Category Archives: blogging

Good night, and good luck…

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Up there at the top of the page, right under my name is the phrase “A voice of sanity in a world gone mad.” That’s been there since the early days of my time on WordPress. In fact, if I remember correctly, it went up on day one as I was originally putting the site together.

Over the last 18 years, I’ve done my level best to stay true to that motto as I came down left, right, and center on the issues I thought were worth discussing. I won’t claim I’ve always been dispassionate, but I’ve always tried to come at the issues of the day from a position of rationality and reason. Sometimes I’ve obviously fallen short of that mark, but overall, I’m awfully proud of the 4,058 posts that make up the lion’s share of my body of “published” works.

With that said, I don’t have the ability or desire to run color commentary through another Trump Administration. The first go around was enough. This is clearly my cue to take a step back.

I’ve always been vaguely annoyed by blogs that stop with no obvious reason given. That’s why instead of just walking away, you’re getting this one last post to state without rancor or regret that jeffreytharp.com is going on an indefinite hiatus. I expect I’ll still be doing some writing, but for the foreseeable future, I want to do it purely for me instead of in hopes of reaching an audience.

In addition to stepping back from my writing here, over the coming days I plan to begin curtailing my social media presence overall. I don’t expect that I’ll have anything helpful or productive to add to the current political discourse, so where I do engage will most likely be focused on animal welfare, history, and books. Others may have an appetite to continue the circular arguments indefinitely, but the fight seems to have entirely gone out of me. I may drop in from time to time and post a missive on something strongly felt, but I have a sense that it may be a good long while before I feel like that’s an option I want to exercise.

After 18 years, 4,058 posts, and 59,301 visitors, all that’s left is to say thanks to everyone who’s been following along. It feels unlikely that I’ll ever take up a project of such scope or duration again. The feedback, comments, and one-on-one discussions these posts have triggered are experiences I absolutely treasure. In my heart, though, I know it really is time to take a break.

I wish us all the very best in this brave new world.

Good night, and good luck.

The day that got away…

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Some days get away from you unexpectedly. Sometimes you get a sense right from the opening bell that the day is going to be a foot race. Today wasn’t one of those. It slipped away in dribs and drabs, one Teams message or email at a time, until there was nothing left but to call it done.

I don’t necessarily mind days like that. It’s better than being bored to tears… but I’ll admit the writing sufferers a bit when it happens. In fact it was just 15 minutes before normal post time when I realized I didn’t have a thing feed up for Monday evening. A sinking feeling, for sure, but the muses at least let me fiddle around with this minor idea a bit before it was due.

We’re headed into a long holiday weekend – four days and a little extra for me. If I get luck, maybe the next three days will slip by with as little trouble. Then again experience tells me I have no business expecting things to go smoothly, but if it does, it would be an awfully pleasant surprise.

In any case, I rattle this out as fast as my little thumbs would carry me and then promptly forgot to hit “publish,” so I guess we all know now exactly how the week is going to go. Ah, situation normal.

The most insulting loss of all…

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I had a whole post teed up from over the weekend. It should have been sitting here safely waiting on me to do some final edits in Word before dropping it over into WordPress for publication. However, it’s currently not sitting anywhere on my computer. There’s no record that I even edited or saved any documents over the weekend. It’s also not in WordPress. Not in my drafts, not sitting in my scheduled posts file, or anywhere else.

It has well and truly disappeared. And frankly, I don’t have the energy to put into trying to recreate it from scratch.

As of a couple of weeks ago, I’ve officially made 4,000 separate blog posts dating way, way back to February 2010. I say 4000, because that’s how many I’ve written – well, 4,004 including this one. I’ve only made 3,989 of them public. Believe me when I tell you the ones that are sitting there in private mode are some real humdingers. Most of them won’t see the light of day until after I retire, if then. They’re the few examples of times I couldn’t tell the story while obscuring at least some identifying elements slipping through. 

In any case, after 4,000+ posts, you can count on one or two fingers the number of times I’ve simply had one of them eaten whole. That’s the entire reason for my workflow of writing everything first in Word. I don’t expect this to become a common occurrence, but it does mean I’m going to have to take some time coming up with a better failsafe. I’ve got too many things sitting here in various stages of draft to worry that they’re going to randomly start disappearing.

At least I’m not getting paid for this, so all I’ve lost is time… though that may be the most insulting loss of all. 

Like art and pornography…

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I really didn’t know what to expect when I cut down the blog from something I posted every night to just two days a week. I’d been five-a-week for so long it represented a surprisingly significant change in my evening. One thing I didn’t expect though, is how much of an embarrassment of riches it would yield in terms of how many things I had the option to write about in any given week. 

