Spread Again

Where I live there are a lot of furniture store commercials. They're always opening or going out of business. One store has been trumpeting its grand opening of a new store: I think it's been opening for about six years now.

I'd like to start with some kudos to myself for mentioning that I was shutting down to begin with. I'm amazed at how many blogs just end abruptly, like a film without a final reel. Imagine watching Goldfinger. James Bond has just arrived in Kentucky and met Pussy Galore. Then--nothing.

Or Butch and Sundance have just taken jobs as payroll guards, and they're looking for bandits. Strother Martin spits in disgust and announces, "morons! I've got morons on my team. Nobody is going to rob us going down the mountain. We have got no money going down the mountain. When we have got the money, on the way back , then you can sweat." *spit* "Bingo."

Then nothing.

There's a wonderful short story by Mary Ladd Gavell called "The Rotifer" (I highly recommend it), and in it there's a sequence where the narrator talks of being a grad student, going through a prominent family's old papers in the library. She's reading letters and gets caught up in a family drama from a century earlier. The letters abruptly end with no conclusion, and she's left hanging. What happened? All the participants are long dead and gone, and what survives is the record. She'll never know what happened.

It's the same with these blogs. What happened to the author? Did he or she die? Or in a debilitating accident? Did an important family member, friend or even an employer discover it and exert massive pressure to end it? Or was it that the person simply locked himself out of the account and cannot get back in? (Been there, done it, bought the t-shirt.) Or did the person simply lose interest, which is the most likely explanation.

The first example is the most excusable, but even then I remember an occasion where this sort of thing happened, and word got back to us so that we knew. For all other cases (except a lock-out), just a note saying "that's it, I'm done. I'm busy / have other commitments / spouse doesn't approve, etc." would be really nice.

It's bad enough when I find a blog I like that ended a year ago. But it's worse with active blogs that just suddenly end with no comment at all, because I keep checking back to see if there's a new post, and there's nothing, nothing, nothing. It's like being stood up on a date every Saturday night for a year.

So back to the subject at hand. My personal life has settled down again and I have the time and inclination to post here again. The schedule will be once a weekend; could be more, but that will be the least. That's my goal.

And for latecommers, the mission statement is that I'm simply using this to vent thoughts on a variety of topics. The subtitle says "things I wouldn't say in real life" and that's still true. But beyond sex and politics (and I'm largely apathetic on the latter, so not so much of that), I'm actually interested in a variety of topics, knowledgable about a few, and I can fake the rest.

I've been writing down things to post about on scrap paper. I've got something about being horny at inopportune times, debt culture, podcasts, the generation gap (that suggests how old I am. Maybe I'll post something about Hi-Fi equipment too) and targeted advertising. I had a couple more I didn't write down; hopefully I'll remember them soon.

So there it is. Welcome back. Miss me? And please, please, if you have a blog of your own and you quit updating it, spend 2 minutes and write a farewell so we're not hanging by our left nuts in suspense.