Yes, I am back, although I can't really say for how long. Next week I'll be travelling to Zurich, and opportunities for posting will probably be scarce (I'll certainly make the attempt). This will be the first time that I've been out of the country since 1995, and it will be interesting to be an American in Europe. I plan to display a poor grasp of geography and will attempt to acquire a large number of firearms.
As for why I took such a long break: burnout, pure and simple. Not just the effort of production, but also the effort of wading through the cacophony of the Net and being beaten down by sheer volume of it. I became overwhelmed by the Legion of the Admirably Certain, of which I am not a member. Certainty doesn't suit me; it is quickly subsumed beneath my tendencies towards doubt and skepticism. Proclaiming positions with conviction, as I had been doing for over two years, began to create a Big Gong of dissonance in the cognitive soup 'twixt my ears.
That, coupled with an absurd increase in my overall level of general anxiety and psychological dysfunction, caused me to flee the blog. Some might call it a lack of confidence; I prefer to think of it as the inability to maintain the fiction of certainty. Vast quantities of wordsnot are being expelled all over the Internet about Iraq, for example, and it's fair to say that 90% of it is guesswork, at best. While it may be entertaining to read all the what-ifs and maybes and supposedlys, after awhile the brain withers and dries up, deprived of a healthy diet of Is.
Still others might call it being a neurotic ball of nerves, and that's fair enough. As my blog persona calmly carried on with business as usual, the gap between my public face and the vibrating twitch-fest that was the Real Me began to cause even more twitchiness, a sort of feedback loop, which unfortunately culminated in my donning a malady-appropriate supervillain costume and embarking on a life of crime, only to be apprehended by Batman, which is irritating because he's far nuttier than I'll ever be, but he's rich, so he gets to run around with all his fancy Bat-toys and do whatever he damn well pleases.
Did I write "pure and simple" a few paragraphs ago?
Apparently not.
