‘Bred Crumbs

Dear Actual, Real-life Friend,

Yes, I’m trying to get back on the blogging horse again, and you may take that with as many grains of salt as your doctor recommends. But this time, I’m trying to fix more than you might realize. It’s not just that you don’t know what’s going on in my life and on my mind; it’s that, thanks to weird behavioral paths I only recently realized I was wandering, I don’t know what’s going on yours.

I haven’t just been not writing blogs. I’ve also been not reading them. Including yours.

Let’s backtrack to the not-writing part. That’s actually fairly comprehensible. I can identify several reasons I’m far less likely to blog than I once was:

• Blissful domesticity. My life is now quite satisfying in mundane ways, and therefore almost certainly not interesting.
• Corporate responsibility. My day job is for a company with many, many corporate clients, which makes me gun-shy about mouthing off in any specific way about the numerous idiocies of modern commercial culture.
• My slowly shifting attitude about my attitude. I’m actually trying to rein in my negative tendencies. Where I once thought that ranting about some little awfulness would be cathartic, I now suspect it’s better for me (and for you) to not spend the energy on it.
• The pervasiveness of the online world. If I stumble on something worth linking to, I can be sure someone else, probably someone you read, has already gotten there. But more than that, I think the interweb has just flat worn me out.

The trigger for my online withdrawal was probably email, my full-on disdain for which I mentioned in an earlier, better-written post in which I also tried to laugh off that big amorphous thing called Web. 2.0. Truth is, the current vogue for “social networking” and widgets and gadgets has wound up making me feel less connected to the world. So many new toys, so many goofily named and rounded-font-logoed web services bubbling into trendy being that I have trouble taking any of them seriously. (I only just started using del.icio.us, finally deciding that the advantages of a decentralized and organized home for my bookmarks outweighed the vapid stench of its moniker.)

Bulletin board and blog comment threads have become means of replusion, thanks to the likelihood of venom and stupidity there. And with each MyBooksterIn that has surfaced and hoped to entangle me, I’ve been driven off by potential etiquette dilemmas of a kind I’ve always hated and avoided in real life: Do I have to be PersonX’s “friend” just because he/she wants me to? Do I have to feel bad if I decide to spurn him/her?

When presented with a fork like that, I tend to just leave the road. It’s a instinct so ingrained I often don’t know it’s kicked in. So the more interactive the web became, the less interactive I was inclined to be. Step by step, I backed away, until I finally noticed how far I’d retreated. Until I noticed that, without ever making any kind of decision to, I’d quit reading your blog.

I didn’t mean to stop reading, it just happened. Then I thought of you, and realized I didn’t know what’s going on with you these days, and realized I hadn’t even looked at your blog in ages. And realized how lame the excuse that began this paragraph really is.

I understood instantly that this means I suck. But — and this really shows you what a gooey mess my psyche is — I still didn’t read your blog. I was too embarrassed to start again. I was (am) too afraid that something I missed along the way would be vital, something I’ll feel like the lowest form of life for not already knowing, something I can’t apologize sufficiently for missing.

But I have to take that risk. It’s time to apologize, hope you’ll accept, and reconnect. Because as much stress relief as I think I’ve found through subconsciously pulling away from the web, I’m missing out on too much out here in the relative wilderness. The maddening irony of my retreat has finally smacked me in the face. This whole internet thing started for me, way back in the mid-’90s, in a CompuServe forum, where I made real connections that are directly responsible for my health, happiness, and prosperity today. I stand by my view that boards and other online fora mostly aren’t like that now, but it doesn’t have to be a universal truth. Rather than run away, I need to find what’s worth finding, the right ways to plug back in.

What I’ve been (not) doing stops now, because it starts now. Even if I don’t actually follow through on my intentions to start writing, I’m sure as hell going back to reading, or viewing, or pinging, or whatever it is the kids do today. I’ll keep up with your news, follow your links, catch your jokes, glory in your observations. And I’ll hunt down whatever Web 2.0 aggregator or network or broadcaster or gizmoid it takes to make sure I’m in your audience again.