Hi.

I spent about two seconds looking for some kind of stock image I could use at the beginning of this post — an image that would spruce things up while simultaneously conveying the distress and chaos that have abounded in my life this past week — but I quickly realized that the extent to which things have been distressful and chaotic is such that I can’t even feign having the capacity for the kind of whimsy that the use of a such a stock image would require.

The past five days have been fucked. Not just fucked, but FUCKED. Like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Scary and tragic and horrifying and upsetting above and beyond anything I’ve ever experienced in my entire life.

And the really frustrating part of it as pertains to this blog is: I can’t tell you about it.

As I recently tweeted (god, has there ever been a more ridiculous-sounding, emasculating verb?): the kids are fine, my wife is fine, and I’m fine (aside from the whole unemployed/looking for work/trying to sell a house and move 350 miles away thing). Unfortunately, however, someone in my family is very much not fine. Someone I love and care about a great deal. And I have spent much of the past five or so days trying desperately to do everything I can to help this person, as have a number of other family members. And we are all scared and devastated and hopeful and cautiously optimistic and exhausted and worried beyond any kind of worry we’ve ever experienced.

And I’m sorry I can’t be more specific — not only because I feel like it’s kind of shitty to write such a cryptic entry that mostly leaves you in the dark, but also because writing about the big worries and problems and challenges in my life is often my most effective means of dealing with, and making sense of, such things, so I hate that I don’t currently have the option of processing this incident in that manner.

What I want far more than to write about this crisis, however, is for this crisis to be over — or, better yet, to have never happened. What I want to write about is my Mexican vacation and my son’s seventh birthday and other things that don’t involve the scariest, most worrisome incident of my entire life.

But I haven’t felt capable of writing about anything else, because there’s an elephant in the room, and I’m not able to write about the other things in the room until I write about the elephant. And although I can’t actually write about the elephant itself in any degree of detail, I’m hoping that by at least acknowledging its presence, I can move on to other subjects.

Sorry for sticking you with such an unsatisfyingly vague entry, but I had to write something.