Phoenix

I have been trying to kill this blog.

Kill it?

You bet. Posting to this site has been a revelatory experience for me. I was having a hard time understanding the pressure I felt to post, the angst I was feeling by the lack of significant response, and my growing addiction and anger at watching the rankings list to see where I was showing up, being surpassed by sudden bursts of speed from blogs I’d never heard of that seemed to materialize high on the list from nowhere. This finally got to be too much. One of the demons which besets a person in my line of work is the concern that nobody’s paying attention, or, at best, that you’re preaching to the choir, the converted, whatever. We long to make a dent in the status quo and at the same time find ourselves concerned that the status quo will not give up or at the very worst, they will rebel at hearing stuff that shakes them up. I’ve done both. I’ve been cuffed from both sides. I have worried about someone not being in church on a particular Sunday and wondered whether it was something I said the previous Sunday. Over time, I have opted for the shake up side in the churches. But these and a multitude of other demons still haunt me from time time and they were beginning to take over my writing here as well. I didn’t like what I was feeling. I started writing here simply to write whatever I wanted. I also wanted to shake some things up. But I have discovered that most of my readers think like me, and the odd dissenting voice that comes through here usually sallies forth with a vitriole that typifies the polarized atmosphere in which we now live, response to which is an impossibility, except in kind which gets us nowhere.

There was only one thing to do. Like the horror movies where the protagonist realizes that the only way to kill the demons possessing him or her was to kill the body, knowing that the spirit would live on, I walked away from this thing, intent on letting it die on the vine. No warning, no long post saying I had bigger and better things to do. I didn’t. I just hated the blog, what it had become, what I was becoming. It had become something I had never intended and it was consuming me, even in the increasingly infrequent postings of the present day. I decided I was going to let the thing drop off the Top 100 list (after two months, it’s getting very close and the momentum may be enough to carry it through the floor) so there’d be no reason to look there. Going cold turkey made the demons scream for a time, but they have gone now and, having had brief discussions with Art Jacobson and Melanie Matson, and having had a wanted poster stuck up on Dr. Omed’s Lost Boys site, I think I’m ready to come back to posting occasionally. But it’s going to be now and then, and it’s going to be what I feel like, the responses be damned. I’ve learned at my churches (some time ago) that I have to preach what the Spirit preaches within me and that works well. Somehow, I didn’t translate that to here. Perhaps the anonymity of it all was the first seduction, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I am, I hope, returning to posting to a resurrected blog, raised to a new life of saying what I want, what I think, and perhaps pissing off a few more than I have in the past. My hope is that a reasonable dialogue can emerge from that, but I won’t count on it. More importantly, this time, I don’t care.

Thanks to Art, Mel, and Doc for their counsel and for reminding me that when we get lost, there are still some folks out there who care about where you are.

8:34:00 PM   Lay some on me []