NEW TWICE EPISODES PAUSED FOR A TIME:

Dear TWICE readers,

FIRST—THANK YOU for the interest and encouragement with which you’ve supported the unfolding tale of TWICE during the past fourteen months. I cannot adequately express how much your company on this journey has meant to me, and I am truly sorry to be disappointing you again this week, but I’ve had to make a very difficult decision to put the TWICE serial on complete pause through at least the end of 2020.

Before saying more about that decision, I want to emphasize that I do mean PAUSE—not end. This personal creative project is a labor of real love on which I have been working for years, and to which I am as passionately committed as ever. Short of my currently completely unexpected untimely death, I can imagine no scenario in which this endeavor does not continue all the way to completion within the next two years—more or less as planned all along. With that said, allow me to shed some light on what’s been happening here ‘behind the scenes.’

The past four years have presented me and my wife with a truly extraordinary sequence of genuinely epic, largely unanticipated, arduous and exhausting challenges to navigate almost without ceasing. Think ‘four years of personal 2020.’ I won’t subject you to the full list, but this gauntlet has repeatedly achieved almost comical pace and intensity, and we’ve been so very, very sure—on so many occasions—that this run of impossible developments MUST SURELY cease soon! …Yet it has not. And now, incomprehensibly, it seems that the entire world has just decided to catch up to us.

I have navigated these four unlikely years by playing a kind of ‘shell game’ with my life, putting off one urgent task—half finished—to address another task too urgent to wait, only to put that one down half finished as well to tackle the next unscheduled but unavoidable necessity; rinse and repeat… During the past couple months I have finally run completely out of places to stow away and put off the slow, cumulative damage this shell game has done to virtually every aspect of my life, and find myself forced to admit—to you and myself—that my best attempts to ‘catch up’ with this unraveling ceased some time ago to be viable or sustainable.

I had hoped—just last week—that the ‘twice-a-month’ format I announced last Friday might generate sufficient ‘wiggle room’ to address this situation, but the universe has laughed off even that ‘halfway measure’ rather strikingly since then, and I now concede the need to set down—completely—everything that I’m not legally, professionally or morally obligated to continue attending to until I’ve made sufficient headway in rebuilding my badly disordered life—beginning with attention to the current condition of my own mind and body.

Lest that last comment launch some unfortunate rumor about ‘what Mark may be dying of,’ let me be very clear that I have absolutely NO serious medical problems at all—yet. There is no dreadful secret being hinted at here. In fact, what I’m attempting here is just (perhaps excessive?) transparency. But I have been working to engineer my early demise very steadily for some time now: putting on a lot of weight, ratcheting up my cholesterol, developing some mild but enervating chronic respiratory disorders, sleeping only half of many nights, bathing only once or twice a week, and working virtually without a single day off for ‘rest and/or recreation’ for the past couple years. Unsurprisingly, I have also been functioning for some time in a steady state of extreme exhaustion, and, as we all deal with a world spinning daily further into madness, I have also started struggling with bouts of pretty debilitating depression—a condition I have not experienced in any significant way for decades.

I spent the first half of this week arranging for and/or attending four different long-postponed doctor’s appointments in ‘America’—none of which I had planned to do this week at all. I have spent the remainder of the week sitting at my desktop computer, struggling to ‘crank out’ the TWICE episode I had expected to deliver to you today. I’ve been looking forward to writing this episode for months now, and have known for just as long exactly what happens in it—down to paragraphs of specific dialogue—and even what image I wanted to decorate it with. It should all have been a pleasurable breeze to produce. But instead…I’ve been staring at the screen and seeing…words—rearranging and rearranging the same two pages of text without achieving any quantifiable improvement—even though I KNOW what comes next. This too is a difficulty I have virtually never encountered before. And behind this mental fog, I keep hearing a slow, quiet, continuous chant. It’s there when I get up each morning, and still going as I flop into bed each night: ‘Stop. …Just stop… It’s time to stop now… That doesn’t matter anymore; you need to stop…’

That chant is not about TWICE. TWICE itself is not what needs stopping, and it hurts me personally even to pause it. What needs stopping is the endless, gasping, staggering race to fall further and further behind that my life has become since 2015. But to end that race, I must drop every elective task I’m free to drop—and sadly, TWICE is the single largest of these ‘droppable’ elective tasks.

If I really attend to the essentials here through November and December, I am hopeful—realistically, I think—of being ready to start picking back up a few elective projects again—first and foremost TWICE—by sometime soon after the New Year. But, in keeping with the four years of experience described above, I know better than to create any new hard deadlines for myself right now. That would just be another way to set up one more little failure.

Anyone who chooses to remain on the subscriber list through this hiatus will be informed by email as soon as TWICE resumes; and, of course, I’ll post about the resumption on Facebook and Twitter as well. In the meantime, I want to thank you again for your interest in the project so far, and your understanding and patience with this latest round of interruptions. TWICE really will be back, just as soon as I get myself up off the ground again. Until then, I wish you more good fortune and peace of mind than anyone imagines possible these days. Not all of fate’s surprises are bad! I still know that too.

Thank you, and be well.

Mark