Building Momentum (and Foundations)...

It's been another long gap between posts for me. Part of that has been the usual busy autumn I've grown accustomed to (which usually means Halloween falls by the wayside and isn't the fun experience it once was), but added to that has been a heavy bout of depression accompanied by apathy. I guess this difficult year caught up with me finally and hit me harder than I had anticipated. All this led to a very unproductive period. I've been doing loads of historical research, but writing or any other productive behavior has escaped me.

Even so, it wasn't until today that I started gathering together the general thoughts, questions, and ponderings of the past few months and realized that overall, it hasn't been entirely in vain. It's been something far more than just feeling melancholy and unmotivated. There has been a shift from deep inside me, and the whole picture is finally coalescing into something approaching a definitive result. I still have some wrestling to do, sorting out the little details that conflict with one another, but it's reaching toward... something.

A lot of this has come about from asking myself a few simple questions: What do I believe? What do I enjoy? What's right (but mostly what's wrong) with the status quo of paranormal investigation? Of course, after finding out all my answers, it takes quite a while to tally up results and figure out what pieces can be fit together into something resembling a final product. Believe me, some of my answers mix together about as well as air and sand. Nevertheless, I do believe that some cohesion can be found in the building blocks of each of my convictions.

One thing is certain: I'm full of complexities, opposing forces, and attitudes/viewpoints that contradict what most people might expect in someone who considers himself a paranormal researcher and/or investigator. But I don't see that as a handicap; too many people fail to look at things from other perspectives and completely miss blinding faults because they follow along with mainstream ideology. I think in this sense writing for Who Forted? has helped me tremendously in just being myself. Surprisingly, I feel a lot more at home there than in most paranormal circles. At least I know that if I bring up something rational, logical, or sensible that thought won't be met with an icy glare or immediate blacklisting as a "difficult" person.

Does this all mean that this blog will suddenly stop being relevant? Does it mean that I'll never tackle writing about the paranormal ever again? Absolutely not! I enjoy playing a minor role as a modern Charles Fort gathering the strange, bizarre, unexplained things from history. I still find visiting reputedly haunted places for entertainment. And I think there's still a lot to learn about unexplained phenomena. There is also a lot to be learned from previous researchers (both in the paranormal and scientific fields) which sorely needs to be addressed by more people. I'm sure some of my thoughts might be met with hisses and boos from plenty of people, but I'm quite used to going against the grain. In the process of all this, I'll probably continue neglecting this blog, avoiding social media, and falling behind in a lot of other things, but hopefully the end result will be worth it.