It’s the end of Sunday, and I am closing out my pity party with a toast.

No, not avocado toast, a real toast—a wine toast. (Hold on, that is not fasting!)

• Cheers, dear readers, for assuring me that the $20 for this domain name, the $190 for personalized email service, the $140 for customized Zoom, the $90 for professional Canva, and the $350 for this website which I pay each year are not for nothing.

• Cheers for telling me that I am not the only person who reads (though doesn’t always proofread) the pieces I post.

• Cheers for letting me know that it is okay for me to write for myself and that, even when I think I am my only audience, I am not.

The practice of writing is a constant jostling of the same 26 letters. It’s all the words you already know and already used trying to arrange themselves into something new—a battle in which words and ideas push and jostle each other for relevance, freshness, and meaning not in themselves but in the space between.

Writing is both an act of catching motes from the ether and digging vessels from the ground. Earthing the fleeting and unearthing what was once in hand. An archaeology that mars the surface of the mundane with gouges of clarifying blackness.

• Cheers for helping me know that I knew that.