I ain't gone, I'm just...
I'm trying to tamp down a family argument that almost got me thrown out of ANOTHER place to live, which would make it twice in six months, and... while I think I'm making progress on that front, my grandmother's in her second day in the ICU. And we're still working on getting my car fixed after my girlfriend parked it in front of a library with the GPS on the dash and the inevitable smash-and-grab that inevitably greeted her when she came back out with the Twilight novella.
In the face of these predicaments, making like Albert Brooks in "Defending Your Life" is crushing enough, let alone actually working on writing.
I appreciate the offers of help and I might eventually follow through on them but, right now, feeling like I'm letting people down by not immediately engaging their kind offers and/or getting feelings of inadequacy piled on top of feelings of inadequacy by people who misread my personality as being spurred by negative reinforcement when there is nothing that motivates me less than having my ten thousand previous mistakes pointed out... these things are counterproductive to short and long term goals equally.
However, maybe this is the simplest explanation for Achewood: the author fucked up a little bit and fell enough behind where all attempts to dig out make him feel even worse because he can't fix it all immediately/without disheartening criticism/easily/without-secondary-setbacks and so he's just spinning further and further down a shame spiral.
Which, of course, makes me empathize with Onstad to the point where my internal quip "he only said Monday afternoon, not THIS Monday afternoon" is significantly less funny to me.