A partial return

For those few of you that read this blog: no, I haven't died. (You probably figured that out, since the few that do visit here actually know me.) I haven't been much in the mood to write on this thing, however. I went through a fairly difficult melancholic stretch a few weeks back, which I still feel like I'm recovering from. Just your garden variety existential angst, nothing to be overly concerned about. I was in a bit of a reading slump too - still am, sort of, although I'm on the cusp of finishing Richard Ford's Independence Day, his 1995 follow-up to The Sportswriter, both of which are narrated by the protagonist Frank Bascombe. These novels, The Sportswriter in particular, have been eerily prescient in terms of shadowing my current mood and state of mind. At times, I feel a little like Frank: self reflective, mostly happy, but also seemingly in search of something - a connection, a sense of fulfillment, all the while knowing that it's not necessarily attainable. But yet we continue to search.