This week, for instance, I thought about taking on the federal government’s continued fumbling of border security, the Iranian backed attack on US troops in Jordan, my MAGA-led county government’s ongoing efforts to gut the local school system, and some additional thoughts on my ongoing efforts to be vaguely less unhealthy. Any number of those topics could stand alone as a single post, or even as a series of posts. Each and every one of them is its own particular brand of shitshow. 

I assume that’s why, when it came time to sit down and start writing, that I couldn’t get past the first sentence or two. They’re all big issues in their own way, but damn am I tired of picking apart all the great foibles of the 21st century. I’m even more tired of spending my free time pondering the vagaries of health and diet.

With all that said, I decided I didn’t have it in me to write one of those posts just in the name of it being Monday. Being an election year, there will be ample opportunities to delve into the absurdities of contemporary American politics. The Middle East seems determined to go hot again at any moment, so there will be plenty of time to go through that meatgrinder. I’ve got a few doctors appoints stacked up over the back half of the winter. I’m sure that will be the topic of at least a few posts after the fact. 

I’m feeling a need to branch out a bit, although I’m not sure in my own head exactly what that means. In any case, I need some fresh topics to get my hands – and head – around. As for what form that might take or even what those issues are, I don’t have the foggiest idea. Like art and pornography, I suppose it’s just something I’ll know when I see it. 

An entirely unplanned month of down time…

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Some of you may have noticed that I basically took the entire month of July away from posting here. I didn’t exactly give up writing – my proverbial cup of post it notes and electronic memory aids runneth over. Whether anything will eventually become of those snippets remains to be determined.

When I started off this self-imposed sabbatical, I was wading through a health issue that left me decidedly unmotivated and challenged my ability to string together any kind of coherent paragraph. My attention span for a couple of weeks was just about nil. I doubt I could have written well with either a proverbial or literal gun to my head. Instead of forcing the issue and inevitably being frustrated by the results, I opted to just not.

What I wasn’t going to do here was half ass my way through it. That’s the kind of thing you reserve for writing you have to do – like in the office. It’s not the way you treat a blog you’ve been tinkering around with for well over a decade. If I couldn’t give it a fair shake, I’d much rather just bide my time until I was in a better and more editorially competent head space. 

There are still days when I feel I’ve mostly got cotton between my ears, but I’m happy to say that I do seem to be over the initial hump. I’ll give you a bit more information on that next time, but for now suffice to say that I’m feeling mostly like myself again. More importantly, I feel like the words aren’t a constant struggle to get down on the page.

Back in early July, when I made the decision to take a pause, I was afraid I’d miss the day-to-day rhythm of these posts. I missed the writing to be sure, but it turns out I didn’t miss the self-imposed daily deadlines. Knowing that, I’m taking the daily deadlines off the table for the time being and intentionally scaling back from five posts a week to a more manageable schedule of posting on Monday and Thursday (with the inevitable extra thrown in when the mood or breaking news begs for something more immediate). 

I’ll be keeping What Annoys Jeff This Week? as a regular Thursday feature. Monday’s post will be the usual wide-ranging sort, but hopefully will make use of the extra time to flesh out ideas a little more fully and exert some additional editorial control over the final products. As time and other circumstances allow, I fully expect to bring more days back into the schedule over the coming months. For now, I want to use this as an opportunity to focus on improving quality versus simply hitting quantity goals.

So, as we prepare to slip into August, I’m pleased to be back and eager to begin once again dispensing full-throated snark into the void.

Temporary pause…

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If you’re going to write a lot, reading a lot just comes with the territory. It follows that since I’ve written a lot of blog posts, I’ve also read a lot of them written by other people. I’ve been enchanted by a number of blogs over the years. The single most frustrating thing about many of them is sometimes they sort of stop without any rhyme or reason. The stories these people tell just end. It’s deeply unsatisfying and I can’t help but wonder what series of events led someone who may have been so committed to posting regularly for years to suddenly stop.

This isn’t a post to say I’m suddenly stopping. It is, however, a post to say I’m going to take a (hopefully) brief pause. Maybe a week or two. Maybe a little longer.

My intent is to get back at it as soon as I’m feeling like I can give the written word the kind of attention I’ve always believed it deserves. The effort is worth a lot more mental horsepower than I’m currently feeling able to put in. So yeah, I’m giving it a temporary rest.

Not to worry, though. My notes pages are already filling up with dribs and drabs that will be the kernels of future posts. Given the state of the world and the inevitably of bumping up against human stupidity, I’m sure I’ll feel the undeniable urge to rage about something sooner rather than later. I’d just like to be able to do it when I’ve got a little less brain fog and a lot more ability to focus on fine details. 

