WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED BLOG?
(Actual date of this post: Feb. 26.)
A considerable few days ago, a blogger to whom I link asked his readers if he should decrease his blogging frequency from every day. And I've been wondering if I should increase my frequency. I'm approaching the first anniversary of the TAO 61's and I am quite aware of how FEW posts I make. Another of my friends has apparently discontinued a blog, I hope because she plans to publish its content in the real print world, although her copy editor will surely throw up hands in despair. There is an advantage in the world of on-line vanity publishing: NO PESKY EDITORS!

As a result of these events, I began thinking about the what and why of this blogging thing, self-publishing in the vast sea of noise that is blogland. I think a blog, being your own private publication (I exclude the sites meant to keep family and friends up with intensely personal activities), finds its nature in frequency and its topic and tone. Are you a daily newspaper (a shopper or the New York Times), a weekly news magazine (Time or People), a monthly review (The Atlantic Monthly or Vogue), a quarterly journal (Granta or Tricycle)? Such distinctions also describe the nature of the subscribers to those publications. My own blogging tendency, it is obvious, tends toward the biweekly essay (partly because of the compulsive copyediting). I admire Anna Quindlen, who turns out a piece for Newsweek about every other issue, alternating space with the more conservative George Will (a yin/yang thing). I'd love to have a gig like that, although I have little interest in politics, sports or the minutiae of current events. I aspire to be an essayist, not a commentator or entertainer, and I write mostly for myself. It's difficult for me to toss off the quick irate and irascible daily posts characteristic of so many bloggers, frequently not well written or edited or thoroughly thought out. (My rants turn up in personal emails.) I am still THINKING about events that happened a year or decades ago which I bring up from time to time to make a point. I am writing history (and possibly a novel).

So it happens that today, while reviewing the events of the past week or so, on the morning after the new moon (and Ash Wednesday) I feel the yang energy rising out of the empty yin. As it has been quite cool in the mornings here I said to the Wizard, "I wish I could go somewhere warm and just bask in the sun and relax." Then I remembered the many folks who are here in Hawaii right now from Minnesota and elsewhere doing exactly that. That's yin/yang relativity.

Later at the elevator (which at my building is outside), impatient to get to work, I was delayed by a small boy wearing hardly anything who came runnning to the door to hit the down button repeatedly. Then two more boys with the same military haircuts, an older and younger brother, the younger in the older's arms, arrived and blocked the door. "We have to wait for our mom," the half-naked one said. I was a little irritated; I needed to GO. But after a few moments she arrived. "Aren't you cold?" I asked the shirtless one. "No," he said, bouncing off the walls of the elevator. "My Dad's coming home today...from Iraq." Mom looked very weary and explained he was returning from a 15-month deployment. The youngest boy couldn't have been 15 months old; his father had never seen him. I abandoned my irritation and wished the family a happy reunion. These rambunctious boys and the weary mom have been in my mind since as a kind of prayer.

Another observation earlier this week, on Mardi Gras, I saw that someone had finally discarded their Christmas tree at the dumpster. So someone else lives season-to-season, event-to-event. Maybe it was the boys' tree. (The poor dry brown thing would surely be depressing for Dad's homecoming.) I bet whoever finally cleared out Christmas probably doesn't blog every day either!