Something funny happens when you are working two jobs while raising a family with a wife who is also working two jobs: you forget things. Well, that's not completely true. I forget things pretty regularly under the most benign of circumstances, so now I just forget even the most basic of things.
I forget what day it is -- which is, in itself, a real feat to pull off, considering there are times during the day when I literally have five separate devices on my person that have screens that plainly show the date: two laptops, a tablet, a smartphone and a smartwatch. But I don't just forget the date; I also forget that all of those devices show it to me. I forget how to find out the date.
I forget when I don't have meetings. I'm a creature of habit, and on weekdays I have a standing 11:00 a.m. meeting. Except on Wednesdays, that is. We take that day off. Yet I faithfully show up for that meeting about half the time. The only solace I find in that fact is I'm usually not the only one who forgets. I'm just the only one who forgets almost every single week.
Christina will readily tell you how forgetful I am. To be honest, I deserve her being so candid about it with people. Heck, I deserve her being even more blunt about it than she is. She's actually remarkably patient about it.
But the worst may have happened recently: I actually thought to myself that I should start a new personal blog and commit to writing in it more.
I forgot I already had a personal blog.
True, I haven't written here in almost seven months. The severe time and sleep drought in my household is solely and completely responsible for that. Neither of us sleep much anymore. Even when we are in bed, we rarely sleep, thanks to one or both of the two tiny pair of feet that don't start the night there, but usually end it there, repeatedly kicking us in the kidneys and other tender places.
Aside: how can a kid who is 33 inches tall take up two thirds of a queen-size bed? Most mattresses eventually begin to sag in the middle; ours probably is starting to slope down on the outermost edges of each side, because that's where Christina and I each sleep most nights.
There's really very little point to what I am writing here tonight. To be completely honest, the reason I'm writing about this, here, is because my brain hurts too much to figure out what to write about the Steelers, Christmas, Christianity or any of the other myriad subjects I write about. I have been writing a book that's been stuck around 30 pages in length for most of a year because I rarely get time to work on it, and when I do, my brain is too fried to get very far. If I had a weekend to do nothing but sit and write, I could probably finish the thing in that 48-hour stretch, provided I have a comfortable bed to sleep in and no access to Netflix or YouTube.
Writing a lot can burn out the writing itch, too. I crank out 4,000 to 6,000 words per week just covering the Steelers, not to mention several hours researching and watching game film from every imaginable angle. I used to loathe the end of the football season; now, I see the Super Bowl as the harbinger of a small, mental vacation.
So, here I sit, lamenting my inability to come up with an angle for the biggest Steelers game in the last six years, because my head hurts, my brain is down for maintenance and all I want to do is sleep.
I also forgot why I started writing this.