In the meantime, you’ve got almost 4,000 old posts ranging all the way back to 2006 sitting here, so don’t be afraid to dig around the archives a little. Some of what’s buried there are real gems.

The super-long weekend begins…

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Here we are kicking off the first super-long weekend of 2023. I may very well keep right on posting on schedule every weekday at 6:00. On the other hand, I may not… so don’t be surprised if you find I’ve skipped a day or two next week. These little vacations are the only time each year when I’m perfectly willing to throw the posting schedule out the window if I find I just don’t feel like it on a particular day. 

What I’ve found through experience is the posts that originate during these short breaks tend to generate quite a bit less interest than then ones in which I’m ranting about work, bureaucracy, or people in general. That’s reasonable. I can hardly expect everyone out there to be breathlessly interested in hearing my tales of crawling through fire trap used book warehouses or sitting on the porch enjoying gin and tonic for breakfast.

By the first full week of June, I’ll be back to normal and probably showing no restive or restorative effects from taking a little time away, so it’s safe to expect business as usual before you know it.

Fair warning for the weeks ahead…

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The next two weeks are going to be dicey – at least in terms of getting anything resembling quality content and commentary ready to post. I’m not saying they’ll be non-existent, just that we’ll probably skip some days and the quality may be off on some others. A lot of what the immediate future holds will depend entirely on how I feel when I schlep home at the end of each day.

Being a creature who thrives on consistency, this will be a period of anything but. Add in most likely being able to reintroduce Anya to the mix in the middle of this stretch and we’re on the hook to have two weeks of anything but ordinary.

I never doubt my ability to trek through the batshittiest of batshit crazy days, but I do recognize that if something’s got to give, this bit of daily writing and editing will most likely be what I temporarily toss over the side first. Oh, I’m sure there will still be updates – and probably a fair amount of ranting and raving – just don’t expect it to land on time or with quite the normal level of penash or polish.

Sources and methods…

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I consider myself fortunate to not be one of those people who has an unseemly love for hearing his own voice. Like Mr. Ed before me, I try to make it a policy to never speak unless I have something to say. It mostly leaves me free to observe people’s comings and goings, their small tics and tells, and generally to spend my time trying to read the room rather than just sitting there cobbling together whatever I want to say next.

Once I make whatever point I believe needs making, I’m perfectly happy to fade into the background as things play out to their logical or illogical conclusion.

The result of this long practice is that, to quote Jed Bartlet, “I hear things. I don’t understand most of it, but I hear it.” Hearing the things, over the course of being dragged into a multitude of meetings, having offhand conversations, and overhearing random comments in passing over the last two decades has proven to be a veritable treasure trove of information about this, that, or the other thing. The vast majority is information that may not prove useful today, but that’s available to dredge out of deep memory at the point where it may be useful.

The trouble with sitting on this vast amount of information ferreted away in dribs and drabs is that much of it was never presented for public consumption. The amount of great stuff I have to write about that’s being self-embargoed because I don’t want to burn my sources and methods is an absolute absurdity… but since using any of it overtly risks leaving me out in the cold, embargoed it shall (mostly) stay.

Maybe someday I’ll get around to writing another helpful guide – this time one on not just joining, but learning to survive decades in the bureaucracy. It’s not the worse idea I’ve ever heard.

State of the blog…

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Is it even the end of the year if we don’t take a minute to review some of the stats from 2022?

In a nutshell, we’ve had 251 posts weighing in at approximately 90,000 words, seen by 1,500 followers. It’s a nice round number and I’m not even going to ponder how many of those are bots. 

Total views were down this year to 14,140. That’s a drop off of 2,333 views from last year. 2021 was the high-water mark for views since I started at WordPress, so this year ends a 3-year trend of steady growth. By the time views for this post and tomorrow’s yearly book review are published, I’ll be slightly ahead of where the numbers stood in 2020. I won’t be gnashing my teeth about any of that. 

I don’t spend a lot of time looking at stats since they’ve never really drive what I do around here. That said, since I created this blog, it looks like there have been 117,885 views from 50, 507 visitors. In that time, those visitors have peeped at 3,804 unique posts. It feels like reasonable numbers for a nobody blogger mostly using it as a tool to scream into the void and hang on to his own sanity.

So, that’s where we’ve been. If everything goes according to plan, we’ll all come back a year from now and see if 2023 treats us better or worse. As always, I plan to walk into the new year with absolutely no expectations either way.