Even Less?

Your Bloguero notes that Andrew Sullivan has decided to quit blogging. He has two reasons:

The first is one I hope anyone can understand: although it has been the most rewarding experience in my writing career, I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight). That’s long enough to do any single job. In some ways, it’s as simple as that. There comes a time when you have to move on to new things, shake your world up, or recognize before you crash that burn-out does happen.

The second is that I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.

Sounds familiar. Your Bloguero has ruminated frequently on blog death. In fact, the demise of this blog. Would he just let the blog entries become further and further apart until one day there were no more? A fade out. Or would he write a farewell, a Good Bye Cruel World entry explaining himself and the end in detail? If only your Bloguero took himself and his output so seriously. Or his imagined significance to his readers.

And so this Blog limps along. Breathes shallowly. Seems to be sleeping. Or in a far deeper state of repose. Is it alive? Is it expiring? Will it stand up suddenly, Frankenstein like and bellow? That seems unlikely.

Meanwhile, your Bloguero has been listening to and thinking about winter night sounds. The sirens and the flashing blue and red lights. The car horns. The wind in the trees. And about radio signals, that invisible cloud in the sky. There is probably no more room for a novel or short story about that. David Foster Wallace, Daniel Alarcon having weighed in, there's not much left. Your Bloguero remembers how Jean Shepherd sounded half a century ago, but when he sits upright, awake in the dark, searching for the idea, your Bloguero cannot find it. Perhaps it will come.

Your Bloguero is working on a third novella. He can no more rush it than a cook can hurry a souffle.

The End of the Haiku Road

On New Year's day your Bloguero posted his 600th Facebook haiku. For now, it is his last. He felt it was enough. He stopped (for now). The repeated "for now" seems to have something to do with obsession.

He still has the odd habit of having a thought, thinking of a line and counting its syllables on his fingers, but that will pass soon enough. He hopes. That has something to do with obsession also.

In the meanwhile, he notices his present disinterest in "social media." This reveals itself in fewer and fewer blog postings (here and elsewhere), the end of the haiku project, few FB posts, an absence of tweets, a dirth of Instagram photos. Maybe it means that the next thing is about to arrive. Who knows what that will be? It might also mean that the "next thing" has already arrived, your Bloguero has missed it, and it has irretrievably passed him (and maybe you) by. This is a problem only if you or your Bloguero remains at all concerned about keeping current about the latest things. Or at least knowing what they are before the New York Times discovers them.