I’ve been thinking a lot about my poor old blog. Metaphor will be 17 years old in March. It began as a venue on Blog City, to excoriate George W Bush and the evil wrought by his “shock and awe” attack on Baghdad in 2003. Many of the oldest posts have been lost to the dyspeptic digestions of the Internet, as the blog moved from place to place.
I used to write posts about writing tech pretty often. They’re called apps now but for a while I was a minor champion of FOSS, Free and Open Source Software. Then a couple of years ago, I was spending so much time trying to ferret out and build a system of apps to enhance my productivity that I grew sick of the whole pursuit. I hit a wall and became disenchanted with personal technology as the solution to my challenges. We all have to use what works for us and productivity apps on my iPhone weren’t working for me.
On the rebound, I fell in love again with analog. In summer 2017 I learned about the Bullet Journal method and gradually adapted it to my needs. Late that year, I found pocket notebooks, then got into pencils in 2018. Those are my hobbies now, and the tools I use for my primary avocation, writing.
I still write, mostly poems, and from time to time I’ll post one here. But it has become obvious that the blog can’t survive on my occasional poems. I need to generate other content. As I’ve said before, I really don’t want to let Metaphor die, as so many blogs have. But it’s not flourishing. It’s time for a change.
“Without change, something sleeps inside us and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”
– Frank Herbert
I sat down with my notebook and pencil. I made a list of prospective blog themes that interest me.
- Poems and poetry
- Books I’m reading
- Philosophy, especially stoicism
- Consciousness and its myriad deployments
- Personal development, especially mental focus and clarity
- Analog, especially reading and writing tools and their use
- Writer’s block
- Journaling
- Random observations
- Worthy content I find on my TV and other devices; e.g., good movies
- Brookie, my dog (she has a mostly-forgotten blog and a tumblr, I think)
You’ll notice a few common blog topics are not mentioned:
- Politics
- Current events
- Personalities
- Food and drink
- Style
- My digestive regularity and other effluent; e.g., the executive branch of the US government
- My opinions on other people’s lives
It’s my thinking that deciding what to think about, and what’s not worth our time, is the first task of an entity that comes to the realization that it is sentient. I don’t think about Hair Furor and his golden golf cart, except when I’m conscious of the fact that I’m not thinking about him. There are plenty of brains drowning in that obsession; mine’s not going down with the ship. If you think it’s my civic duty, sorry not sorry.
OK, I’ll admit it: when he’s actually doing damage, hurting people, I f**king care very much. I’m literally a card-carrying member of the ACLU and the SPLC. I care deeply about human and civil rights, including those of LGBTQ persons and immigrants. I just have no near-term plans to write about this, as far as you know.
So that’s my thinking today about what to do with the blog. Some of those themes in the first list are sort of trending culturally, based on my myopic perceptions. If any of them resonate (great newly-overused term!) with you, please click like on this post to let me know. Leave a comment please, if we share interests. I’d be glad to see Metaphor become more of a place of dialog, less a lectern of unchallenged mediocrity.
Thanks for reading this!
Metaphor 