Category Archives: writing

Is the juice still worth the squeeze…

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I’m tired. I thought when I cut back the posting to twice a week I might catch my breath. Maybe I have. Maybe the writing is even just a touch better and more cogent than it was when I was trying to churn out five a week. The fact remains that I’m tired. I’m tired of shouting into the electronic void. I’m tired of feeling like an increasingly isolated voice of sanity in a world determined to spin violently off the rails and drown in an ocean of screeching religious, social, political, and economic extremists. American “Christians” collectively losing their shit after entirely missing the point of the Olympic opening ceremonies leaves me wondering if it’s even worth trying to be anything other than a partisan wackjob. Is there even room for a voice that isn’t doing its damndest to be way out on the extremes? 

Maybe I’m just tired of giving a shit at all about forces operating well beyond my span of control or influence. Is it time to hunker down, circle the wagons, and focus on the thing on which I can exert some influence? After 4,043 posts, I’m not sure keeping on with this is the right answer. I’m not sure it’s doing much beyond creating its own little echo chamber. Sometimes I wonder if keeping on my soapbox isn’t, in fact, actively leaving me worse overall than I’d be if I just let the world’s fuckery roll past and around rather than sitting with it long enough to write down a few paragraphs of thoughts on the topic of the week.

I expect there’s not much that will ever stop me from writing, but maybe it’s time to go all the way back to basics. Maybe it’s time that I’m writing exclusively for myself without even the slightest consideration of an audience ever having eyes on it. That’s the kind of thing that doesn’t feed the ego, but it’s possible that might not be such a bad thing either. 

As I sit here tapping this out, I’m part conflicted, part disenchanted, part disappointed, part disgusted, and perhaps just a touch irrationally optimistic that there’s a chance we can pull up before burring the whole American experiment nose first into the ground at a high rate of speed. If we can’t, I don’t know that I have it in me to keep plastering over the wreckage with cynical commentary week after week. 

This isn’t an announcement or even a decision to stop so much as it’s a recognition that at some point I may just throw up my hands and walk away in disgust. At some point it all just becomes too absurd to carry on as if we haven’t entered a truly bizarre era in history. On the other hand, it’s the sort of thing that means having an inexhaustible supply of things to write about or comment on… so color me conflicted. 

Maybe it’s just a passing fancy…

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I like writing. I mean that in just about every possible way. I like the feeling of my hands on the keyboard. I like sitting down and filling a page with ideas that were, just a few minutes ago, just some vague ideas banging around the inside of my head. I like the notion that, thanks to the permanency of the internet, that somewhere some of these thoughts will continue to exist in the ether long after I have ceased to be. I suspect that’s something of the same reason why I have such an affinity for old fashioned paper books. I accumulate them in hopes that one or two might somehow survive the passing of the years to become the rare old survivors that people wonder about when they eventually come to light.

Just now, though, it’s the writing itself that is intriguing me. Part of me really wants to get back after it in a more methodical way. Is it time for a follow up to Nobody Told Me? Should I take another crack at short fiction? Do I have more to say if I follow either path? Maybe I should just serialize something here instead of dealing with the pain and aggravation of relearning the electronic publication platforms.

The big question – the one that rules them all – is ultimately one of how much time am I willing to allocate to it. Back when I was going at it strong, I was writing every day. That was more than ten years ago now, but back then I was ginning up 300-500 words for the blog 5 days a week and then doing another 500-1000 words a day on other projects. Doing it, even in the halfassed way that I went after it, represents a relatively significant investment of time. Doing it whole-assed, of course, means laying in ever more time than that.

At some point I’ll just have to be very honest with myself about whether this is a passing notion or something that’s going to stick around for a while and be grit in the gears if I don’t do something about it. For now, it falls somewhere on the list of things I’m pondering without applying too much mental horsepower.

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. 

Meaning and subtlety…

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I spent a fair amount of today screwing around with PowerPoint. It’s only worth remarking on because I do it far less often now than I did once upon a time.

There are a chosen few people who can make PowerPoint sing. They turn it into a real dark art form. They’ll add all the bells and whistles and make the thing look like the slickest sales presentation you’ve ever seen. I’ve long known that PowerPoint is a tool of the devil, but I’ve always had just a little bit of admiration for these sorcerers and their unholy works.

On my very best day, my own slide decks could best be described as “wordy.” Some people think in charts an graphs. Others think in numbers. Me? Well, I think in words. A big beautiful block of text gets the point across to me far better than any amount of razzle-dazzle you can jam into a chart.

The written word, when used correctly, is a thing of real beauty. When used in conjunction with a slide deck, even the best words are a bit of a red headed stepchild. Even with that being the case, words are still the very best way I know of conveying meaning and subtlety. In retrospect I’m not sure I managed to do that either… but there were a lot of words on the page so I suppose that counts for something.

When interests overrun time…

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I’d like to get back to writing. Not just blogging, which I love, of course, but proper writing – telling stories and building worlds. I won’t claim to be particularly good at it. Perhaps that’s a failure of imagination on my part, but it’s honest labor that I enjoyed.

Time, as always, is my eternal enemy. Even in the midst of a plague year there isn’t enough of it. What time there is, I spend with my nose in a book someone else wrote… Because there’s always one more thing I want to read. In fact, there’s somewhere north of 500 somethings I want to read already here, shelved, and waiting for me to get to them.

The secret to really getting things done, I’ve always suspected, is not sleeping. Although I have grown increasingly fond of those six hours a night. I wonder how well I could get by on a little less. given my already surly mood, the answer is probably “not well.”

