The Backlog Is Dead, Long Live the Backlog
A Brief and Suspicious Peace
I finally published my entire essay backlog.
There should probably be some kind of ceremony. Nothing extravagant. Maybe a ribbon-cutting for an empty drafts folder. Christa could hand me my newest mug while someone plays one of the unnecessary but surprisingly earnest songs I made to accompany the essays.
After months of drafting, revising, generating images, writing lyrics, choosing meta descriptions, and giving essays singles they never asked for, I have caught up.
I have not finished writing. I have not reached the end of Open Doors. I am not announcing my retirement from the dangerous sport of paragraph-making or entering some enlightened post-blogging state.
I have simply, and perhaps temporarily, caught up to myself.
I would like to say this has left me peaceful.
That would be dishonest.
I feel relieved, proud, a little ridiculous, and faintly suspicious of the whole thing. Finishing a backlog sounds like the sort of achievement produced by discipline and careful planning. In practice, it felt more like chasing escaped chickens through a grocery store while assuring everyone nearby that this was part of my literary process.
Still, the essays are published. The backlog is no longer sitting in the corner of my mind with tiny disappointed eyes.
For one brief moment, there is nothing waiting to be finished.
Naturally, I responded by making another list.
The Next Thousand Essays
There is an essay I want to write about Mayo and my visit there. Not a medical report, exactly, but a reflection on what it feels like to carry your body into another room full of expertise and uncertainty. I am still sorting through the gratitude, exhaustion, fear, perspective, and strange relief of being taken seriously even when no one can hand me a clean answer.
I also owe newer readers a brief explanation of languorene, a word I made up because the existing ones kept missing the feeling I wanted to name. It combines languor and serene, pointing toward a soft, unhurried condition: calm without numbness, rest without self-reproach, ordinary beauty allowed to be enough. Tea near a window. Quiet water. The small and almost embarrassing relief of being alive for one more gentle thing.
That probably needs an essay. At least a note. Possibly a note that turns into an essay because I cannot behave.
There will also be yet another mug essay, because mugs keep happening to me. Christa bought me a new one, and somehow each mug is better than the last. This feels both impossible and spiritually suspicious. At some point, I will either have to stop writing about mugs or admit that they have become part of the theological architecture of this website.
I am not ready to rule out either possibility.
I also want to dig through some of my oldest drafts, a few of them dating back to before grad school. I still have them because I am apparently the kind of person who preserves ancient sentence fragments in case Future Me ever wants to perform an archaeological excavation of Past Me.
Most of those drafts are probably better left buried. A couple may contain worthwhile ideas. This is encouraging, but also inconvenient, because a worthwhile idea is rarely courteous enough to remain a worthwhile idea. It eventually starts demanding paragraphs.
The World Keeps Entering
I want to write one or two essays about Ukraine and the war, because it is essentially the only news I follow closely. Putin is pure evil, and I do not feel compelled to soften that sentence until it becomes more intellectually fashionable.
Some subjects invite nuance. Others require moral clarity first, followed by whatever nuance can survive standing beside it.
The first essay would explore why I care about this war so much. Why this particular struggle, happening far from my daily life, has become one of the few pieces of news I keep allowing into the room. Why I follow the maps, the weapons, the shifting lines, the awful details, and the stubborn evidence of people refusing to be erased.
The second would ask why now. From where I sit, Ukraine finally seems to be turning the tide. That does not mean it is winning in some clean, cinematic sense. It does not mean the suffering is ending or that anyone can safely exhale. It means the shape of the war appears to be changing enough that this feels like a fitting moment to consider what I have been watching all these years and why it has mattered to me more than nearly anything else in the news.
There will probably be darker essays too. More disability. More pain and fatigue. More attempts to understand what it means to live inside a body that sometimes operates like a collapsing committee meeting.
I do not want Open Doors to become only that. I also do not want to treat darkness as some embarrassing side room in my life. It is part of the house. Sometimes it gets the main floor.
