I've never kept a diary. I don't know why. My gut instinct is to say I lack the discipline, but that's probably not it. I write here. I write whole novels. I must have some ability to put and keep my butt in the chair. I suppose it must have something to do with diaries being - you hope - private. If you want to make a living writing, why write something no one will ever read?

It has occurred to me that this blog is in many ways like a diary. I could go back a year or two or three and see what I was up to, what kitchen disaster I had wrought, what embarrassing social situation I'd gotten myself into. But the thing is, this isn't a diary. There are huge chunks of my private life that have never and will never see the light of cyber day because they are, by their very nature, private.

Some of the stuff that never comes out is very good. Some of it might do well to be written about and worked over with my mental muscles more thoroughly than the normal pace of life allows. Some of it - like the past few days - is just gut wrenching awful. The sort of god-fucking-awful you wouldn't want to see happen to anyone, and by the very fact that it happened to you, produces a fear that more things like it are lurking just beyond the fuzzy edges of the shadows. And it's only a matter of time before it and its buddies jump out and beat you senseless again.

It has just been that kind of week. It's why I've been missing here for a few days. And even though it's schoolyard-bully mean to tell you something's up and not tell you what, I thought I should explain. And in three years when I read back through this entry, maybe it will remind me of all the things - good and bad - that never made it here.