Thursday, June 10, 2021

End (終)

I disappeared. I am still here, here being Japan. But I disappeared from the blogosphere. There were/are reasons, I suppose: literary laryngitis (aka burnout), the pandemic, the end of the line, retreat (not to mention the crappy new Blogger interface). This post is not a restart. 

Newness yields to routine over time. Those early days in Japan, like being born again. A childlike rush into the world. What’s this? What’s that? なに それ. Being a baby is not a permanent state. The years go by, you grow up: you crawl, you walk, you run. You can’t write about dining disasters and laundromat riddles when you’re seven years old. It's not cute.

From the beginning I chose to write about only positive experiences. Assuming there was an audience for my writing, I guessed people didn’t want to read about my bitter experiences at the Immigration Bureau of Japan, my humiliations teaching…er, trying to teach English to 3 and 4-year-olds, etc., etc. The COVID-19 pandemic rolled in like an obnoxious relative that doesn’t know when to leave. This was (and still is) a massive life killer, literally and figuratively. There was nothing to write about because I wasn’t doing anything. I refused to give this fucking bug space in my blog. Corona virus was/is the greatest villain of our time. It spread not only through the population of every country on the planet, but across all media. I saw no point at all in writing about COVID-19. There was nothing to say. A big negative. 

I am a product of the 20th Century. I never really made the transition from 1999 to 2000. Even as I compose this piece of writing on my computer and post it into cyberspace, I am positively an analogue-ist. I’m not part of the narcissistic look-at-me culture of the 21st Century. I am more interested in disappearing than being noticed. I don’t want to be found or followed or liked or viewed or trending. I’m as famous as I ever want to be, which is to say, not famous at all. I’ve become more private. My experiences are mine, for me. At some point I decided I didn’t want to share these anymore. Post: Today I did this. Selfish? Perhaps. But whose blog is this anyway? 

You’ve got to know when to say when, na? You’ve got to see the end of something, and understand it, embrace it. It’s not sad. Because the end of one thing is the beginning of something else. And there will be something new…at some point, somewhere. Keep your eyes and ears open. 

Thanks for the support over the last 7 years. 

 また あいましょう 

Ciao, 
Robert

Note: this blog and all the old posts will remain here as long as Blogger (i.e. Google) continues to host it.



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