hogglestock

In the 17 years that I’ve been blogging, never have I ever posted so little. Only one post so far in 2023. There were times this year when I felt like I really needed to get over here and write something, both because I was neglecting Hogglestock and because I felt I had something to say. I would have a spark of inspiration, begin to think about how to present the information, and then about 20 seconds later think about the mental and emotional energy a post would take. There were many times in 2023 when I thought that this might just be the natural end of my blogging life. God knows social media technology has made blogging a bit of an antiquarian activity. But, I’m not ready to go–yet.

The death of words

Pre-Musk Twitter sucked for many, many, reasons, but damn if it wasn’t a great place to find community. Reams have been written about post-Musk Twitter so I will spare you my take on that, but conditions did get to a point where I decided–a few weeks before he let the orange guy back on–that staying on the platform would be a moral failure on my part. I care less about losing 4,000 followers than I do the loss of my Twitter regulars who supported me, responded to my dumb jokes, and engaged with me about books, music, cute dogs, and other important matters. So although I am on BlueSky and Threads, the former is a bit clunky and the latter is just too much about stuff that gives me anxiety. Instagram is where I probably spend the most of my social media time, but it isn’t really conducive to words. So leaving Twitter–the very thing that killed the way we used to interact with each other on blogs–has rendered me without a place to share all my clever and not clever words. This is especially challenging now that John is no longer around to absorb my need to share my thoughts. Yeah I still do it on Threads, but engagement with my witty bon mots is so low that I might as well whisper them into a pillow.

My year in review

I’ve realized that if I’m ever going to get anything on paper as it were, I need to just do it in chunks and not try to come up with some overarching theme or even a logical sequence. The blog posts that follow below are loosely organized random thoughts about my year.