haruspex

I'm off to Boston tomorrow on a plane from PDX for annual Baconfest, a long-running MLK weekend party put on by an E2 buddy. From Boston I'll join a car with a buddy to Northeast Kingdom Vermont, off to the frozen cold to consume mass amounts of bacon, various flavors and kinds of alcohol, play games, and discuss all kinds of nonsense in the half-frozen smoking lodge in the garage attic library.

Great, multi-generational nerd family reunion, family entirely chosen on my part. JB, the hosting E2 buddy is part of a tiny IRC cabal I've been part of for a good decade now, and the regular gathering (save an errant, non-practicing Swede who refuses to deal with US border controls) is this party.

There used to be flamethrowers: we'll see if there are this year. For my part, I'm bringing half a case of fancier spirits for the cocktail bar.

The latest call out on the listserv is for bread knives. We'll see if this is the year of twenty incoming bread knives by the Baconfest folks.

Onwards, to the suitcase packing, and then to Vermont!

During the years of my time spent in the NOC, I wrote feverishly. Part of it was isolation: I spent my time on night shift waiting for the pager to go off, which meant that the sometimes long, tense in-between times needed filling. As the only person awake watching twenty buildings for twelve hours at a time, I needed caffeine to keep me awake, and a habit to fill my time.

I've always been a prolific reader and writer: at twelve I was already online, chasing plotlines in play-by-email games and reading as much fanfiction as I could get my hands on. But on the night shift, I regularly consumed the equivalent of two twenty-four packs of Mountain Dew a night in Penguin Mints. Possessed by a twitchy, blinding need to do something I produced a whole lot of cut-rate fairy tales and fantasy.

When I went west, my writing slowly dropped off as I cut back on the caffeine dose. I stopped having as many anxiety attacks, and I stopped needing the outlet as much.

Some time after that, I picked up technical writing, which turns out to have been the nail in the coffin for any aspirations towards publishing short stories. While I've produced some fiction since I left that career, it's nowhere near the visceral level of satisfaction or output from before.

This is not uncommon. Steve Brust is said to have struggled coming back from heart surgery. Those undergoing treatment for mood disorders struggle when put on meds for the first time. Over Christmas, a fellow fanbrat told me about her father, who stopped smoking only to discover that he needed to light something on fire before he could even begin to tap out the merest introduction.

But I am a writer: a writer writes. And, as one of the editors in attendance at Christmas told me: "you can learn to write again".

So, having had a very sharp, very thin blade, and a way of writing that I used for 20-odd years, I find myself with a broad, ill-formed blade with notches knocked out of it and no handle.

This is not an excuse. This is instead a new year's commitment to myself: write what I can. Write what I like. Write what I see and think. Sharpen the blade until it's once more a usable thing.

Eight years have gone by. When I left Minnesota in 2007, my entire life had fallen apart. I was 20 and broken-hearted, with RSI-ridden wrists, poor social skills, and what I didn't recognize as a case of major depression and anxiety.

Sometime in 2009, I began going to therapy and unraveling my head and the trauma leftover from a narcissistic mother, a violent brother, and my own seclusion throughout middle school. I learned to stop trying to take on the weight of my surrounding world. I learned how to work in data centers. From Virginia, I began to move and move again, moving first to Washington State, traveling to Brazil from there, moving to the San Francisco Bay Area for a few months, living in Portland for years, and now, returning to near an ancestral root in Boston.

Here in the fall light, I've gone to Burning Man three times. I operate a camp that talks about existential risk and tarot. I'm an administrator on Everything2, where most of my writing lives on under the nom de plume of Auspice. For work, I now orchestrate teams across the world in building, operating, and improving the Internet.

In the morning, I open the windows, and the sea breeze comes in, and I can scarcely remember what it was like to be twenty years old and afraid of the entire world.