Tuesdays With Abhorrent Fiends vol. 38 (final edition?)

This blog has been up for almost four years now, which is a heckuva long time for a blog. I know it's only been a few days since I last posted, but I've been thinking about a lot of stuff in those few days.

People react to life changes in many different ways, and one of my reactions to Dad's death was to throw myself more firmly into work. To "buy in" in the sense of becoming emotionally committed to an organization in a way I've never really done before. I've seen other people who go through the motions, don't invest their emotions in their roles at work, and end up hopping from job to job in a vain search for that perfect "government work" type position where they can get adequately paid for doing virtually nothing at all. Some do find it. I've seen other people commit heedlessly or thoughtlessly, pouring themselves into job roles where their talents may be misused or where people of the first type abuse them shamelessly until they're burned out. Some of those, too, get lucky and find a job where neither the manipulation nor the risk of burnout is severe enough to grind them to a halt.

Perhaps that dead Greek guy was right (don't recall whether it was Aristotle or Plato) that virtue lies in the median between the two extremes of any quality a person can have. Then let us say I've moved a smidge closer to the "job commitment" pole of the spectrum in search of virtue.

Leaving the question of virtue aside, this development has had the effect of vastly reducing my internet time. I had been accustomed all through my work life to getting the bulk of my websurfing time on the job. Maybe the lack of a second computer at home has decreased my web time. Maybe it's just that I have Dave there, with whom I can chill and hang out for long periods of time without strain, as opposed to Dad, from whom I did tend to hide a bit after the first two or three hours of nightly discourse. (Discourse in this case mostly means listening.)

So I am starting to ask myself, have I really got the minerals to support two blogs? I mostly need a blog, in practice, as a reasonably safe and central place to store any poetry or lyrics I happen to come up with. Considering the beginnings of this blog and the mental territory it has traversed, is this the representation of myself I want to put forward? However nice it may make me feel to imagine all that is an expression of "cards on the table" honesty, I wonder if it isn't something closer to intellectual mastrubation. Because you, the handful of people who actually bother to read the thing, are there because you like me as a real person. Not because my text is germane to the interests you are pursuing in your own life.

And maybe that, too, is another thought that's been leading me down this track. I've had a good run with my blog being my personal brainvomit station. It has been a very important therapeutic tool. But having a blog as a therapeutic tool isn't enough anymore.

It rather amuses me that what bubbled this post up out of my emotional soup on the matter was something that happened over at Accidental Historian. Some guy who Geds had reason to know from real life (I'll spare the details) took it into his head to leave religiony comments on some posts. These were not content-rich comments; rather the jist of them went something like, "I'm going to completely ignore the points you are attempting to make, restructure the discussion according to my pet definitions, and then condescendingly chide you for not toeing the moral line I have helpfully imputed here for you." None of my comments over there actually altered the discussion, to be sure. As I said to Dave yesterday, I got all amped up and took it into my head that the level of discourse could be raised, when I should have stuck to observed facts and participated in lowering it.

What that tells me about me is that I yearn for hatting. Pine for it. The mere presence of a reasonably articulate troll sent me into spasms of text. Not that I should feel bad about my reaction exactly--look at the example of the great discoursers of Western history. Socrates had an endless stream of trollish Athenians of wealth and influence (not to mention youth and stupidity) to spark his mischievous Muse. Shakespeare had Spencer and Will Kemp and all the other leading lights of the Elizabethan theater circuit, who all fought tooth and nail for market share and hung onto legal legitimacy by the skin of their teeth. (But oh, did Elizabethans ever have skin on their teeth.) Even the mighty Jesus had the Pharisees to kick around.

But they all went out and earned their own debate partners, both the noble wit-matchers and the blustering trolls. I should not be attempting to bogart the trolls of my friends! I should be attracting my own with the irresistible lure of my shiny content!

Which means I should probably be doing it somewhere else. Not here, where some of the painfullest and most ludicrous of my thoughts and deeds are recorded right here in gray and white (formerly tan and darker tan).

I believe that it is time for me to consider either moving to my other blog in its entirely, or deactivating both and inaugurating a new blog. A blog of splendor and magnificence. A blog worthy to be my workbook 2.0 for my next big project now that I've finished denizen and CONSUMER--my first-ever prose project. A blog worthy, in short, of the Anatomy of Trust.