It’s good to be back.
So, Chris, what’s up with this blog? I mean, don’t you have another blog? (Or two?)
Yeah, yeah, I do. Thanks for asking. I’ve sort of stopped using those other blogs. So that’s what this blog is about: it’s about not blogging. It’s like when you buy a gym membership and then don’t go to the gym, so you buy an exercise bike for your home, partly so you get get in shape to go to the gym (oh, the irony), and partly just to trick yourself into exercising: if there’s that much exercise equipment around, you’re bound to exercise eventually, just by accident, tripping over the treadmill or whatever.
And so it is with blogs. Or so I’m hoping. Everywhere I go there’s a blog and if I’m not going to write in that one, then maybe I’ll write in this one instead.
Poor you, having to sift through all that.
(Lucky for you, there is no you: so far, I don’t think anyone even knows this blog exists. In the vacuum of blogspace, no one can hear me scream.)
I have blog fatigue. I also have Facebook fatigue, Twitter fatigue, work fatigue, and even stay-at-home fatigue. I’m spending more and more of my days on long hikes (see below), cooking elaborate meals, working a garden, and, finally, recently, reading.
Again.
Finally.
(It’s a special kind of person who responds to blog fatigue by creating a new blog, and I am that type of person.)
What I’m learning from this phase of the life cycle is that I very much wanted (needed?) to slow down. The Internet is not conducive to slowing down (duh). I needed (wanted?) to re-wire my brain, to make it a little less dependent on the gratification of a new email, a new @ mention, a new “Like.”
And what’s doing that for me, recently, is reading.
I’d tell you what I’m reading (though there is no you), except my point here is McLuhanesque: the content of these books matters a little, but matters a lot less than the process of reading, and how this forces me to unplug, and to immerse myself in a different kind of thinking, and thereby access some neglected recesses of my hardening brain.
Where was I? Oh, that’s right: I was online, blogging.
It’s good to be back. (Sort of.)
