Starting Again

I had a call yesterday from one of the very few regular contributors to this site (Left Coast Rob) wondering what had happened to me. Had I quit writing and if so why? He said (kindly) that he missed the posts.

Yes, I have (or at least had) quit. I have written a couple of posts that are still saved as "drafts" in Blogger, but the last actual post was almost exactly 3 months ago.

There are a host of reasons for this. Partly, it is hard work trying to find something interesting or useful to say on a regular basis. Partly it is becuase, toward the end, I had been writing primarily for Billy Bob, but learned that he could no longer get accesss to the site. Partly is was that, for the most part, it all felt like I was talking to myself: mental masturbation performed in public, as it were. (To complete the metaphor, I have continued to "massage my mind for my own amusement" over the last few months, but have done so mostly in private ;-)).

Mainly, though, I quit writing becuase I kept finding I had nothing new to say. A year or so of blogging has brought home to me, in a forceful way, how little things change even over the course of a year, to say nothing of day-to-day or week-to-week, which is the time frame for a blog. There is always new news, of course. We are bombarded by it. But the underlying issues and the things people say about them are always the same. Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine, the conflict with Islamo-facisim, social security, neo-conservatism, gay marriage/rights, stem cell reserach, religious fundamentalism,pollitics in general, etc. etc. I have written myself out on all of these issues. And, at least in the absence of dialogue, once you have said what you have to say on a given issue, what is the point of saying it again? After all, who wants to be as tiresomely repetitive as Maureen Dowd?

But recently, the urge to write has come upon me again, spurred in part by my wife who, though she hadn't been all that pleased with the amount of time I had been spending on the blog when I was doing it, has now concluded that it at least beats my spending the same amount of time (or more) playing spades on Yahoo or on-line poker -- which (in case anyone from NSA is checking)I am no longer playing by the way. So, the call from Rob caught me at a moment of weakeness, and I decided maybe I'd try again.

We'll see how it goes.