19 April 2009

An Interwebby Garden in the Shade

My friends, a weblog is in some ways like a garden, and in other ways it is not at all like a garden. On the one hand, it requires love and care if it is to grow. On the other hand, a garden usually grows in the spring, while a weblog should grow in winter when the weblogger is inside keeping warm instead of outside in the sunshine, possibly gardening. I do not really garden. There are gardens around the good ship house, but I hardly garden in them. That is, my contributions could hardly be considered gardening. Still, this weblog has not grown in the spring, but it did reasonably well in the winter, as it should. In this way, it is rather unlike a typical garden.

Insofar as a weblog requires love and care to grow, I note that I have been giving the weblog love and care during my rather lengthy silence. I have begun and left unfinished a number of postings, most of which I would love to finish one day. I even have one from last year, regarding certain adventures in the West. The problem, then, is not that I have not had anything to say. I have found a number of things worth saying. Rather, the problem is that I have not been able to concentrate on them long enough to see them through. Some of them also deal with topics that I wish to address with a degree of sincerity, and so I must consider them rationally, which is difficult. Others are incomplete verses (if indeed I choose to present them here), repeated attempts at the same project, a classical ballade. I shall likely be embarrassed that the obsessive extent of my labor produces only the product that it eventually does, but actual quality is partly beside the point. I am not trying to be a great artist; I do not even want to be called an artist (I think would prefer "human being"), but I do the best I can. At any rate, the weblog has received love and care, but it has not grown. It seems I have planted seeds and not watered them, to push the analogy a bit. So the weblog is somewhat like a garden, without being entirely so.

At the last, it has always been a great pleasure to make the writings I put here, and I have not abandoned doing so. I hope to resume with reasonable fervor soon, but I happily note that I do a good many more things than ever before, so time for me to sit and bond with a computer screen is very limited. As someone who in former years, generally before 2007, would spend hours daily before such a screen, mostly gaming, I am happy to note the change. It was a bit lonely.

Until next time, my much beloved friends, it is always a pleasure to ramble for you.