It’s five minutes after my publishing deadline. I just abandoned the blog post I spent the whole day handcrafting as completely unacceptable. This is not good. Here in the Abyss we call this type of scenario Situation Normal.

Please pardon me while I vamp for a few minutes…

Things don’t always work out like we hope or think they should. Ya think?

This morning I encountered a particularly insidious form of online racism. It got to me so I decided to blog about it. My goal was to employ my usual deftness, sensitivity, style and grace while still getting across the raw sense of anger that consumed every fiber of my being like schools of cellular-sized piranhas in my bloodstream.

See? There I go again. Why do I always have to oversell my feelings? It’s almost as if my feelings matter. Let us not play games. We all know they don’t.

I was generally happy with the opening I had written. I even asked my wife to review it and she had high praise. “It’s not quite as bad as your usual garbage,” she quipped.

Wow. Things were looking up! Or so I thought.

Then it came time to actually say something. You know, the point of the whole exercise. KABOOM! That’s where the post jumped the shark, took a turn for the worse and shot off the rails. With extreme prejudice.

Thus, this post is not about racism. Not at all. I’ll have to leave that intellectual exploration to the successful version of me in the mirror universe. (It’s theoretically possible, I suppose.) Instead, let us change gears and talk about failure.

The number of posts I’ve abandoned exceeds what I’ve published. If that’s not true failure I don’t know what is.

At least there’s one thing I’m good at.