I opened my laptop fully intending to write, absolutely needing to write. Last night, to give you an idea, I fell asleep attempting to finish a post about my upcoming photo show. (More on that in mere minutes, I hope.) But just now: classic blunder. I launched Facebook. There happened to have been a good reason — a friend who seems to get messages via Facebook and may or may not have received the time-sensitive e-mail I sent to an e-mail address that may or not be current. So my plan was simply to go on Facebook, send her a did-you-get-my-message? message and log off. But then I noticed that my friend John had a new profile picture — a cartoony sort of thing. I scanned the comments and discovered that he’d made the picture on the AMC site as part of a gimmick to promote the season premiere of Mad Men. Now, it’s hard to say exactly what sucked me in. Gratitude maybe. Because I had not realized until I clicked the link that Mad Men would be starting its new season soon. For my own idiosyncratic reasons, I will not be typing the date or time of the premiere. While I do admire the show and while the show is the reason I’ve heard of Frank O’Hara’s poetry and while O’Hara in turn posthumously led me to Jen Bekman’s “Personism” blog and while I have gone so far here as to post the self-portrait I made using the same Mad Men Yourself tool my friend used, I am not quite willing to trollop myself out to AMC so thoroughly as to serve as an outright commercial for the premiere. That said, making the caricature was actually fun. I’m not going to claim it was as satisfying as writing. But I can’t help noticing that my fingers are pressing keys on my keyboard at this very moment. The whole thing feels a bit like writing. Call it a warmup.

I opened my laptop fully intending to write, absolutely needing to write. Last night, to give you an idea, I fell asleep attempting to finish a post about my upcoming photo show. (More on that in mere minutes, I hope.)

But just now: classic blunder. I launched Facebook. There happened to have been a good reason — a friend who seems to get messages via Facebook and may or may not have received the time-sensitive e-mail I sent to an e-mail address that may or not be current. So my plan was simply to go on Facebook, send her a did-you-get-my-message? message and log off.

But then I noticed that my friend John had a new profile picture — a cartoony sort of thing. I scanned the comments and discovered that he’d made the picture on the AMC site as part of a gimmick to promote the season premiere of Mad Men.

Now, it’s hard to say exactly what sucked me in. Gratitude maybe. Because I had not realized until I clicked the link that Mad Men would be starting its new season soon. For my own idiosyncratic reasons, I will not be typing the date or time of the premiere. While I do admire the show and while the show is the reason I’ve heard of Frank O’Hara’s poetry and while O’Hara in turn posthumously led me to Jen Bekman’s “Personism” blog and while I have gone so far here as to post the self-portrait I made using the same Mad Men Yourself tool my friend used, I am not quite willing to trollop myself out to AMC so thoroughly as to serve as an outright commercial for the premiere.

That said, making the caricature was actually fun. I’m not going to claim it was as satisfying as writing. But I can’t help noticing that my fingers are pressing keys on my keyboard at this very moment. The whole thing feels a bit like writing.

Call it a warmup.

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