Fetch me my horse.

I have no excuse.

Actually, no, that's not at all true. I have several excellent excuses for why I've blogged only once in the last five months, and I'm surprised to say that none of them are "No news here, move along." But most of those excuses boil down to the fact that finding a way to fit my life's happenings into coherent, non-despairing little boxes with tidy little literary arcs has moved way, way down on my priority list.

I think this has been a mistake.

The past several months have held a lot of ups and downs for me, the downs often traveling in packs, and I didn't feel much like putting a "Let Me Get This Straight" spin on most of it. Lack of time, lack of inspiration, lack of energy—whatever the reason, I could not find the blog posts in me. Looking back, I wonder if I shouldn't have tried a little harder. Reading over some old posts helped me remember that my particular brand of blogging is sometimes also my particular brand of coping; it's my way of taking my life and breaking it down, looking at it, laughing at it, and rubbing a little shine back into it with my shirtsleeve. It helps me sort out my cobwebs.

Luckily for me, I have a good back-up system for those cobwebs when I forget that tool. I have friends and family that refuse to let me feel stranded. I am so proud to have KB and Lisa, who keep me sane every single day. I have my brilliant Kate, who is the most spectacularly funny lawyer I know. (“I’m the only lawyer you know.”) I have my best friend, Christine, forever (thank God). My sister, who I want to be when I grow up, still. My hilarious brother-in-law. My giftedly intelligent father. And my mother—my incomparable mother.

The band is playing me off the stage, but my point here is that there are a lot of people (more, even, than those listed) who keep me going every day of every week of every month. This fabulousness doesn’t just happen all by itself. Because of that, it has been relatively easy for me to forget Let Me Get This Straight and focus on “more important” things. It’s easy to forget that LMGTS is actually pretty important to me, therapeutically and artistically, and that I am doing myself a disservice by not giving it the attention it deserves.

So. I should get back on the horse.

I’m going to try to get back to a regular blogging routine. Don’t get your hopes up for daily blogs or anything (they’re cobwebs, not cotton fields), but I’d like the posts to come more often than quarterly. If you see that they’re not, be a dear and bug the hell out of me, would you?

A lot’s happened. I got a new couch. Both of my parents seem to have exhausted the manufacturer’s warranties on their bodies: they developed their own respective cancers at the same time, have undergone six surgeries in three months between the two of them, and have either broken, damaged, or herniated essentially every part of themselves. I’ve done a lot of nursing. I got a new coffee table. I dressed like a punk for Halloween and lived the secret dream of every insurance person I work with. TiVo is my new best friend. (Sorry, Christine.) Two of my very closest friends have called “dibs” on significant others. My sister met the (surprisingly stealthy) business end of a When Christmas Trees Attack! episode. Citizens are toppling statues of the VenJetta in the streets as I shop for a new car. I got a new bed. My family was stalked by a wild turkey on New Year’s Eve in the middle of the suburbs. Izzy is growing up, and yet somehow not growing up at all, the holy terror.

So, I have no shortage of things to talk about. Make sure I do that, m’kay?