whatever, I guess

Music: Rosetta Stone: Foundation Stones (1993)

I'm never wont for something to say---or wanting to say something; tonight is no exception. It's just that I'm tired, and wanting something to say and having the focus to say it---to belly up to the responsibility of focus---sometimes doesn't line-up. That sayerly asymmetry produces, at times, some fairly interesting insights, or some naked feelings around or about the edges of words (or tired, slippery fingering about the presumably poetic, which I worry is more likely the pretentious display). I've noticed lately my time alone with a screen has diminished, which means I'm busier than I was in the past, and so I thought tonight I would set aside some time---after laundering and packing---to blog about things I've been working on (a talk on Jeremiah Wright's rhetoric), or today's seminar (about Judith Butler), or the state of educational politics in Texas. And I have a lot to say about those things. But sitting down I just think: I want to smoke a pipe of black cavandish and surf the Tubes and read my friend's blogs before I hit the sack.

Put simply: I feel guilt for not blogging more in recent months.

It's as if I'm letting my reflective self down. I don't have a large audience here, I know. I mostly have been blogging these here thirteen years or so for myself; the narcissistic echo-chamber of blogging is well acknowledged. Still, I've been going at this steadily for so long---on average two posts a week---that my drop off in bloggish productivity is starting to wear on my sense of connectedness. I started blogging in 1998 on Livejournal, and this blog debuted in 2002 upon my move to Louisiana (the name of the blog is derived from a confederate soldier's recipe for mint julips). Not writing for the anonymous audience enough seems like I'm letting myself down in some weird way.

I'm not sure how to explain the feeling, except that I've said a whole lotta nothin' in its honor just now.

It's true I have less time to do this than I did before. But it's also true that I'm more keenly aware of the ways in which bald expression has consequences that I cannot predict. The democratization of expression (mostly because of Intertube technology) yields access at the same moment that it makes it possible to be policed. I'm thinking my busy-ness is not the only reason why blogging has shrinked. Some part of me has solidified the censor--odious censor, but the sentry is there. And I cannot keep pace with my past energies; I'm getting slower, in thinking and in doing.

It's age, yes (gack! 38!). But it's also a growing sense of emotional equity, of wanting to talk with you instead of at you. That is to say, as I want to get away from "me" and move toward "you"; I have much less of a compulsion to say this here.

That means I'm increasingly tired, but also increasingly less pissed-off. I hope that also means that I'm not resigned, just better connected.