Hello?

I imagine that for the handful of people who actually bother to read this thing with any regularity that my occasional disappearing acts are frustrating. I understand, I truly do: I feel the same way when some blog I read goes on an unexplained hiatus and you don't know if they're even coming back. And I apologize for not being more reliable.

At the same time, I hope you can understand that I'm frustrated too, frustrated by my own shortcomings as a regular blogger. It's just that there are times....

Times. Times I just feel inadequate to the task. Times - frequent times - when I seriously wonder if I'm accomplishing anything, if I'm contributing anything worth the effort. Times when I wonder what it is I might say or notice or observe that is not already being said/noticed/observed by voices with greater and sometimes far greater reach than mine. And most importantly or perhaps better said most stressfully, times when, as I said just the other day at another site, the dark clouds shade the spirit to the point where it will not bear the weight of the desire - and thinking of what I want to write can't provide the energy to actually write it.

And frankly, to toot my own horn for a moment, I do put a good deal of effort into my posts: For one thing, they rarely (not never, but rarely) consist of little more than a lengthy quote from some other source and for another, those on news items often contain links to multiple sources re-written into a single coherent narrative. My two posts on rendition just down from this one contain links to a total of 19 separate sources and references, 21 if you count my comment on Glenn Greenwald's blog and my quote from the print version of Lotus. (I also like to include fun links such as, for example, one to an explanation of the origin of some slang phrase I might have just used, so don't forget to at least glance at the URL the links are to; you might miss something.) This is not criticism of anyone else - although I do get frustrated with sites (and we all know who I mean) heavily featuring posts consisting of something like "Oy!" with a link plus open threads but still get daily hits in five figures - it's rather that for me, there's not another way to do this.

So yeah, this does take a certain amount of emotional energy. But light is energy and for most of my life I've struggled with the dark clouds that sometimes get dense enough to block the light and so drain the energy needed for everything that is neither necessary nor required. And, as much as I want to do it and hope it is of some use, I just can't see this low-traffic blog as fitting either category.

The bottom line here is that I'm back for now, probably not multiple posts in a day back and really in a sense I never left because, again, the desire was there, but back for now. At the immediate moment there are chores to do and an errand to run but there will be more to come later. (Warning: Perhaps much later; I'm a real night owl and often post late at night or even overnight. Unless you are, too, tomorrow might be a better bet for checking back.)

I hope you're still out there and will find this. I do have to add one final warning: Yes, I am back, yes, I want to keep doing this, yes, it does give me a certain sense of satisfaction when I turn out a good post - but I have to be brutally honest with you and with myself and say that the reason I said "for now" is that I can't promise you I won't disappear again for a few days, a week, maybe longer. But for what it's worth, I can promise you that if I ever decide to pack this in, I won't just disappear. I will say so explicitly.