Anyway, I may have found a system that works for me, finally. As with everything else I do, I simply need to trick myself. Here’s what I am doing differently:

1. Think, then immediately write. Set the thought down into a blog entry before you lose interest. Right now in WordPress, I have 14 drafts of various aborted ideas I started to write about. I am unlikely to take them up simply because I no longer care about those particular ideas. However, at the time, I did, so I should have taken advantage of that fleeting moment of enthusiasm. Something interesting might have come of it!
2. When you’re feeling productive, crank out as much as you can. I think today I wrote 6 blog entries. Other times, I’ll go weeks without writing anything. You won’t see these entries all in one day because I will schedule them to appear once or twice each day rather than all at once. Google likes this and it also makes me appear to be more consistently industrious.
3. Keep to a schedule. Remove the choice. Right now I’ve got a daily recurring task in Remember the Milk for “Write a blog entry”. It gets created automatically every day and if I don’t complete it, it just sits there in my task list until I close it out. If I go several days without blogging, the tasks just add up like household garbage no one feels like taking out. Deleting the tasks or marking them complete seems cowardly, so after a while I just hunker down and write. Quite honestly, the recurring task thing is the main reason I’ve been blogging more.

When this happens, I feel as if I should have done something final with that original idea, since it has bubbled up again like a submerged corpse.

Memory is unreliable. Yet, something about who I am dictates that I will re-create the same idea again and again, though I have no memory of it. It calls into question every idea you have, every plan you conceive of, since so many others amounted to nothing without a lasting record of their failure.

Then, as I read the daily dose of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Notebooks yesterday, I learned that much greater minds ran in similar circles:

Begun at Florence, in the house of Piero di Braccio Martelli, on the 22nd day of March 1508. And this is to be a collection without order, taken from many papers which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place, according to the subjects of which they may treat. But I believe that before I am at the end of this [task] I shall have to repeat the same things several times; for which, O reader! do not blame me, for the subjects are many and memory cannot retain them [all] and say: ‘I will not write this because I wrote it before.’ And if I wished to avoid falling into this fault, it would be necessary in every case when I wanted to copy [a passage] that, not to repeat myself, I should read over all that had gone before; and all the more since the intervals are long between one time of writing and the next.

In other words, just keep writing and stop keeping score.

The thing that is hard to remember is that you cannot argue with a brain injury. There are certain things that he has to do like wear a neck brace and use a walker, but if he does not feel like doing it, no amount of bargaining, solicitation, or badgering will work. It’s especially difficult in my case since my Dad is 6’3″ and about 265 pounds and not afraid to mix it up even in his weakened state. A lot of times you feel like a lion tamer, dancing around with a chair and flimsy bull whip, ducking in to lob a quick, “Hey Dad, please wear your neck brace.” Luckily, he’s been good about taking his medicine and letting us give him shots. It seems to help if you can make him feel like he’s in control.

Anyway, the thing is, it’s tough. From the moment you get up until you go to bed. It’s not just dealing with Dad. It’s dealing with Dad and everything else you normally have to deal with, like making money and keeping the wheels on with the rest of your life. It’s harder than anything I’ve ever had to do before (Not that I have ever had it rough. I know now that I have not.). The upside is that everything else I have ever worried about in the past has become so much easier in comparison. All my previous problems and anxieties seem laughably easy. When he was first in the hospital and we thought we might lose him so we were there around the clock, I thought that was hard. That was really nothing. It was emotionally draining, but it was not work. Our present situation (which is way more complicated than I can go into) is both emotionally draining AND work. That wouldn’t be so bad except that it’s hard to see any positive outcome. Life is just different now. Everything is different now.