Because blogging is dead.
Because the WordPress blogging interface changed and I’m old and don’t want to deal with it.
Because I don’t know what to say.
Because The Thing That Is Happening In Front Of Us is so distracting, so depressing, so consuming, that to write about anything else feels like a declaration of ignorance.
Because to write about The Thing That Is Happening would be personally indulgent and professionally inappropriate. Unlike the many, many times I’ve written about my hilarious children.
Because everyone is already writing about The Thing That Is Happening, and everyone has said the same things a thousand times, and no one needs me to say those things one more time in a corner of the interwebs that no one visits anyway.
Because I am trying to live a more mindful life, OK? And the constant demand for new blog material is breaking my back, all right? I’m not a content machine! What happened to silence? What happened to reflection? What happened to walking aimlessly? (There is no demand for new blog material.)
In the middle of World War II, E.B. White would write in the New Yorker about his domestic life: his sheep, his daily routines, the sun coming up, etc. When I first encountered those essaylets, I thought the disjunction between global catastrophe and quotidian observation was grotesque. But you could make the case (someone has, in some distant blog) that his apolitical writing was a political statement. He was writing on behalf of timeless life, the life that outlasts war or social upheaval or cultural chaos.
But I’m not making that case. I don’t know what the hell to do, I really don’t.
But “I don’t know what the hell to do” is a luxury. You do what you do. You ask yourself if you can do more. You ask yourself if you can do something different. Not-knowing is a luxury–but it’s also a beginning.