Banging The Empty Tin

There are over three people who occasionally visit this blog, and as a result the clamor surrounding my two-month disappearance has been deafening.  Well, "deafening" is a little strong. More accurately, it is pretty muddy as to whether anyone noticed at all.

However, reading the blogs, posts, tweets, tumbls, emails, SMS, MMS, iMessages, FaceBook, Snapchats, Post Secret cards and whatnot that I follow, it seems that publicly and loudly explaining oneself seems to be de rigueur in any even vaguely "social media" endeavor, so I suppose I must.

Social media these days seems all very "Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution Public Self Criticism" in which people identified as counter-revolutionaries get to stand in front of a hostile crowd of Red Guard and berate themselves over their shortcomings and lack of revolutionary fervor. 

Which reminds me: Does it strike anyone else as strange that we are all examining ourselves in a degree of detail that would leave the old-school empowerment-feminists and their hand-mirrors gasping, but STILL seem as lost as babes in the woods? Fascinates me endlessly. A key part of my fascination isn't just the self-examination, but the zero-filter public outpouring of the results. 

Sometimes — rarely — some real insight is developed, although why it would be a matter of public record remains a complete mystery, at least to me. Why Dillon in Duluth needs to have access to my sudden realization that "It's not me, it really IS them, 'cause I'm Fabulous and the Universe loves me!" remains a bit elusive for me, although the reasons are apparently crystal clear to everyone else.

I dunno, some of it's reasonably entertaining to read, and I'm always curious to hear how people are doing, so if that's the goal, uh, Yay! I guess, although much of it is the same self-congratulatory bullshit that one can read in the yearly Christmas letter from an annoying sister-in-law. You know her. The one who spends her life spinning the latest family disasters into accomplishments. Replace the verbiage about how Little Eddie is nearly cured off the Wild Turkey and is in the running for Assistant Sub-Manger on swing shift down at Taco Bell with some flowery meme-flavored prose concerning one's personal journey to enlightenment/improvement/a new life, and you've got a month's worth of blog posts.

Fascinating, as I said, and no chore to find since as far as I can tell, approximately 97.3% of the entire friggin' Internet (including upwards of 80% of Internet corporate sites) are on that same wondrous journey into the light.

Ah, well. As a side note, if you wonder whether I'm talking about you, no, I'm not. The people I'm talking about have hiked so far up their own asses with a spotlight and microscope that it would never occur to them for a second that I'm talking about them, assuming they hear me through the thick walls of their self-absorption in the first place.

So, anyhow, back to my own personal navel gazing about the last couple of months:  I've been busy with stuff, y'know? Had a metric shit-ton of various stuff land on me. Grieved some stuff. Re-grieved some stuff, more like. Got angry about other stuff. Or the same stuff, sometimes. Had life event stuff. Had small stuff. Had a fair bit of stuff that I thought was important turn out to not be.  Had a place to put stuff once upon a time, but it was ripped away, so for the longest time I was just stuffing stuff down into the black hole where it used to live but doesn't seem to fit anymore. But I've now found a lovely new place to put stuff that seems to be working out. There was, in short, lots of stuff. A very stuffy time. Oh, and I went to Florida for a couple of weeks. And it looked like I was going to Providence RI for a week or two, but didn't.

Questions?

OK, whew, good, glad to get that all out. Let's move on, and see whether there are any scrapings in the bottom of the can left to whip up into a culinary miracle and/or some new blog posts.

In Our Next Episode: Hobo Stew.