My Buddy sent me a link to a commentary by my all time favorite blogger, Andrew Sullivan, in which he takes oodles and oodles of verbiage to explain among other things how blogging and the Internet became addictive and nearly killed him. I only got through the beginning of it.
I was addicted to Sullivan’s blog almost as severely as he was addicted to publishing it and updating it every half hour for days, and then years on end. It was a brilliant filter of everything that was happening but impossible for any person to sustain and keep their sanity. My favorite thing about it was Sullivan’s willingness, in between bouts of acerbic take downs, to fess up when he was off or even flat out wrong. I try to do that althought on a more modest basis here in Lincolndemocrat.
Unlike Sullivan I never got to the point where I stopped reading books although my guess is even when he gave up reading he still managed to read a lot more books than me. I’m overjoyed if I get ten books (serious books) read in a year. I also take holidays from posting blogs but if they go on too long I do start getting the yips. But breaks are good. My two-month long hiatus around the time of my trip to Jerusalem gave me more time to reflect.
Well, my blog just kicked me off and cost me a couple of paragraphs. I’ve lost the thread. I wrote something about how I do my writing, editing and updating online so that my readers can see blog posts long before they are finished or presentable. I do the same thing when I make snowsculptures in my front yard. Over the course of a couple days they will go from an amorphous white lump to something at least marginally recognizable to passerby.
BTW Sullivan’s commentary was interspersed with famous paintings like the one above tinkered with to place cell phones in them. Yup, life is a constant barrage of mind numbing data. Ah for the good old days with just three networks with television news. We may even, in some measure, have been better informed back then with less data. At least Republicans and Democrats could still intermarry.
Gotta go. My cell phone just made a noise.