That is me, for better or worse: noticing the terrifying thing, then noticing the funny thing beside it, then wondering whether they belong in the same sentence.
The McCarthy series also needs to continue. I have not escaped Cormac McCarthy, and I do not think I want to. At this point, reading him feels less like moving through a bibliography and more like entering one long, dimly lit argument with language, death, God, consciousness, and whether existence was a good idea in the first place.
Apparently, this is my idea of fun.
Fiction has been calling too. I have plenty of ideas waiting while I keep telling them, “Soon,” like a man who has never once understood how time works. I miss making things up on purpose. Essays let me arrange what happened. Fiction lets me tell the truth sideways.
I want both.
Rest, Apparently
Before I bury myself beneath all of that, I want to spend some time doing other things.
I want to build a couple of useful tools for Christa with Codex. Not grand inventions. Not a startup. Just practical things that might make life a little easier for someone I love. That feels like a better use of my attention right now than squeezing an essay out of every passing thought as though I operate a tiny artisanal meaning factory.
I also need to do some basic Open Doors maintenance, the invisible housekeeping no one notices unless it is neglected. I want to go back and re-listen to every essay, because apparently an exhaustive audio proofread of my own archive is another thing I consider fun. I may even correct the typos I notice instead of allowing them to remain as tiny monuments to human fallibility.
I want to begin filling out the What I’m Hearing page too. Music has become part of this project in ways I never planned, and I like the idea of keeping a looser record of the songs, albums, sounds, and strange AI-generated haunted jukeboxes I keep discovering in the basement of my attention.
I want to return to a more regular meditation practice. It has not disappeared, but lately I have mostly been sitting for shorter stretches—more like checking in than settling down. I miss the longer sits. I miss what happens when attention has enough time to stop performing attention and simply rest.
I also want to get back to listening to books more than once every few months. I used to finish one a week, sometimes more.
What happened to that?
At some point, I apparently replaced reading with drafting myself, editing myself, listening to myself, and then asking an artificial intelligence to help me explain myself. This may be evidence of growth. It may also be evidence that someone needs to hand me a novel and confiscate my metaphorical clipboard.
This essay has become its own small record of that process. I drafted the first version with GPT-5.5 and joked that GPT-5.6 would probably be available by the time I edited it.
Now I am editing it with GPT-5.6.
The joke has been overtaken by the release schedule.
Hopefully—and, I am sure, soon—Suno V6 will arrive and tempt me into giving the essay a song. Apparently, every reflection now wants to leave the house wearing a little jacket and carrying a chorus.
This is ridiculous.
It is also fun.
That may be the most important thing I discovered while clearing the backlog. I like the whole ecosystem around the writing: the essay, the image, the song, the revision, the title, the little arguments over whether a sentence has earned its chair. It is too much, obviously. It is also mine.
Still, I do not want to keep publishing at this pace. I want something more humane—maybe one or two pieces a month. Enough to keep the doors opening without turning the site into another machine I have to feed.
I would also like to chill and watch The Office for the hundredth-plus time, because civilization exists for a reason. It is my favorite show, and watching Michael Scott be insufferable remains one of the most reliable forms of rest American television has produced. Some people meditate. I watch a regional paper company manager ruin a meeting with absolute confidence.
I need to write a couple of emails too, including one to my niece, who is looking for books to read. Lord help me, I will have to exercise restraint. Nobody needs a fourteen-page annotated reading list from an uncle who hears “book recommendations” and immediately transforms into a Victorian railway timetable.
Probably.
Maybe.
We will see how strong I am.
For now, though, I finished the backlog. I took a long row of drafts that existed mostly as promises to myself and turned them into a body of work.
For all the jokes, that matters to me.
The work is not done. It was never going to be done.
It is simply, for one rare and suspicious moment, not behind me.
That seems worth celebrating—even if the celebration is mostly a new mug and another episode of The Office.
Can I take a break?
Maybe, but what’s the fun in that?
We’ll have to see
