The JackB

"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

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When Jack Came Back

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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.

The Wheels Keep Turning

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.

The Holidays of ’23

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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.

Thanksgiving Week

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There is a full house here for the first time in what feels like forever. All of the children are roaming the place and for a brief time we’re together under one roof.

I understand what the older folk meant when they said time goes quickly and now I try hard to be present in every moment because they move so quickly.

It is surreal how fast it went and I am so very proud of what I see and hear, but it is bittersweet in some ways.

That is a good thing and I know it to be so.

I’ll blink and we’ll be in a new place…again.

Three Weeks Of War

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Three weeks of war already. Three weeks following the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust.

Feels like an impossible amount of time and similar to a nightmare that is hard to wake up from. Every day there is a new story of horror tied to the attacks or another example of antisemitism.

Can’t break, can’t falter because that would let the bad guys win and we won’t make that possible or probable.

It is not an option but we’re going to pay a price beyond that which we have paid but that is the cost of survival- there are no options so we move forward.

One Post A Month

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There was a time when I would update 2-3 times a day every day but it was before the content shock of 10 million online sources.

Some people thanked me for entertaining them and some people asked if I could slow down because they found it overwhelming.

I told the latter to stop reading everything and or to feel ok to take a break, wasn’t going to hurt my feelings. I write first for me and then for everyone else.

Now I sit in a place in which I may produce one or a couple of posts a month with the odd time in which I pump out multiple posts in a week.

And for some reason I have received email from multiple people to let me know about broken URLS.

They always say they work for company XYZ and want to make sure my readers aren’t hurt by not finding the correct link.

And they are always tied to posts that are more than 10 years old.

Kind of odd to see such things but they seem legitimate.

Most of the time I simply delete the section with the broken link or the entire post because there doesn’t seem to be a solid reason for keeping it.

They weren’t particularly good posts and sometimes less is more.

Tends to happen more when I receive multiple emails pushing me to update, especially when they adopt a certain tone.

Dawn Of A New Day

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Rolling through the weeks like a juggernaut whose forward momentum cannot be slowed or stopped we reach the place where the so-called rubber meets the road.

It is time to make decisions in a few areas about what direction the path forward takes. Been saying this in multiple ways for years now but there will be movement from discussing possibilities.

Now it turns to action and the consequences of those moves will play out as they will. Can’t straddle the fence forever, enough is enough.