Angry Robot

The First of Possibly Many Last Posts

Wondering if I should write something here?

Funny first line to write as I’m already writing something, and it’s always here where I am.

I guess what I’m debating ultimately is do I keep writing on this website. Now, “keep” is perhaps too strong a word, as I haven’t really done anything on it for over a year.

So the question, if I can gradually clarify through writing, is: is there something worth writing here?

To be clear, “clarity through writing” is the whole point of writing here, originally, for me. It was essentially therapeutic, a way of clearing an oft-muddled or indecisive mind by testing its mettle in the forge of… words and stuff.

That it was shared online, and people liked it, and commented, and linked to me, and I to them – that was a bonus.

Now, thousands of years later, I’ve made weekly writing part of my self care routine – I just don’t post it publicly. All the eyeballs are long gone, slurped into Facebook’s glass house. Writing here is a monologue to a house of skulls and dust. Ok and, TBH, a handful of my close friends. Hey fellas!

And, I write much more of the time for work, which is much busier than it was back at The Dawn of the Blog Age. And, in my great and unmatched wisdom that I have Earned The Hard Way (through age and hard living), I do sense that I perhaps have a clearer mind to begin with?

(You’d be right to point out, if that were the case, I’d already know the answer to the question I am floundering around presently. And. It’s not a good sign that I’ve avoided writing here for some reason for the longest time since the Fourth Bloggerozoic Era, Since the Rule of Bloggosaurus the Pretty Ok, since Bloggicus Brought Hot Takes to the Bloggicists, since…)

I’m pretty sure I have a point in mind, though, at least somewhere in here. It is this: the bonus of blogosphere community is long gone. That’s fine, I have other communities, more often now in real life, so that’s nice. And even the main point, of clarity through writing, is much less valued now for me, as I have other techniques for finding, or maybe maintaining, clarity.

And, a much more prosaic reason: time. There is no time for this. I have many times written posts that, for clarity, need to be rewritten, and rewritten, and re-re-written, and then abandoned. They know what they did! The only thing I could successfully publish were link posts with like no original thought at all.

But fucking hell, god damn if I don’t miss it.

So here’s my Promise of Excellence* to you. (*Note: promise will not be honoured.)

I hereby promise to post at least one soul-searching, “haven’t posted in a while”, “wondering whether to stop this nonsense”, flirting-with-final-post post per decade, or year, whichever is sooner.

(Ed. Note: I’ve just reread this trainwreck of a post and it goes exactly nowhere, and fails to answer the question it eventually figures out to pose, which is: is there something worth writing here?

The answer is: yes, but is it anything more than tortured, perpetual last posts? Like Sisyphus pushing the Publish Boulder up the WordPress Hell Hill?

I beleive it is, but I’m ever the optimist.)

Joy Robot and Destroy Robot

As you can probably tell from the URL I like robots.

My daughter “wrote” two “books”. By “wrote” I mean she drew a series of pictures, and by “book” they are probably more like a zine comic book, as put together by a six-year-old, of course. But she read them to us, decoding the pictures as if they contained words, sometimes getting mixed up and backtracking. Let me try to summarize the plot:

Once upon a time there was a robot, called Joy Robot. (Note: this robot contains a little girl in its belly that looks awfully similar to my daughter.) But then… a terrible robot appeared! This is Destroy Robot (who contains a little boy, identity unknown). The two robots had a war. They fought and fought, until the Queen of the Mermaids appeared. She tried to help. But Destroy Robot used Mind Control! And then the Queen and Joy Robot fought. But after a while, Joy Robot remembered who she was, and she and the Queen fought Destroy Robot. And Destroy Robot was destroyed!

I’ve never told my daughter about this site. It’s quite possible, however, that she witnessed my love of robots first hand, and thus her behavior was guided. Or, it could be in her DNA.

But one way or the other, I’ve never wanted to change the name of my site more than I do now.

Eamon
This is our newest creation, Eamon.

When I was ten I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

Living and dying on his own terms

Patience Is a (Sexual) Virtue