So..[awkward pause]..I am back. We are in the process of a move and my wife and I have been going through all our collected memories and keepsakes trying to cull out all the junk. We came to the conclusion that it is pretty much all junk but we still couldn't throw most of it out. Instead, we spent way too much time reading letters and diary entries from our high school years to each other and laughing about how melodramatic we were as teenagers. I would quote from some of the letters, but despite being over-the-top funny they were written with sincerity and I would feel like a betrayer of trust to put it out there for ridicule. I don't mind putting myself out there for mocking fun, but generally I will refrain from putting other out for the same treatment (unless it is really, really funny or the letter was from one of my wife's old boyfriends). Back to the point you didn't know I was trying to make; many of these letters open with some variation of the line. "Sorry it has been so long since I last wrote." Or something like that. The very monotony of these apologies grated on me. I wanted to write back and say, "Who expects prompt correspondence from highschoolers, stop apologizing and tell me what's going on!" Of course, these letters were all written more than a decade ago and any response from me at this point would just be confusing.
Basically, this whole anecdote has been a round about way of saying that I won't apologize for being gone. Instead, I will just get back to the reason for being here...writing about books.
