Tag Archives: writing

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.

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.

On my distinct lack of give-a-shit…

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There are a million things going on in the world, and if I’m brutally honest with you (and with myself), there’s not a single one of them I feel interested enough in to write about today. Sure, my privilege is showing or whatever, but I just don’t have it in me at the moment to be morally outraged, vaguely interested, heartbroken, or whatever appropriate response is dictated by the events of the day. 

All I really want to do – and therefore what I will spend my evening doing – is sitting here comfortably with a book. Jorah will inevitable be napping next to me. One of the cats (Anya for sure) will be curled up between my knees. Monday is bad enough on its own without trying to dwell too much on all the ills of the world. 

This is a thought I keep coming back to. I know it’s made an appearance here more than once. There are probably lots of valid questions – How engaged should we be in what’s happening outside our bubble? What do I owe the world if I’m keeping shit together inside my own fence line? Should I even be bothered by what’s happening out there beyond my immediate span of control? 

The last year has, somewhat of necessity, been focused internally – on what I’ve needed to do in an attempt to follow doctor’s orders and the various episodes of fuckery that resulted from that. While it hasn’t been a full-on shitstorm, it has been the better part of a year of the number of things I’ve had the bandwidth to care about being reduced pretty dramatically. Maybe that was self-preservation, but the downstream consequence seems to be that my naturally low give-a-shit level is almost nonexistent these days. Believe me when I tell you that any time you think you see me giving a shit (and it doesn’t directly involve animal welfare or mocking the feckless or stupid among us) I’m 100% faking it… and probably doing a piss poor job of that in the moment. I’m honestly not sure if I’ll ever adjust this attitude or if I even want to. Like so much else, that is apparently yet to be determined.

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. 

And we’re back…

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After Christmas I took a little break. I was feeling legitimately good for the first time in months, there was a lot going on. Honestly, I just didn’t have the normal burning desire to sit down and get anything off my chest.

Today, however, I spent my first day back at work working in the actual office. Rest assured after eight hours as a standard office drone, I’m cured of not having anything to say. I won’t say it’s a great routine, but it is a routine and I appreciate it for that if nothing else.

Somewhere along the way, I think we’ve all been led to believe that the purpose of vacation is to enjoy some downtime and come back rejuvenated. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, as I don’t think I’ve ever come back from a vacation re-energized and excited to be back to work. At this stage it’s safe to say that’s just not who I’m ever going to be as a person.

But back I am. Because the animals are expensive and I’d well and truly suck at living under a bridge or sleeping on the nearest park bench. There are, if nothing else, standards to be maintained.

I won’t say the day was entirely unproductive, though. I did spend an unreasonable amount of time today plugging in all the federal holidays for 2024 into Outlook and starting to plot how to maximize my days off for this new year. So I’ve got that going for me.

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.