Taking a break

I have thought this over for what seems like forever. But today I resolved for good that there's only so much the Gnu-Headed Oracle of Whatever (for lack of a better pen name) can accomplish on the internet. If there's a threshold for the bizarre, I've passed it and then some. So on July 4 I am going to take a vacation from this blog. I'm riding off into the sunset because there is simply no reason to continue. Whatever battle I have been fighting since February 29 of last year, I have won won won.

From July 4 on I'll be working on something new, which I've already mentioned. I hope it will be lovely and good (lovely and good is all anyone should ever try to be). I'll still be kicking around; I'm a pretty easy guy to find.

This blog is intensely personal and patently foreign. I've done my best to blow minds and coax thought. To accomplish that I had to blow my own mind, and make myself think, to double-think, to meta-think, to pre-think and anti-think; to think on the fly, to think strategically and compromise among contradictory thoughts; to think about words, sentences, paragraphs, whole posts, strings of posts and how they all fit together and to never stop or submit to horrible and fatal cliche or thoughtlessness. The result is this mixed tape of a blog, and it is glorious and awful and stupid and huge and delicate and I love it. I put many demands on my readers because I owe them that respect as intelligent human beings. I left out autobiographical details of my 'real' life, because to me that stuff wasn't as interesting. To me, imagination is more interesting, more real and powerful, and so that's what I wanted to share. In deliberately avoiding my personal details and anecdotes, I surely alienated a huge chunk of my readership - hell, I half scared myself to death with this shit - but I stand by everything on here. A lot of people tuned out a long time ago in bewilderment, and I understand that of course. There are a lot of voices on this blog, but all of them are mine. As some poet said: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am a man, I contain multitudes."

Believe it or not, I agonized over every syllable, with few exceptions.

Will I ever come back and bake more cupcakes for blogger? I hope so. I believe I have already won the battle. Ms. Rhythm has lost and I have won. But if any of her sisters come kicking around, then just flash me the cupcake signal and I'll come back to finish them off.

For now, it's time to move on.

At some point I'll put up a list of my favourite posts. Which is completely self-indulgent, but hey.

I'll say it again in 5 days, but thanks so much for reading.

xoxo


ps "Freedom is a cupcake"? I wrote that sentence with my eyes closed and half-asleep in the fall of 2003. I'm still not sure what it means, but I think 'FIAC' means you can choose something warm and delicious, or you can choose something that rots your teeth and gives you cancer. The freedom to grasp at a small delight is at the heart of freedom and the philosophy of joy. Joy is something you can find if you think long enough about it. If you find yourself in a fog, or a situation that doesn't make any sense, as I did and we all do, you can make it make sense. While you have a brain there is hope. All we've got on this pale blue dot is our words and our thought.