A blog can be a millstone around your neck

....and other crazed ramblings.

Why do I feel like a shirker when I neglect my blog? After all, I have no evidence that anyone is actually reading it.

At one time I wrote every day in my journal; deep, keenly insightful observations offered up with reverence and wry wit. In short, your typical introvert's maunderings. And it was a certainty that no one would ever see it but me, what with password protection.

The blogging phenomenon changed all that. Now the entire universe, or at least discriminating readers from Siberia to Somalia, can receive my homespun wisdom. Of course, it's much more likely that no one even as far away as Penngrove will actually view this blog, but still, it gives one a bit of performance anxiety. A touch of stage fright.

If I'm going to waste your time, I'd better have something worthwhile to give you. Even if "you" are nothing but a figment of my imagination.

And there is so much to tell the putative you. Every day I find a half dozen Outrages to buttonhole you with for your immediate action, and another six-pack of Wonderful Ideas That Will Save Our Civilization in desperate need of promulgation.

Time. It becomes scarcer and scarcer, as each labor-saving device clears another thicket of obligations to reveal the ever-expanding forest of distractions. Freed from the need to leave my home to work, I've turned my spare attention to foolish causes that I didn't have time for in the days of the daily commute.

Tonight I spent 3 hours calling voters to support my candidate for state assembly. Tomorrow I'm determined to call the local newspaper and strenuously object to his repeated use of a very biased observer to comment on the local legislative races. Friday it's a trip to Ft. Bragg to talk up Clean Money campaign finance reform. Next Tuesday is the primary; I'll be getting out the vote all day. Presumably by then I'll have mailed in my absentee ballot, which is on hold until I find out some more details about one of the races.

The hard drive with all my photos and back issues of my newspaper has crashed. I've got the new hard drive and the rescue software lined up, but no time to perform the rescue.

Somebody needs to rescue ME.

Someday, some year, I really have to install the new sink in the back bathroom so I'll have a place to wash my hands after using the toilet that I finally installed two months ago. I'm worried because I got the faucet fixtures at a garage sale and while they are very nice, they are missing the instructions and I had to download a set of instructions from the Internet for a very similar, perhaps identical but perhaps not, set of fixtures.

The back yard has to be tilled with the borrowed rototiller before the clay soil turns into cement and the rototiller owner takes me to small claims court. A whole list of dinner parties is owed to friends I clearly don't deserve. But first I have to clean out the awful mess that is my abode. Can't have my friends find out what a slob I really am. Of course I want to share my most intimate secrets with them, but not that one.

And I'm getting old. Life is crazy, too short, too messy, and I must make choices every hour, to leave this dream behind so I can try to catch that one before it's too late. I have to stop and get my oil changed now. I have to pick up a prescription. I have to set aside a little time to breathe.