This is almost it – our second annual summer hiatus is practically at hand and I cannot wait! The last day of new blog posts for the season will be this Saturday, June 30, 2018. Then we will go dark until September. Those four remaining posts will hopefully see you through the summer days, and there are more than enough links in each of them to keep you well-occupied should you miss this place.
Personally, I won’t miss it much. While I love writing and creating content, the promotion of these posts is done mostly through social media, which of late is a nasty place to visit. Taking a break from here will enable me to take a break from there. FaceBook and Twitter are both being taken over by dark forces, and though I fight back as much as possible, I’ve been finding more joy in the simple pleasures of pictures on Instagram. That’s where I may be spending most of my online time this summer, so watch that space and follow!
As for this site, I recently spent some time outlining a rough long-range trajectory for the rest of its time here. All things, good and bad, must eventually come to an end. Nothing lasts forever. The temporal nature of life, especially online life, has been on my mind. Someday this blog will end, at least my part in it. In the past, I’ve sort of skirted and avoided the topic because ending something is often a sad affair, and the thought of being forced to stop doing something I love is not pleasurable. But this labor of love is indeed laborious, and after last summer’s break I realized there was a lot to accomplish when I didn’t need to worry about writing thousands of words a week. I’ll always find a creative outlet as that is my way of surviving such a mundane world, but it need not be here. Merely keeping a diary is enough. That said, there is something to sharing things with those who want to listen and who might relate to something I’ve said. For now, I’m not quite ready to give that up. I do, however, see that this endeavor has an end date, and for perhaps one of the first times I am facing that and stating it now. There is an exhilaration in such a declaration, and I hope it gives this blog, when it returns in the fall, a renewed jolt of inspiration and urgency.
I’ve been doing this since 2003. This website is over fifteen years old. It’s a dinosaur among dinosaurs. If we liken the lifespan of the blog to the seasonal cycle, I’d gauge us at somewhere within the fall portion of the year. We’ve had our spring and summer, and we are beyond the half-way point of its existence as far as I can see. The good thing is that fall and winter carry their own charms and enticements, some of which are richer than anything spring or summer can conjure. Good things are yet to come.
