209.0: Yeah, yeah.

Dear Linc,

Breaking the fourth wall.

I haven’t posted a never-to-be-sent about you in four days. On Monday, I called out of work. I woke up that morning after I spent the second half of that prior Sunday sneezing up a storm; now, with all that sneezing, you may think I just had bad allergies. It could not possibly be the flu, since I got a flu shot a few weeks ago. In fact, it wasn’t the flu — or what I am used to in terms of flu-like symptoms. But I had a little bit of a temperature, and I felt sluggish. Was it the flu? I have read that you can still get the flu even when you get the shot.

Whatever it was, I was not feeling 100 percent on Monday, and I spent that day mostly in bed, waking up during erratic bouts of consciousness to reach for my phone for at times I couldn’t even make it to my computer. I spent all day reading articles of varying subject matter from science news to soap opera gossip, and also posting a lot of that shit to my blog. Sometimes I was moved by an article so much that I tapped out commentary on the accompanying blog post, an act which took up enough energy to send me back into a nap.

Save for a minor sore throat, I feel much better but I have now fallen into what is hopefully a brief habit of re-blogging interesting posts without actually blogging much in the way of original content. This is kind of ironic because I had recently modified my LinkedIn profile to include the word “curation” in the description of Baseball 2.0, by which I mean that my blog, in addition to being observations about life written in the format of letters to you, also includes re-blogged content that is distinct only because I take so much time before I actually re-blog it. There are many blogs that exist solely to fulfill the impulse of the blogger with an itchy mouse finger. With the exception of this week, I try not to fill up Baseball 2.0 with a lot of re-blogged content — and, yes, you read right: Baseball 2.0 is in my LinkedIn profile. There is a small but passionate movement by writers, publishers, and agents to have more of a presence on the professional social network dominated by “traditional” pros like financiers and programmers, etc. OK, so I am not a “pro” in the sense that I have anything published. Yeah, yeah.

I may end up doing more re-blogs for the remainder of the week and what is left of the year. (Let’s not talk about this apocalypse nonsense.) For a while it will be busy, Linc: Pop and Ma are coming into town for Christmas. They will leave just before the New Year, but just a few hours after they leave one of my buddies from elementary school will fly into town. Between all of that is my existing work schedule. Baseball 2.0 will unfortunately be a distant thought, which is just as well, because the effort of juggling the demands of an interior world with the realities of physical existence is quite frankly like training without end for a marathon with no finish line. If you want to get in touch with me, at least for a short while after I post this never-to-be-sent, then you will just have to… get in touch with me.

Joe

PS: I need a date for New Year’s Eve. He’s bringing his girlfriend. I will be the third wheel, which is mostly my fault. I could have done a better job at this speed dating thing I went to the other week… oh, am I ending this with a cliffhanger? I am.