstration of the fact that I am sappier than a winter maple and prone to getting all in my feelings about everything from the dog days of summer to someone else’s cat…

…the latter of which happens to be the topic of the piece up within the hour.

Sigh… it has been a grinding stretch. We’re back to on the same page with the publication of my coming piece… and then we turn the page and roll on.

As always, thank you for being here.

“Nelson, the Gentle Best of the Citizen Six” up within the hour.

“The Elephant not in the Room” to follow within the next couple days.