At some point the only reasonable thing to do is accept that X number of interests don’t fit into Y amount of time and descope where I’m trying to spend my hours. It makes perfect sense, but I’m not quite ready to make that decision. Maybe I’ll never be… and maybe that’s the point.  

Life long learning…

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So I’m thinking about launching a new weekly feature… I’m leaning towards something short and pithy highlighting something (or several things) that I learned during that week. Based on the handful of notes I’ve jotted down already, there’s a fair chance that it’s mainly going to be a running list of things I probably should have known already given my advanced age.

I really don’t know if this idea is something that might have the staying power of my venerable series on What Annoys Jeff this Week. It might just be one of those early morning, under-caffeinated ideas that would have been better left where I found it.

I’ve been tinkering for a while now with various ideas of what I could use to plug an ongoing gap on Fridays here. I know that by the end of the week I’m rarely in the humor to churn out a fully formed post, but quick one-offs could fill the bill nicely in moving from a 4-posts per week back to a full service, five posts a week format. I increasingly feel like I need to be writing on Fridays, even if it’s just a little something to keep the fingers moving.

Anyway, we’ll see where it goes from here. Watch this space on Friday evening and you can judge for yourself.

Confessional…

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This blog has become something of my own personal confessional. There’s no privacy of course and there are plenty of thoughts I’d never dare put in writing, but it’s definitely got the catharsis of spilling your problems out to a benevolent and receptive audience.

The challenge though is it’s on the days you most need to write, you find the list stocked with things you just can’t say for general consumption.

So you file it away, wondering if maybe it will see the light of day again someday. You go fix a whisky drink and turn your full attention to anything that isn’t what made you want the drink so much in the first place.

The days like that are the exception rather than the rule, but sometimes they do stack up like cordwood. Especially when you realize it’s only bleeding Wednesday.

Why I skipped Monday…

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Writing, even something as trivial as the next blog post, for me – maybe for everyone – doesn’t come from a happy place. It doesn’t happen when I’m content and well rested. It comes from anger, frustration, annoyance and most of the feelings that make up the Dark Side of the Force. 

Four day weekends rarely evoke those feelings in me, though… except maybe once we’re within a twelve hour window of the long weekend being over. Then the angst finds all sorts of interesting ways to display itself. 

This weekend I threw more books on the stack, spent quality time with the critters, watched a couple of movies, made some drinks, had some food, spent time with what probably constitutes a full third of the total number of people I have any interest in being around for longer than 15 minutes, and generally relaxed… insofar as I ever really “relax.” It wasn’t the kind of weekend that engenders particularly interesting stories… and it certainly didn’t fill me with motivation to find anything to write about.

So I skipped Monday. It’s Tuesday now, though, and we’re back in the swing of it, so I’ll return – if not quite gladly – to the regular posting schedule.

Zero point zero…

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Let me be among the very first to say I can admit bad decisions when I make them. My idea to kick off an August AMA was met with a resounding silence zero point zero.jpgfollowed by the distant womp womp of a sad trombone. Level of interest: Zero point zero. That’s ok. The sheer volumes of topics around here that never get past the idea stage is staggering so it’s just one more aborted notion on the pile.

Of course if there’s no one out there feeding me ideas, that means I’m back to relying on my own devices. After compiling a couple of thousand posts, I guess you can say that I’m ok with that. It’s not exactly a new thing. I’m just going to proceed from the assumption in this case that silence implies consent and that I should continue doing what I’m doing.

So, you may be asking, what does that mean? Well, it means you’ll be sure to see more stupid things that happened at the office, a bit of commentary about the news of the day, and whatever else happens to catch my interest in the moment. After so many posts I’m finding it’s nearly impossible not to tread some of the same ground, but I’m finding it entertaining to look at how my thinking has evolved over time. All things considered it’s not a bad way to run a joint.

What’s on your mind?

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About once a year, but on no actual specific schedule I like to throw open the doors here at jeffreytharp.com and let you tell me what’s on your mind. No, I’m not asking you to click, or share, or forward to 10 friends to prevent the ghost in the machine from deleting all your porn links, but I am offering up the chance for each and every one of you to set the agenda for a little while. I usually do this kind of thing when it feels like my own topics are getting a little stale and it’s safe to say looking back over the last few months’ worth of posts, I get the distinct impression that the day job is getting way too much time inside my head. Thanks to the power of social media and the vast reach of this blog (you know, 20-60 people per day), I’ve got a chance to set out of my head for a little while and stretch my legs – or more aptly, my fingers.

So, you may be asking yourself, what are the ground rules? There really aren’t any. Want to know my thoughts on a topic I haven’t talked about? Ask. Want a deeper dive on something I’ve only tangentially touched upon? Let me know. Want to hear more about dogs and less about work? Tell me. Have an unanswered question about that one time I did “this” when I clearly should have done “that?” It’s your chance to get the straight dope from the horse’s mouth… or horse’s ass, I suppose, depending on your particular point of view.

Now for the fine print: While I will provide an answer to every question asked, I do reserve the right to “vague up” some details that could be incriminating for me or embarrassing for others. I will, however, provide the straight dope answer directly to the questioner in these cases. All questions will be answered in the order in which they were received, or the order in which I feel like answering them. Scheduling really depends on the day. I will lead off each AMA response by crediting the asker, by name, link to their blog, twitter, etc as appropriate unless they have requested to ask anonymously.

So now, it’s all up to you. What’s on your mind?