"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx
So it seems this joint gets updated monthly which is quite different from several times a day as it once was.
And we are still debating whether to keep going or to roll this up into one of the other blogs out there which also seems to be part of a common theme.
Next week marks the official start of this blogging journey, 20 years of random thoughts and crazy stories.
Think I ought to work on putting something special together for that.
If you are truly lucky you’re awake when your dog starts barking at midnight. Awake so that you are not so far into sleep to wonder if it is a dream and if you should rouse yourself.
And when you do wander the house with him you can feel pretty good about what you find or don’t find lurking in the dark.
But there is still that sense from childhood when you remember the feeling that something might be out there just far enough away to hide itself from your furry friend but close enough to find a way inside.
So you thank him for his vigilance and tell him to keep watch while you try to sleep because morning will come too soon.
I ate well over the holidays and had a feeling that I was getting myself into trouble but I ignored it.
It is my own fault. I had really turned things around and I felt like I was on a great track and then there was mix of my own cockiness and failure to remember I am not 25.
I could have gotten away with it then because I could make a few adjustments and turn it on at the gym and the body responded.
This body responds still, but not like it once did and not without accepting that we aren’t who we once were and can’t act like we still are.
So I did this to myself, not making excuses.
Am I being honest or am I being hard on myself?
I can still turn it around, we haven’t passed the land of no return but it is going to take some work. I am irritated with myself and having to be more concerned about some changes because of aging.
But it is a privilege, getting older that is and one that I need to treat better.
Starts today, guess we’ll see how it goes and go from there.
The idea was for your host to go on a short walkabout and then come back in time to write a post wrapping up the year and then another talking about ’24 because that was going to launch something special.
The launch of something special happened outside of here and it came with several fits, starts, challenges and opportunities.
Color me surprised, sarcasm intended that things didn’t go as planned and that it has taken about five weeks for me to reappear.
Clearly, I haven’t figured out what to do with this place and how to do it. Is it dying or is it just going through an evolution.
The answer is forthcoming but I can’t tell you if that is something we’ll know in a week, month or year.
Figure at some point I’ll have another conversation with the Shmata Queen about this and get her thoughts.
The last time we saw each other in person there was too much going on to dig into it and it didn’t happen.
There have been six million conversations in between so there is truth in saying if it was important it could have been brought up already.
Not that it matters because the ultimate decision rests with me regardless so it is up to me to determine what I want to do and how to do it.
So call that lack of conversation a silly excuse for not taking time to figure it out. The biggest question I need to answer is what kind of cadence do I wish to hold here.
Do I want to go back to writing daily or updating a couple of times a week. Do I want to try and build the traffic back up again or use this for as a writing sandbox to play in.
I am not sure yet and that is part of why I didn’t put question marks at the end of the previous two sentences.
Can’t really say they are questions any more than I can say they are comments. It is really me thinking out loud and I am ok with that.
Sometimes you don’t need an immediate answer because what is more important is taking time to consider your options, possible, likely and probable.
I could write about the holidays of ’23 as the time when the Jews of the world bonded because of rampant antisemitism and the massive amounts of gaslighting we have been experiencing.
Or I could go a different direction and tell you I am going nuts trying to keep my inbox relatively clean but am losing the battle.
I get too many newsletters that I actually want to read and too many that hold no interest but lack proper settings to adjust the frequency with which they come.
And by proper settings I mean I can’t adjust them solely by wishing them to be fixed.
That aggravates me because it means I have to take time to open and look for the unsubscribe button so that I can reach the field that adjust frequency.
Consequently I open them and find there is something there that interests me enough to think it might be worth keeping it a little while longer just to see if I am correct.
So the inbox fills far more rapidly but unlike snow or rain it doesn’t melt or evaporate, it just clogs my feed.
