That is just a horrible, offensive title. And I’ve decided I don’t care. I haven’t written for a long time. A really long time.

My writing used to come from a place of pain. I wrote because I had too. It was what kept me sane. Along the way it kept some people informed or entertained. That was all good.

And then the pain subsided. I had no compelling need to let the stuff ooze from my brain to keep my head from exploding. I wrote a thing or two only when it seemed to cross some threshold of what must be interesting to other people.

I filtered my writing.

We now live lives of extraordinary privilege. We are still in our early fifties, semi-retired and living on a yacht in Mexico. We can fly back and forth to Canada when we please. We can still work any time we want. We can also wake up and not work if we choose to. Just about every day is really awesomely amazing for one reason or another. And who the hell wants to read about somebody else’s good fortune?

I started writing a piece about all the burden of daily life on the boat. We run a small city with power generation, propulsion, navigation systems, a water maker, sails, rigging, safety gear and any number of complex systems that are continuously breaking and require repairs. It can be super interesting technically or really boring, but mostly it seemed like a whiny piece from somebody who should be happy they get to live on a boat.

I could write just the facts. The stuff of the log book. Here we are. This the weather. We went here today. We are going to go there tomorrow. Interesting or not, it’s boring for me to write it, so it doesn’t happen.

I am also lazy. If I have an idea, but it’s a phone in my hand, I’m not about to break out the laptop and start writing. So the world gets a picture with a little paragraph. It’s not writing. It’s captioning.

So what does the world lose if I don’t write anything?

Absolutely nothing. But I lose. I think I actually need to write to stay cognitively engaged. It’s not enough to read. It’s not enough to be on social media. I need to write for me and stop worrying about who I might offend or bore or how off-topic I might be on a sailing blog writing about saving your life with an Apple Watch. I am going to write to amuse myself. It doesn’t have to even be good writing. I just need to write. I’ll post it on some lonely corner of the internet. If you like it, great. If you don’t, I’m OK with that, but I’m not going to apologize and try to please everyone.

So there you go. Are you ready, bitches?