“There’s nothing I hate more than nothing. Nothing keeps me up at night. I toss and turn over nothing. Nothing can cause a GREAT BIG FIGHT.” – Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians

We’ve been cruising through the Seinfeld catalog of episodes, watching one or two every couple of days. Its basic premise is that it’s a show about nothing, the minutiae of daily life. Every episode is ridiculous and inane, but like coming upon a relationship accident, I can’t look away. We will finish watching the whole series. Nothing is going to get in our way.

Unless something does. On any given day, all of my best-laid plans – to exercise, to not procrastinate writing my latest blog post, to watch the next episode of Seinfeld – can so easily get derailed by…nothing. Nothing is another word for regular life. “What’s new?”, an friend will ask and the first thing that comes into my mind is: nothing.

Which isn’t true, right? If you keep any sort of diary or journal or even if Facebook assaults you with some weird anniversary (Celebrate 10 Years of Friendship with Your Accountant!) and you look back two, five or ten years ago, you can quite plainly see that things do change – maybe at a snail’s pace but still. Even a snail moves at 0.048 km/hr. That’s better than the average couch potato. I can plainly see my routine has changed from two years ago (because: Covid), my face looks different from five years ago (hello: wrinkles) AND I have a different accountant from ten years ago.

This blog is sort of about nothing. I’ve been trying to shape it and figure out what it’s about since I started. I write about writing (very meta!), about memories (how ephemeral!), about what I read lately and occasionally about stuff that happens. It’s a pretty good antidote for thinking that nothing happens when I read a post from two years ago or a throwback from twenty years ago.

Sometimes I wonder why I keep writing. And then when I write, I figure out why I do. It’s nothing, really.