Why I Keep An ‘Unblog’

On 2025021620250216 By Beleaguered ServantIn Personal Essays12 Comments

When you care about people, and when you pick up everything they are feeling, even if they’re concealing it, then days surrounded by them are exhausting. Most days, I feel like a musician with a finely tuned ear who has been placed in an echo chamber; some days it almost drives me mad.

From my earliest memories, I was attuned to other people’s emotions; I could always tell who was sad, or angry, even when it wasn’t apparent to anyone else. It’s like I have an antenna that’s only tuned to the emotional frequency; and the music is always playing, and loudly, when I’m around people, like a station I can’t shut off.

People mistake my introversion for people aversion, but that’s not it at all — I love people, they just wear me out. I’ve always been terrible at “small talk” for the same reason: I often feel people are concealing what they’d really like to talk about, and when I say so, they usually tell me what’s really on their mind. I’m glad to do it – I was born to do it – but I can only do it for so long before I need rest.

I have developed virtually every solitary hobby known to man (I read; I play a musical instrument; I write music; I play video games; I go on long drives by myself, and so on, ad infinitum); I studied mathematics and became an actuary as the least emotional occupation I could find; I studied philosophy in an attempt, like the ancient stoics, to pass beyond emotion. Not surprisingly, none of that has worked to in any way change the basic problem, which is: being around people wears me down.

Even though I work as an actuary, I am in a position that requires me to lead and interact with people. I can do it, but I look forward to any spare moments I can siphon off the excess of emotions that dealing with people all day gives me. Which is where we arrive at this blog.

Most of what I write about concerns other people’s feelings: at one time, that was the tag line of one of my now defunct blogs. It may seem to defeat the purpose of a blog if it is not personal, but that is my personality: I am a magnet for other people’s emotions. I can’t explain it, but I know it to be true.

The best blogs I know are all blazing with the lives and emotions of their remarkable authors. It’s hard for me to write about my own life, because my own particular emotions and circumstances are just one among many in my head. I wish I could write a ‘purer’ blog, which was about my life and my feelings only, but that’s not the instrument I was given to play. I will continue to write about every thing I feel, even if most of it is second-hand, and even if it results in my maintaining what is more-or-less an “unblog”.

I appreciate all of you who read my (un)blog, and take time to hit “like” or leave comments. I am more grateful to you than I can say.

—- Owen

Are We Back Here Again?

On 2022031620220316 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original PoemsLeave a comment

Troubles come in new and changing ways, but
Character defects are forever.
I can always count on mine to provide
Endless variations of heartache arranged around
The same themes.

From the outside, of course, other people's faults are
Easily fixable: we should just quit doing
The same dumb stuff over and over.
But we don't quit doing these things, or at least,
I don't. 

There's nothing quite so alarming
As realizing the degree to which
Habit rule ones life:
We shake our fists at would-be external overlords,
While the ones within us
Move us around like marionettes.

But in our occasional wakeful moments, we ask
'Are we back here again?'
And can, at least maybe,
Erode the power of our proclivities
Through the cleansing power of
Laughing at our own foolishness.

tomorrow’s seduction

On 2021042120210421 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original PoemsLeave a comment

tomorrow’s seduction comes like this:
we wonder what’s behind the glass,
and climb to find a place within,
then hide our face so we can pass

as someone that we’ve never been —
it isn’t right. but is it wrong
to give up and give in when we
would give it all to just

belong?

Weatherbeaten

On 2020122620201221 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original PoemsLeave a comment

The wind and rain have seasons
 where they will work their ways;
They wear us down, eventually,
 But it is no disgrace

To live the years, and show the years,
 for as time goes, we follow --
And there's a peace that comes at last,
 when we are still

 and hollow

A Spacious Vanity

On 2019092120190921 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original PoemsLeave a comment

To be vain
In vain’s
In my veins.
Nonetheless

I show my
Spacious vanity
And hope there
To impress

But why —
I cannot tell you why,
It is both
Fact and shame,

For though some bathrooms
Glow and shine,
They all still

Smell the same

I Talk Too Much

On 2019091520190915 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original PoemsLeave a comment

I talk too much, I always have,
Much to my family’s misery;
The rare days that I’m quiet are
When they can see the best of me

And so I took up blogging — writers
Are forgiven monologues —
To write of common things, and see
The glory in the underdogs

And yet, I have a real life, too,
With work and bills and banks and such,
And a long-suffering wife who knows
Just like my dad, I talk too much

Aging

On 2019062620190626 By Beleaguered ServantIn Original PoemsLeave a comment

I do not seek the music of violence,
For I know only too well that
The world will bring it to me, anyway,
And too soon.

For so long, my eyes have been unclear;
For so many years, have I strained to see —
This is the dim mirror of my regret,
These are once new tools grown useless.

Somewhere, hidden from light and sound,
A boy sits, fresh-faced, expectant:
He calls to me as from a distant room,
He bids me to bring him his promised life.

These are not negative thoughts:
This is the way Reality smells,
Like too familiar fabric, well used,
Where rain and stain are just events, not

Misfortunes