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.

The Haiku Road

I know how it began. In high school someone showed me haikus by Basho. They were unbelievably profound. So some classmates and I tried writing them.  Eventually, the novelty wore off. We stopped.  Fast forward to the New York Times Haiku contest in 2014. I forgot to enter it.  But in April, fed up with pictures of cats, brunch and boobs, I decided that Facebook was best used for photos of the sky and haikus.  I don’t know exactly how this idea arose. Maybe Twitter was better because then the little poems would disappear in an ocean of words, never to be seen again. Oh well.  After a while, I lost count of how many I had posted, so I put a number on each one, like a upc on an organic tomato.

I continue. Today I posted number 471.

Why do I continue? A great question that deserves a legitimate answer. Unfortunately, I don’t have one.  Maybe it’s a sign of my obsession.  Maybe it’s because there is no logical stopping point. Maybe I’m deriving some special benefit from these.  Maybe it’s simple. I enjoy it. And I was right, Facebook is a great place for collecting Haiku. And it’s contagious: some of the comments have themselves been haiku.  That’s wonderful.

Is there some benefit from this? I hope so. I was stuck on the manuscript for a novella. I haven’t worked on it for a few months.  But I notice that all of the haiku are gently loosening up whatever obstructions there are in the manuscript. We’ll see whether I go back to it, or whether it becomes one of those projects that just gets abandoned.