Spanner

Checkash is a blog I started about eight years ago, up in Bellingham, Washington. Checkash preceded any of the hundred or so articles I've published in print or online since then. It was what blogs are supposed to be, a threshold drug for real writing, you know, writing you get paid for. I developed a voice and a momentum on Checkash and when it outlived its use, I let it drift. Until one day I got the email notifying me that Checkash had expired, and all its content deleted. For sentimental reasons, however, I picked it back up again. This was a couple of years ago, and I've left it empty since.

Now I find myself in need again. I need a platform, a forum, an empty podium and an equally empty hall in which to air my voice. And judging from stats in today, pageloads, unique visits, first time visits and returning visits all ring in at a flat resounding zero.  I haven't published anything in over a year, I'm on medical leave from my Ph.D. program in China, all bottled up inside an Irish cottage in the middle of winter with storms, gales and hurricanes. So I'm good to go.

So why the title 'Spanner'? Because my Irish fiance calls me a spanner from time to time and I just looked it up. It means 'retard', and he swears he means it with love. But I look at the word as a foreigner and see the verb 'span'--to span, to bridge the gap, to make the connection between now and then.

Mostly I'm looking for meaning, for some narrative within which all the disparate emergencies inside my heart and breast can find an integral way of communicating with one another, so as to stop tearing me apart.