Imagine, if you will, using a public restroom.  After about a minute, a stranger that you were barely paying attention to, pipes up unprompted.  “I’m sorry I haven’t been a proper conversational partner.  I’m just not in the mood for small talk today.”  Awkward silence…

A bit of wisdom from over 15 years hobby blogging: never apologize for an absence.  While I might have a personal commitment to write this or that much, barely any readers will be aware of my commitment, and none will care that I’ve missed it.  Apologizing for absence is a form of self-centeredness–and it’s natural to be self-centered on a personal blog, but let us not express self-centeredness in a way that only serves to make ourselves feel bad.

And that’s not to invalidate feelings of inadequacy.  I have two or three more hobbies than I can reasonably sustain, the pain is real.  But publicly and uncritically expressing those feelings will only reinforce them.  So this is me giving voice to those negative feelings, while being highly critical of same feelings.

Absence for a period of time is one thing.  Absence on a particular topic is another.  There have been plenty of times I’ve felt vaguely inadequate for failing to write seasonally appropriate essays for Christmas, Thanksgiving, and so on.  The feeling is irrational–nobody cares if I do or don’t write a Christmas-themed essay.  The obligation is not real.

And then there’s absence on political topics.  Some would say, there really is a moral obligation to speak up.  And so, for instance, I have felt bad about saying nothing on the Israeli-Palestinian war.  The truth is, I have said stuff about it, but I keep it to my personal life.  For the most part, I have expressed bafflement at the cruelty of Israeli apartheid, even before the war.  The US isn’t exactly great on racial relations, but at least we’re ahead of whatever that is!

Does me saying any of this stuff, in private, do anything to help the situation?  No, not at all.  But broadcasting my half-baked opinions wouldn’t help either.  My main contribution to the topic would be asking readers to explain it to me like I’m 5.  Which… might actually be a useful exercise, but also probably not.  I’d rather that discussion be lead by someone who knows more about it.

So we come to the Trump presidency.  I remember in 2017 that Trump was a major demotivator for hobby bloggers.  It felt like we had to talk about it, but also like we couldn’t, so then we end up not talking at all, about anything.  Doomscrolling is bad enough without having to select something to carefully understand and then write about.

Politics are somewhat within the purview of this blog, and I’m not ruling it out.  But I’m also not particularly well-positioned to talk about it.  I just don’t like blogging about current events.  My predilection is for cooperative analysis that nobody actually reads, which is often corrosive to the sloganeering needed for serious political fights.

So this is a statement (not an apology) that I do not intend to write much about the train wreck that is US federal politics.  I will write about the usual topics, namely whatever happens to tickle my fancy at the moment, whether or not it’s appropriate to the current political mood.  This is not motivated by escapism, although if readers treat it that way that’s their prerogative.  I talk about it plenty; there is no escape.  Rather, I just don’t think it’s productive to try to write about politics, fail, and then write nothing at all.

Or, as Coyote put it: feeling bad is not praxis.