And my acne cleared up, too

The recent and relative quiet from this corner of Blogsville is due to a handful of factors. Firstly, I've been fairly busy at, ah, you know, the place where most of the blogging gets done. Additionally, I've been doing more non-blog-type writing; I've found that this tends to bleed off a lot of the energy that would otherwise go into the web stuff.

There's a third factor, though, which is actually intentional rather than incidental: I've been on a bit of a political fast, and I have to say that I'm really enjoying it.

Just about all of the feeds in my RSS aggregator are politiblogs of some stripe or other, and I've studiously ignored nearly all of them over the past week. As for political news in the regular ol' mainstream media, I've avoided it. Sunday morning bobblehead shows? Ha! Blew 'em off!

The result? I've lost nearly three pounds!

Okay, it's more like two pounds, but it's the non-physical consequences that have been more interesting.

For me, political stuff has always been the most common blogging topic because it's so easy, what with the war(s) and the malfeasance and the crimes against liberty and stuff. All you need is indignation bordering on gamma-fueled rage, and you're good to go. Lord knows, though, that there's no dearth of politibloggers, most of them much better at it than I am. One more source of such editorials - or one less - shouldn't really matter all that much. As Yama, God of Death, once said in the ultra-cool Roger Zelazny novel, Lord of Light:

There are leaves and feathers enough in the world for me to have labored so long only to increase their number.

What Yama said.

I once worked at a somewhat dysfunctional business where every day was a new adventure in stress. One of my coworkers ruefully reflected on the effects of this environment on her own personality. "Honestly," she insisted as much to herself as to me, "I'm not like this." This, of course, being the tense, oft-irritated person that she was from nine to five. She was right. And she left. So did I, much later, but then I'm a slow learner.

There's something to be said for not being angry all the time. Hmp. Fucking anger.

Also, it's a lot quieter these days inside the cranium, astonishingly so. It's rather like those car commercials where the driver (or invisible narrator) demonstrates how much NVH (Noise, Vibration, and Harshness) is blocked by the vehicle's QuietSteel construction. Very pleasant, I must say. There's been mental space to think about other things, which is timely, since I really need to to be thinking about those other things, many of which are important in the personal sphere.

Of course, it's not desirable nor even possible to permanently divorce oneself from things political, since that aspect of life is woven into everything else. The LaVena Johnson situation, for example, will be with me for some time to come. Perhaps this is less about avoidance of politics than about formulating an alternate approach to the political. Or to, uh, life. Well, we'll see about that. For now, I just think I'll be doing less political opining in future.

For all the beneficial aspects of this path, I do wonder: When so much of your online persona has been devoted to one thing and then you substantially reduce that one thing, then who are you?

The eight-ball says, "Ask again later."

Hmp. Fucking eight-ball.

(Not a good-bye, cruel world cross-post. Honest.)