Life Trumps Tango

This blog is two years old today. I went back to check the date of my first post last night and was caught by surprise. I thought it was later in the month.

So, I'm caught and fraught without much to say on this anniversary. I let the first one pass by without fanfare last year, without so much as a mention. I'm not one to brag about visitor statistics, or where all my hits and visitors and readers are around the globe. Visitation is not much to brag about anyway.

I suppose I should look back at the blogging year, like we look back and reflect on our year when our birthday comes around. But it's early in the morning, I need some coffee in me, and I've got to get my day going. Life calls. Life trumps blog. Life trumps tango.

I've been thinking of a post titled "Maturation or saturation?". It will be, or would be, about the maturation process in tango. Our feelings and needs and emotions and goals change with regard to this thing tango in our lives. It would be about how I don't have much to say on the subject of tango anymore. Believe me, I do rack my brain on a daily basis trying to make something shake loose and spill out. But it doesn't.

The stimuli aren't there anymore. I'm not dancing much. I don't attend classes or workshops or festivals anymore. Partly due to nano-economics, but mostly due to the fact that my brain is saturated with past stuff. There is tons of information up there that I've never incorporated into my dance. Changes of direction. Single axis turns. The Fabian and Gustavo volcadas. Tons of stuff. Practice. Practice and conditioning are needed, but that is a subject for another post.

There has been a burst of fairly good discourse on Tango-L of late. But it's all ultimately a bunch of drivel, signifying nothing. So I unsubscribed the other day.

I'm not reading the other tango bloggers' blogs like I should. I'm not playing the Blogger game and engaging with commentary on their posts, nor the tit-for-tat dialog with commenters on my posts. Oh, I forgot. I don't get any comments on my posts. Not like some of the other more profound and eloquent bloggers. Whining is not attractive, dude.

I'm not watching YouTube, or even keeping track of new videos that pop up. Not much these days on YouTube moves me to post them and/or talk about them. I could bitch and moan about the prevalence of white shoes that I am seeing in the videos, but to what end? To put the white tango shoe cobblers out of business? What about my own (never worn) white shoes? How do I explain that? Better to keep my mouth shut on the subject.

I don't write about my local community. I don't nickname and write about the women I dance with. I don't write about what I feel and think, what it feels like, to dance with them. I don't write about technique or teaching or teachers or community building. It's all too close for comfort. Plus, that's just not me to talk about how some woman's hairy mole affects my posture and tweaks my lower back. Oh yeah, there was "Miss Delicious Mons", I almost forgot about her. (Grin)

I don't write about organizers who stage tango workshops, then cancel them, then don't issue refunds. Or at least not timely refunds. It's called wire fraud, a Federal crime, and this is not a tango crime blog. Luckily, these stories are few and far between in our tango world.

I don't write about or review festivals or workshops, because I don't attend them any more. Not that I ever did much reviewing, or was comfortable about what I did review in the past. The one thing I would like to see at future festivals is a green room. I did recently think about an angle on the proliferation of festivals. It seems they must be getting diluted. I even thought about organizing my own milonguero festival in Austin - with no visiting instructors, no performances - just dancing. Tom's mantra - by dancers for dancers. Malevito has a good post on "not" attending festivals.

Come to think of it, I don't write. One of my goals in this blog was to get more practice writing. Actually WRITING. Composing. Editing. Structuring. Literary type bullshit. That went out the window long ago. Pretty much every post has been off-the-cuff extemporaneous. Oh well. I'll write my masterpiece someday.

I ponder my addiction to tango. It "was" my life for mas o menos four years. (Sheesh, I just realized I'm at the five year mark.) Is this the normal tango maturation process? Where it's relegated to the back seat of our lives? Where it becomes about quality and not quantity? Where it becomes more about friendships and good solid connections than festival/milonga hopping to seek out the next tangasm? More about tango the community and the culture and less about tango the dance and the technical. Maturation or simply evolution?

I came out of the end of the tunnel of twenty-five years of married life and had a head-on collision with Argentine Tango. It saved me, I suppose. In a way. It saved me from my own oblivion. The oblivion of continuing on the path of the average white man with absolutely nothing in his life. (Excepting my beautiful, intelligent daughter of course.) I was living the upside-down life in Aspen, Colorado. Lost. Up shit creek without a paddle. Boxed in in a box canyon.

They say that you don't choose tango, that tango chooses you. They say that everyone who comes to tango has something missing in their life. Some key element that tango somehow fulfills, replaces, rejuvenates, substitutes, corrects, satiates, is the thumb-in-the-dike. The answer.

Tango has enriched my life in so many ways. This blog has enriched my life. I've made some great friends through this blog. Friends I look forward to getting to know much better. Friends I have yet to meet. There's the answer I was looking for in this post. Tango, and this blog, have enriched my life.

I have a life. There is true love and laughter in my life. There is growth in my life - where I was stagnant for so many years. There is deep, contented sleep in my life. I have a place on this Earth to finally put down a tap root. I have my health, and someone who cares about it. Thank God. So many people don't have this.

Tango is a part of that. Albeit a smaller part. I'm coming to grips with that these days, but I have a better understanding of what's going on having written this post.

That first post, two years ago, stated that I was going to use this blog simply as an archive for 'cool' tango stuff that I ran across. A repository. It grew into much more. A dear diary. A too-much-information, Alex. A soapbox. A diatribe-unal. Was that a quasi-Freudian slip? A diatribe-urinal? Pissing in the proverbial wind? I suppose I'll keep at it, struggling for something to write about, vacillating on an almost daily basis about whether to delete the damn thing.

Nine hundred forty-four posts. In two years. I've already said a lot of what I have to say on the subject of tango. And life. And the universe. You will have to dig deeply into the archives for the good stuff.

Thanks, friends and loved ones and kind readers. Thanks for being here. In this blog and in my life.

Now for that coffee.