I have been struggling with my health this month. Today, on top of that, I have your basic head cold. I feel stuffed with Kleenex, largely because I can’t take a common OTC remedy due to inevitable conflict with the rest of my meds. Consequently, I am not up to much more than boiling a pot of beans and rice for dinner and playing a bunch of Sid Meier’s Pirates. But that, in itself, is just today. When I am feeling less full of death, why is it, in general, that I do not post more?
When I first started blogging, and on Livejournal no less, it was late 2001. Voices mattered – every voice, every link, every stutter, every yelp. We did not have your Facetube and your Twittergram and your Gawkchat. The noise of the internet was already great, but not deafening, the way it is today. Consequently, the editorial authority I asserted in the voice of my first blog is just nauseating. I shared news and links and photos as if I could be certain I was the first aggregator to bring them to my readers’ attention, and sometimes I was.
No one needs that now. No one needs my opinion on the latest anger-making thing to course through the intertubes. No one needs me to show them the cutest or weirdest or most controversial of things. What is it that they – that you – do need from me, the blogger? What can I offer to you?
When I know the answer, I post it. When I don’t, I am silent. What is more precious, in this world we have made, than silence?
L.T. Patridge 