I’ve pretty much taken a hiatus from performing, from writing, from everything but being aggravated I am not wealthy enough to get all Johnny Paycheck on the universe. Partially, it’s been the joy of simply not worrying and spending my time doing shit like riding waves late into the day. A few things got me thinking about a winter writing regimen, though.

A big part is death, you know that mortality thing. I recently had a long rambling conversation with someone who lost a baby and then couldn’t and didn’t ever try again. One of those kind of profound life moments from which you never quite recover, maybe aren’t meant to, yet everything moves forward. Life goes on and all that.

Meanwhile, I shared the litany of tragedy from my own family growing up. From my point of you, it wasn’t my father’s death that broke the little place that deaths leave you, it was my little cousin, Tommy. Forever, that’s an experience I will hold, and a person I will miss, and it’s a story that just hurts. No Hollywood ending.

Where my father is abstract. His death surrounded me later in the form of other people’s grief that I was slow to comprehend, but I didn’t feel it (relatively speaking, as I’m not a total psychopath).

And, then there is Pat. An adult death, the one that I think passed me into another level of adulthood. It helped me understand my grandfather’s death when I was in high school and how my mother dealt with that. No more parents, no more turning back to a place where someone solely relates to you as their child.

My dining companion made an interesting point. According to her, old Sigmund Freud said that every death is the first one. The grief is based on that original episode. It has me wondering if my obsession with all of the above, my tendency to dwell on and review and think about and try to honestly (I hope) face what changes folks go through all sources back to all the things I never understood in 1968. Of course, that does make me mentally stuck at 4 years old, very believable if you ever see me at a toy store.

I do tend to divide friends into two camps — Those who have lost someone and those who haven’t. Like losing your virginity (or better way after when you figure out how to make the parts fit more enjoyably), it’s a secret fraternity of people who have know something. From that perspective it was a good dinner conversation.

But, all of the above is stupid navel-gazing, I know. That was prelude to a few thoughts maybe coalescing.

Another gelling agent to my blob thoughts was this interview with Ruth Reichi, who’s just written a memoir about her mother. Her mother kindly left behind a box of journals and letters unraveling some of their shared past and her mother’s own. Pat was not so generous.

Finally, there was a conversation with my sort of mentor, who’s also a psychiatrist, because I like to pick influences that are more challenging than the Sunday New York Times crossword. After a long heart to heart over lunch (all of my deep conversations involve meals), he asked why I feel the need to write, and he told me that it was OK to consider that maybe it’s not meant to be. I took it to heart, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Consequently, i haven’t wanted to write.

I haven’t figured everything out yet. At all. Maybe I never will. I think there’s a chance that I will never be able to set my laziness clock up against my inspirational one and get the balance just right. I admire people I know with that eternal fire that pushes them forward, pushes them to finish things, to market themselves as writers and performers. I long to be that person, but often, my path is too internal to blaze one like I should. And, sometimes, there are just too many things I find interesting (right now boogie boarding chief among them) to blind myself in singular pursuit.

However, I have to conclude the psychiatrist is wrong or wasn’t really in my moment as much as his own. For him, writing has largely been in conjunction with his academic career. Work not love. Moreover, in retirement now, he had a difficult time plowing through a not completely academic book, which he ultimately decided it would be easier to get published through an academic press than jump through all of the challenges to make it more general, mainstream and commercial. Despite having a daughter who’s a working artist and a writing wife, I don’t think he entirely understands that kind of impetus.

Irony of irony, he’s now working on a memoir. Even if it never sees the light of publishing day, he wants to leave something behind of his life for his family.

OK, back from the navel gazing. What ties all of this gibberish together?

My writing, Ruth Reichi’s mom, my mentor’s writings, death? What’s all in it for me? The shred of a plan. The edge or kernel of a thought.

I want to be able to explain myself. But, moreso, I think, I want other people to appreciate Pat, because she deserves it. I also want other people to appreciate whatever their version of Pat is. The flawed by good influence in their own lives. I hope some day or in some manner my words can maybe make someone else laugh or think. Actually, I would take my words causing any kind of action, even loss of bowel control. Who wouldn’t want that?

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