So Dave has dialed back to one-a-week, and now TBogg is apparently checking out, at least for the time being. Too bad, but ultimately it happens to everyone who decides to tie on the butcher's apron and set about the gruesome work of cleaving offal from meat. After some time, everything looks like roadkill, and there's only so many ways you can cook roadkill.
I don't know if it means anything or nothing, if it's a signal that "blogging," whatever that means, has (let's say) an attenuated utility at this point, in this vaunted era of twittardery and daily outrages and not thinking or talking through much of anything. For the record, I don't believe that that is the case; I think there remains a sizable audience for thoughtful commiseration, for whom 140 characters doesn't quite cut it.
So folks are welcome to come here or go there or whatever's clever. Reading the "please don't go" comments in anyone's GBCW missive is a lot like listening to someone bemoan the cancellation of their favorite teevee show, or the breakup of their favorite group. As if there aren't plenty more of each out there, of comparable or even greater talent and vitality. (In fact, since the past-due dismantlement of the networks and record companies, there's more great stuff than ever. There's also more shit than ever. As always, it's up to you, Tonstant Weader, to discern which from which.)
Asking people to stay on in any line of work -- especially the creative line -- is an invitation to eventual crushing disappointment. You know what the Beatles or Zeppelin would have been like if they'd pressed on? They'd have sucked; they'd have lamely cadged slivers of mediocrity on the remnants of past greatness. Perhaps nowhere else do the laws of diminishing returns (or expectations) have such impact.
Perhaps in some cases, walking away is also a tacit acknowledgement of the facts of the game -- that the writer, who presumably seeks at least some measure of legitimacy and/or efficacy, is basically the Ultimate Salmon, swimming against the impossible current of abject ignorance. For the political blogger, it's impossible to ignore that in the aggregate, politicians generally reflect their constituencies.
You can try to convince yourself that it's the fault of gerrymandering, a lazy or complicit media, money buying power, etc. And you'd be right. But at the end of the day, it comes down to dipshits being easily baited into voting against themselves. And no quantity of tilts against windmills will change that.
So you press on for the folks who do pay attention, who give a shit about something besides the tips of their noses. But they're fewer and farther between, and there are always more distractions. After all, there's probably another season of Duck Dynasty or some such gearing up right this here second.
(Not that I'm necessarily high-minded in my choice of entertainment -- the only reason I bother to watch The Newsroom is that I would absolutely wreck Olivia Munn.)
Anyway, hang in there, I have more to yap about in the near future, and should at least make the 10th anniversary of The Hammer come 1/1/15, which is closer than it might appear tonight. We have things to discuss, to disparage, to defame and decry, and as a famous cartoon character once said, I have not yet begun to fart. Or fight. Whatever. The Ultimate Salmon swims on, despite the odds.
I don't know if it means anything or nothing, if it's a signal that "blogging," whatever that means, has (let's say) an attenuated utility at this point, in this vaunted era of twittardery and daily outrages and not thinking or talking through much of anything. For the record, I don't believe that that is the case; I think there remains a sizable audience for thoughtful commiseration, for whom 140 characters doesn't quite cut it.
So folks are welcome to come here or go there or whatever's clever. Reading the "please don't go" comments in anyone's GBCW missive is a lot like listening to someone bemoan the cancellation of their favorite teevee show, or the breakup of their favorite group. As if there aren't plenty more of each out there, of comparable or even greater talent and vitality. (In fact, since the past-due dismantlement of the networks and record companies, there's more great stuff than ever. There's also more shit than ever. As always, it's up to you, Tonstant Weader, to discern which from which.)
Asking people to stay on in any line of work -- especially the creative line -- is an invitation to eventual crushing disappointment. You know what the Beatles or Zeppelin would have been like if they'd pressed on? They'd have sucked; they'd have lamely cadged slivers of mediocrity on the remnants of past greatness. Perhaps nowhere else do the laws of diminishing returns (or expectations) have such impact.
Perhaps in some cases, walking away is also a tacit acknowledgement of the facts of the game -- that the writer, who presumably seeks at least some measure of legitimacy and/or efficacy, is basically the Ultimate Salmon, swimming against the impossible current of abject ignorance. For the political blogger, it's impossible to ignore that in the aggregate, politicians generally reflect their constituencies.
You can try to convince yourself that it's the fault of gerrymandering, a lazy or complicit media, money buying power, etc. And you'd be right. But at the end of the day, it comes down to dipshits being easily baited into voting against themselves. And no quantity of tilts against windmills will change that.
So you press on for the folks who do pay attention, who give a shit about something besides the tips of their noses. But they're fewer and farther between, and there are always more distractions. After all, there's probably another season of Duck Dynasty or some such gearing up right this here second.
(Not that I'm necessarily high-minded in my choice of entertainment -- the only reason I bother to watch The Newsroom is that I would absolutely wreck Olivia Munn.)
Anyway, hang in there, I have more to yap about in the near future, and should at least make the 10th anniversary of The Hammer come 1/1/15, which is closer than it might appear tonight. We have things to discuss, to disparage, to defame and decry, and as a famous cartoon character once said, I have not yet begun to fart. Or fight. Whatever. The Ultimate Salmon swims on, despite the odds.
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