I remember wondering why a few of my favorite bloggers just up and vanished over the years.
A couple seemed, perhaps, a tad paranoid but a high profile government or military IP address making a blip(s) on your blog’s web tracker can, on first sighting, have that effect .
My initial misgivings turned to shameful pride and fed my silly photo-shopped intensity with every EOP, DARPA, GOV, MIL, TREAS and even EPA visitor.
I drifted from my beloved blogging not for fear of steel boots but for a Bush-weary boredom with the clamorous metallic noise and toothsome visage of the seeming Teflon corporate media’s iron grip on discussion and agenda.
Though equally needy and prone to weediness, my garden was rewardingly goal-oriented, far less edgy and genetically non-fixated on past and present trivia.
Sure a hot freak (hello Larry) always has the potential to lure me with its lusty siren song.
But, I have to admit, my “occasional posting” quickly turned more pictorial, ephemeral and, of late oddly, audible than I had originally intended.
I shall not, Prospero-like, infest my mind with beating on the strangeness of my web comings or goings but shall follow the teaching of Zen master Doris Day’s que sera, sera.
Blogging has been and remains tragicomic and a great way to endure the Bush strain of Stockholm Syndrome but I pity the far future’s history researchers doomed to wade through our collective bloggy e-scribblings.
My past posting, perhaps too simply put, was more or less a manifestation of a sort of post 2000 Election and September 11 kind of Stockholm Syndrome where myself and other poor tele-viewing Pavlovian slobbers were held hostage to a strange mix of horror-movie cliché, national marketing and family heritage.
Unlike Stockholm Syndrome’s most famous sufferer Patty Hearst, my personal captivity, as measured by self-published words, has lasted several years.
As it stands, the star and hostage-taker of so many of my blog posts will soon leave office or commit some final tragic palimpsetting of American and World History.
I will continue to try and co-witness it occasionally in this space and with as much humor as is possible in these dark times.
It’s a given that, until unplugged, something will happen that triggers a shiver, a gush of words and a flashback of not so Pattyesque semiotic liberation.

Image: umkc.edu