Getting started again…

Usually after I take breaks from writing this blog, I start out with words like: I haven’t been doing this in a while. And I guess that the fact is that it has been a couple of years since I have done this- so, I guess I should start by saying, it has been a long time since I have done this so please, bear with me.

At the moment, it is about a quarter after four in the morning and I am sitting in the Internet/computer room on the 8th floor of the Metropolitan Jewish Geriatric Rehabilitation Center in Brooklyn, New York. How I got here is kind of a long winded story but basically, if you read the blurb that I put out a couple of day ago, I have had the fortune or misfortune to have lost a leg and I am in the process of recovery. This rehab facility has been a very, very difficult place for me to be for a number of reasons, mostly because I am not really used to not being an independent person. Now, if we wish to address this point and say something like, “How do you intend to be an independent person when you are hobbling around on one leg, a pair of crutches or a wheelchair (I am in the process of getting a prosthetic)?”, my answer would be that I am not talking about my ability to go through closed doors or up and down stairs or even to peacefully head out for a little walk if I had the disposition to do so. It is more along the lines of how the facility I am staying at interferes with my sense of independence (rather than build it back up, which one might imagine would be the point of such a place) and how angry I am at fascists, sadists and lazy idiots actually having the ability to make policy in my life and this is the main reason (well, this and how they go about managing the other residents/inmates) why I find this place so disagreeable.

And I guess this is one of the main reasons I am using this point as a fulcrum to get me back into blogging. I am not really sure that I want or can sustain a long blogging session, but on the other hand, I need to get started in doing something. This also has to do with re-establishing independence and, as a great part of my independence has always been the ability to think through multifaceted problems, well, this is why I am here and typing away at four in the morning. And really, the illness that came along with or led me to this place, was also very hard on my consciousness. For weeks I have been noticing that it is very hard not only to get around physically, but also to get around mentally and especially getting around in writing. I have tried several times to put together workable essays only to find that my energy only allowed for a few hundred words- and almost no cohesiveness- before I would get tired.

So as the brain is, just as with arms and legs, dependant on usage in order to stay fit, so I have been thinking of using the blog as an instrument to get re-organized and eventually, as a warm up for some projects I had been hoping to do for a long time. My current situation also belongs in here because of how much they piss me off. And of course as always, I’d like to speak about Belarus (Polish corruption by now a universal given) and Belarus/ American relations. All of these subjects are kind of complex to deal with and though I sort of have it in mind already what I want to do and say, because all of these subjects have many facets to them and none of them seem to have the ability to be said concretely in a sentence or two, I am going to try and work it out here.

So this is what it is about here in late June, 2010. I don’t know how long this is going to take or how many words I am going to have to type to make have all of this make sense, but this is my idea for restarting this blog this time around. I guess we can let this be an introduction, or perhaps, a reintroduction and let’s just see how it goes.

As always, thanks for reading me,

More soon…