This all became real to me this morning as I sat here mapping out my day. I had 83 RSS subscriptions active and more than fifty of them popped up with new content today. I got 62 new emails. I started the slog.
Meanwhile, on my right-hand display, my desktop picture is of my wife, the Boss Rabbit, taken inside the Comyn Tower at Inverlochy Castle. It's one of my favorite images. She isn't looking at me, she isn't smiling. In that quiet moment she and I are both coming to terms with heading back to the U.S. from Scotland. The paradox is that we have never felt so much at home as we did in the Highlands and Edinburgh. I stopped and took a good look at the picture. You just had to be there, and that is exactly the point.
You have to be there, and you can't be there when you're staring at your computer or your phone all day.
I have culled my RSS feeds in Google Reader down to an essential ten. No more accumulator sites. No more political blogs. I have server-level blacklisted those people whose conservative-rant emails incited me to rage. They were never really that interesting, anyway, and the heated exchanges that followed their stupid kool-aid diatribes were always the analogs of mud-wrestling with pigs; You get dirty and the pig has fun.
By the time September rolls around again, I will either return to this endeavor enthused, rejuvenated and excited about life, or I'll be living in a refrigerator box under the Broadway Bridge. The Boss Rabbit may also kill me in my sleep. Maybe we'll be living in Scotland. Probably not.
I may, from time to time, post an image or two, sans discussion. The blog was really just my notebook, anyway. It was always for me.
If you watch Maru, the the Japanese Scottish Fold ( ! ! ! ) about once a week you won't need blogs, either. If you can watch the box sequence that begins at about 4:25 without laughing out loud, you're not worthy of The Maru. Or summer.
Now, who wants margaritas?
We're outta here ... in 3, 2, 1 ... [ white noise ]
Thus spake the rabbit.
