HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME!

I started this blog as an outlet, a way to say a few things I could no longer say because I no longer had a pulpit to say anything from.

Which is already the wrong way to start, because a pulpit is a place from which one says very specific things to very specific people, unlike a blog which is open to anyone who stumbles upon it and is a place to say anything that pops into your head. But blogging is an odd creature, at once personal and public. Speaking is public; we have to engage another's attention to do it, and we can see when we are losing their attention, when we should stop, sit down, let them go away from our voice for awhile. Writing is personal. Much as we imagine there is someone reading what we write, much as we obsess over who is reading it and how many people, we still imagine it is going to only one person at a time. On a blog, that is a fatal miscalculation.

We may imagine an e-mail is for one person only, though we know how easily it can be passed around ("viral" is the perfect metaphor for what happens, and how). We may be sure our telephone conversations are private, and our letters (but who writes anymore? Even I have given up the practice). But I have made the fatal miscalculation of imagining no one is reading this, all the while hoping everyone is. And inevitably what you say, whether you meant to say it or not, comes back to haunt you. And I'm tired of being haunted.

I started this, as I said, in order to keep my hand in; to establish some kind of communication with others who were either sympathetic or of like mind, and I've done that. But this blog has outlived its usefulness, and now it must go. I'll take some time to mine it for things useful to me, or hopefully useful; then I'm going to take it down. All the way down. Turn out the lights. Ring down the curtain. Lock the doors.

I'm tired of what it has become, of the inadvertent problems it has caused me. Life as enough problems all on its own without creating our own set. This is it. In a week or so, it will be gone. It will know it's place no more.

It was a good run. Thanks for stopping by. Thanks for the interest, the comments, the good words. I appreciate it more than you know. But all things, good or otherwise, must come to an end.