The inevitable pause in the conversation with myself

 Blogs--are, like, not a thing anymore.  Remember blogs?  Ha, you were born in the 90s.

I suppose the active ones foster a community.  People react; they react to others' reactions; a community grows around the content.  People do this elsewhere, now; Reddit, Instagram, other ones I never visit.  Who am I kidding, I don't really visit those either.

So then!  The venerable blog!  Where you must actually visit intentionally rather than stumble across some machine-elevated content.  How obscure!  How bespoke!  How analog.  How 2003.

(I am writing in an odd headspace.  I am writing to myself.  I'm also inescapably aware that others might eavesdrop on what my neurons say to each other.  I'm trading the privacy of inner thought for the clarity of written thought.  Without the tension of a potential unintended audience, I wouldn't write the same way--but it also restricts my range of motion.  Curious to observe the dueling pressures in my head.)

The inescapable trouble with blogs is that they are all temporary: they will close, collapse, become a time capsule for nostalgia.  Even those blogs not permanently abandoned will occasionally slip into hiatus.  For example: I posted once in the last six months.  To be fair, some of that is due to nuance and private writing versus public writing.  Dark thoughts & cranky moods and so on.

But when I compare this to the unending waterfall of content that drowns our consciousness in every corner of every social media outlet, a bit of silence doesn't seem so bad.  It's like having a real pause in the conversation, instead of talking to 6 year old kids.  Or, in my case, three of them.

Today at one point during dinner, all three kids wanted to express their opinion on some topic and there erupted such a shouting match that all I could do was raise an eyebrow and down another bite of sushi.  I just--well yeah.  Raise yourselves if it's gonna be this noisy.  I'll be the one on the couch having a nap.

So, anyway--Giving the ol' blog a good dusting-off, getting a feather duster back there in the cracks, laughing at my younger, better, wiser self, indulging in the moment of introspection ... overall, I think I appreciate the occasional moment (or, uh, six months) of silence.

My other neuron agrees.  It's unanimous.

March 2022