Why I’m (we’re?) not blogging any more.
posted by The Vidiot @ 2:04 PM Permalink Update: Bill Arnett wanted to share his thoughts on the closing of this blog.I’m so glad we had this time together,I know we didn’t sing all that many songs, though many an excellent tune was posted by my friend Sailor and I occasionally posted lyrics, both original and parodied from time to time.
Just to have a laugh, or sing a song.
Seems we just get started and before you know it
Comes the time we have to say, “So long".
As things do in the cosmos in which we reside that Great Wheel of Life has turned yet again, as it did late last year and again mid year. Unfortunately with each new turn the centrifugal force seemed likely to force insurmountable, undesirable changes upon me. I know that they did on Sailor and the Vidiot as well.
These two people have been a pivotable force in my life. I met Sailor on a different website and when I grew weary of the bickering and the troglodytes there I asked Sailor if I might try my hand blogging for this site. After checking with his partners here he gave me a warm welcome and I immediately felt I had a new family, one that did not judge me nor censor me nor ever do anything but offer me their wholehearted support and the friendship, camaraderie, respect, and love that is often found when least expected, but needed the most.
The Vidiot is one of the most fascinating people I “know,” and she never ceases to surprise and amaze me with her style, wit, and intelligence. Her take on too many issues to count were so close to those beliefs I hold that she often addressed an issue before me and left me unable to add anything!
As to Sailor the bond we had already formed on that other site became cast in stone, irrefutable; I have a new brother from a different mother. Stay in touch my friend. I’m still hoping you can take some vacation time and come out and stay awhile.
I did then, at the beginning so long ago, and do now live trapped in a web of never-ending pain and that pain, combined with the obvious inequities now institutionalized in our government fueled a hatred that eventually threatened to consume me entirely, so I stepped back, reassessed, fought through the influence of the many medications I must take, and decided that for the sake of my mind and self-identity I must renounce the hatred building within me or lose my identity completely. I have never before been a man that hated; I dedicated my life to public service, as I saw it, first in the military, then by hunting bail skips professionally for fifteen, returning thousands of accused felons and misdemeanants to court or custody.
Then I got clobbered with two Agent Orange cancers from my service in Vietnam. I don’t have the heart to recount the travail of those rampaging sicknesses that nearly killed me and left me with neurological damage which means massive pain 24/7/365.
I did also recount much of the story of my Warrior Woman, with whom I fell in love at first site and within the first five minutes of meeting her I told her that she would be mine…oh, yes, she would be mine.
It’s almost 39 years later now and oh, yes she is and will always be mine. True love is an amazing gift; it uplifts you, centers you, shows you the joy of life, and yet somehow keeps you grounded in reality at the same time.
This, probably more than anything else, brought me back from the precipice over which hatred was threatening to drag me. I am grateful for that, but it took the fire out of my writing and I have become more consumed by further major upcoming surgeries that I know worry my Warrior Woman and our wonderful son (who will be getting his BA in psychology next spring) more than they will say. As “they” say, one day at a time.
When I get out from under these new health difficulties and if the blog should happen to still be here and I can ever figure how to log back in directly (the Vidiot is being courteous and sweet enough to post this for me) perhaps I’ll be able to return for second go round.
Thank you, Sailor. Thank you, Vidiot. We’ve had much fun together and I love you both. Let’s get together and do this again sometime soon, eh?
And a special thanks, too, to all our readers with a special farewell to DanD, which whom I have gone round and round with, but always with a measure of civility and good humor.
Farewell for now…my friends.
Bill
Personally, I’ve lost the steam to blog. For The Sailor, he feels like his “sense of outrage became dulled and it started to seem like 'same shit, different day'.” He also pointed out that when “you go read through our archives, we were covering the same issues we started with, it seemed nothing had changed.”
You’d think that with the OWS movement, I’d have even more steam, but no. I don’t live in NYC anymore, (I really really REALLY wish this had all happened while I was still there though.) and my life has gone off onto a different road. I’ve come to realize a few things about blogging, but mostly, it started to feel like I was spitting into the wind. I hadn’t even wanted to address it, or make a last post, until I read this on Dr. James Petras’s website that so perfectly summed up how I felt:
To address an active assembled public meeting, to formulate ideas, programs and propose programs and strategies through political action defines the role of the public intellectual. To sit at a desk in an office, in splendid isolation, sending out five manifestos per minute defines a “desktop militant”. It is a form pseudo-militancy that isolates the word from the deed. Desktop “militancy” is an act of verbal inaction, of inconsequential “activism”, a make-believe revolution of the mind. The exchange of internet communications becomes a political act when it engages in public social movements that challenge power. By necessity that involves risks for the public intellectual: of police assaults in public spaces and economic reprisals in the private sphere. The desktop “activists” risk nothing and accomplish little. The public intellectual links the private discontents of individuals to the social activism of the collectivity. The academic critic comes to a site of action, speaks and returns to their academic office. The public intellectual speaks and sustains a long-term political educational commitment with the social opposition in the public sphere via the internet and in face to face daily encounters.
I no longer want to be a desktop militant. I’m tired of feeling like I’m contributing and knowing, deep down, that I am not. The blog was necessary for me to get to this point. I am now going to take everything I’ve learned over the years and focus on something more productive. (Hint: I’ve started writing Chapter five) Once that is accomplished, I will be back, only within a different forum.
My days as a “pseudo militant” are over.
Huppy the Anarchist lives!
Labels: blogs, end of an era
