Not long ago, in one of those impromptu deep discussion with a teenager that you don’t see coming, my 13-year-old said “everyone acts like nothing has happened to us.”

The 13-year-old in question is known to be prone to exaggeration and fiction. When he was in pre-K, for instance, he’d regularly come home and regale me with stories about how the teacher had taken him for a haircut that day, or to McDonald’s, leaving the rest of the kids back in the classroom to fend for themselves.

I had another Bubble-explainer experience last week.

Which is to say I had to explain my backstory to someone and the most shorthand way to do that was to reference “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble,” the 1976 movie that was based, in part, on my brother Ted’s story.

A couple of months ago I met my friend Heidi (who I often refer to as “my sibling loss friend Heidi”) and her sister, Rebecca, for dinner in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, where I live. They were going to an art show beforehand, in the neighborhood—Chelsea is small gallery mecca—and invited me to go, too. But I had to bring Luke to the orthodontist (such is my life) so we settled on the dinner plan instead.

Years ago, when I was researching The Empty Room and collecting books, movies, and memoirs that dealt with my subject as a way to immerse myself in it, I stumbled across a documentary called “A Kill for A Kill: Witness To An Execution.”

For ages now, my friend Bri and I have been talking about getting memorial tattoos, i.e. tattoos that memorialize someone who has died. In our cases, they would be my brother, Ted, and her mother, who died of breast cancer when she was five. We’ve talked designs and locations. She has scoured Instagram for artists and made queries. And just when it seemed like it would all be too complicated—not the least so because she now lives in L.A.—it all came together.

Recently, on a Monday holiday, I was minding my own business, having lunch by myself, when the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno rang in my head.

Well, I got life-d again.

As in, life turned into madness for a while and threw me off my writing game. Off a lot of games, actually. And once again, I find myself starting over….not just with blogging, but with all my routines, both work and personal. And while I find this incredibly frustrating, it is starting to dawn on me that this is the way it is, life. Maybe it’s just an illusion that everyone else’s life stays steady while mine looks like the EKG of someone in a dubious state of cardiac health.

A couple of summers ago Luke talked me into going on an amusement park ride that I had otherwise successfully avoided for my entire life. We were at Funland in Rehobeth Beach, Delaware. He went on the ride first with his older brother and thought it was so great he came to drag me on for another round.

Well, life got very life-y again. The lifey-est it’s been in quite a while. And, once again, I got blown off track with blogging. The whys of it all relate, in some part, to other people’s lives, and the details are not really mine to share. But they involve health crises, and, not surprisingly, they have been trigger-y.

Yes, the title says it all. I have no particular agenda for today except to write…something.

Life has been on hyper-speed lately and I am juggling a lot. So, I missed a post last week. And I’m late on one this week. And it bothers me, not only because I’m trying to keep to a schedule, but because this project is really my favorite thing to focus on these days. Maybe because, these days, I realize how much I have relied on the example of my brother’s strength, and how much I still need it.

I talked to Marc, one of my brother’s closest friends, and his guitar teacher, awhile back. It’s taken me awhile to write up the interview because, frankly, it takes me awhile to process these conversations. It’s emotional, to talk to everyone. So far I have not completely lost it during an interview, but I do get teary at times.

A week or so ago, I wrote a post about process, i.e. my process in putting together projects, sme of which become books. That’s hopefully where I’m going with this one. I decided to these posts regularly, not because I think I’m so fascinating. Anyone you know who produces art of any kind has a process. Sometimes it’s evident to them, sometimes it’s not. Once I realized that I had things that worked for me (and some that didn’t), I became fascinated by this is as topic, and in further cultivating mine. (Anything that makes the work easier and more pleasant to my own peculiar brain is welcome.)

Awhile back, I interviewed a few of Ted’s friends from elementary school, specifically about a surprise birthday party they threw for him when he was first in the hospital. When I told my mom that I was speaking with them, she said, “The only one who is missing is David.”

One of my nerdy obsessions as a writer is process. Specifically, how do you (or I) go about your creative process? What works for you?

I was on the MOMA site the other day, checking out what’s on exhibit now that the museum (and others) are open again.

The newest thing is the show by sculptor Alexander Calder (who I love). But what I ended up lingering over were images from the museum’s Henri Matisse collection, which are pretty much always there (I think…I don’t follow this closely enough to speak with certainty).

From as far back as I can remember, my brother was obsessed with wars. As a kid, he had a full array of G.I. Joes, and those little green army soldiers littered our house and backyard. He read about wars…histories, guns, memoirs, fiction.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fact that, while I’ve meant this project to be about my brother, it’s a lot about me, so far. My memories, my recollections, my stories. Part of that is easy access. The thoughts in my head are fairly easy to get to. (It’s finding the time to do it that’s hard.)

My oldest son, Henry, has been on a chess jag lately, and has been playing in person at a chess spot in Greenwich Village called Chess Forum. This means that, aside from being the subject of a lot of in depth lectures on things like Alakhine’s Defense, gambits (there’s not just a Queen’s Gambit, it turns out), and the Sicilian Defense, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Village, myself.

Here’s a weird story about the way the mind, or, hey, I’ll only speak for myself, my mind, works, and mercy.