Taking a Microblogging Break

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Greetings Gentle Reader,

Decided to take a break from the social media sites.  I’m tired of the election noise, even though I’m lucky to have followings/followers who share my views.  I think I’m tired of the echo chamber because of the feeling that the sound, however favorable, is never escaping.

Interesting bit about pumping a lot of sound into a bounded area is that it will heat things up.  But it takes an absolutely astonishing amount of noise—a jet engine’s worth—in a small box to make human-detectable heating.  Add that to the futility above.

It’s time to return here and be more thoughtful.

The first thought that occurs is the anniversary of the birth of my friend Glen who got me started blogging.  I’m phrasing it that way because Glen died a few years ago.  I miss his weird and calm humor.  I also owe him a continuing debt, a regret I didn’t jump on a grenade I just kind of kicked over into a hole.

Elsewhere on here I do some musing on 22 years of blogging.  I appreciate Glen getting me statted on the habit, however poorly I may be doing it.

I need to do better at editing.  Good writing is the result of even better editing.  By switching from incredibly expensive and singular machines to reproduce for publication to a system where the content-consumers own a percentage of the effort needed to distribute, we’ve “democratized” written communications.  Side effect is the lower bar to entry means lower quality of stuff entering.  Typos are normalized.  Grammar is mad at grampa.  And I write for me (the writer) and not you, the reader.

Time and things to work on.  As winter gave us a little preview yesterday, and temperatures appear to have really and truly abandoned the illusion of stretching summer, I’m making an effort to set my mind to treating winter as “Type 2 Fun.”

I’ve begun to put aside dreams of buying a camper and hitting the road for warmer places in the winter because the carbon emissions would be terrible.  I know that the real carbon criminals are the corporations and industries we refuse to regulate just like the billionaires we refuse to tax back into citizenry.  And for the same reasons.  If I’m to live up to that, I need to treat winter as a bounded pain in the ass.  Ok, wait, better than that, as delayed fun.  (That’s the Type 2.)

I know it’s going to be cold, I think I need to just get down with that.  Long johns all the time might be a start.  Heavier socks, even though I really don’t like them. Maybe more knit caps, to wear indoors.  I have a lot of unused sweaters, probably time to deploy them.  Snow-removal is something I should get out of the business of, while I hate my snowblower with the heat of a thousand suns, I actually like snow-clearing as an exercise.  Given a fortune I’ll never have, I’d love to spend my winter days in a metropolitan tractor doing random acts of snow clearing.  I just need to treat each event at home as an individual event to not get mad and frustrated over.  I know the limits of a single-stage snowblower intimately.  (Jesus christ, Wirecutter should just advertise their bribe-rates for product placement….uh, I meant “review.”)  But that’s not changing, it’s simply not worth the money to replace it for the tiny improvement.  Use the money to buy snow clearing services next year.  Time to make this the first winter without (quite as much) discontent.