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.

Tuning Out

Every month about this time, the NY Times e-mails me (and its other online subscribers) a list of the 10 most e-mailed articles for the last 30 days or so. This list always intrigues me, less becuase of an interest in the articles themselves (although I do occasionslly find something intriguing that I missed) than becuase of what the list seems to say about the interests of the (amittedly unrepresentative) on-line readership of the New York Times.

This month's list was peculiarly suggestive. There was not one article on Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, the Palestinians, Somalia, Iran or Korea. Nor were there any articles on spying, or immigration, or detainees, or military tribunals, or flag burning or "defense of marrriage" amendments, or any of the other subjects that so consume those in Washington and the blogosphere. There was also not one editorial or op-ed piece. The readers, in short, found almost nothing in the entire news or editorial sections of the NY Times to be worth sharing with others.
The four most popular articles were, in order:

1.What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage,

2.At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust,

3.Star Jones Reynolds's Departure From 'The View', and

4.Rogue Giants at Sea (a story about freak ocean waves).

Of the other six "most popular" articles, two were about Ken Lay's death, one about the man who blew up his multi-million dollar NY townhouse rather than give it to his estranged wife, one about Google, and one about the bizarre end to the World Cup. Of the ten, the only one that might begin to qualify as "news" (at least as I define it) was this, coming in at number 7: Surprising Jump in Tax Revenues Is Curbing Deficit .

What do I make of this? Probably too much. But it does seem to suggest that people -- even the types that read the NY Times -- have simply tuned out. The purient and perverse (Ken Lay, the NY town house, Star Jones Reynolds, and the Zidane head-butt incident) will catch their interest, as will forces of nature (rogue waves and Google), the counter-intuitve (female dominance in college) and the simply bizarre (Shamu on marriage). But the only "news" readers see fit to share with others is the rare bit of good news (whoops! the deficit is coming down a bit). The rest is so unrelentingly bad that, even if it is read, forwarding it to people who may have had the good fortune to avoid it would be bad manners or worse: "Hey Joe. Just in case you didn't hear, there were 120 peoplke killed in Iraq yesterday. Have a nice day."

I find myself doing the same thing. I look at the headlines and flinch. I feel like it is "important," but I have to make myself read even a couple paragraphs. Mostly, I skip anything beyond the headline and go off ot look, usually fruitlessly, for something upbeat or new or surprising to actually read.

In part, at least, this is what lies behind my month-long hiatus in posting here. In particular, my enthusisam for "Billy Bob's Bulletins" had been considerably dampened. In posting the headlines about Iraq, or other events that might impact Billy Bob, I feel like a one-man morale buster. It is probably hard enough for someone in Billy Bob's position to stay positive without having someone like me making it even easier to see how f@%*ed up everything is right now.

There is lots going on, but it is all so damn depressing that the thought of "sharing" it with others makes my skin crawl.

The Hiatus

It's been nearly a month since I posted anything. For part of that time I was on vacation sans internet access, but I must confess as well to a bit of ennui. No one except Left Coast Rob seemed even to notice, so it didn't seem all that important. And besides, the news is so unrelentingly depressing that it's hard even to think about it much, let alone write about it.

But, Billy Bob seems now to have access again, so I transferred the last four days of Billy Bob's Bulletins I did (June 12 to 16) back here from the alternative site I had set up and decided to get my sorry ass back in gear again.

Just to work slowly back into it, here are some cartoons I have seen over the past few days that made me smile:













Also, I think the cover of this week's Economist is a hoot: