Biting The Bullet

Okay, this is it. Teh Blog Of Doom is now LIVE once again — but by no means Ready For Prime Time. Not by a long shot. I just decided to throw open the doors, in hopes that the risk of embarrassment might prod me forward. We’ll see.

I am working on it even as you read these words. No, really. Those are not Star Trek reruns you hear in the background.

Explanations and elaborate excuses to follow forthwith…

12:05 am

UPDATE 1: Precipitous

By the way, I do a lot of deadpan (in writing, that is — I can’t do deadpan in my face). Maybe it’s the mystic touch of New Mexico that seeped into my crust so long ago. It’s a bit of a caution, to be sure, but it’s just my style now. I shrink when it rains, but I go well with fish. Especially when I’m half-asleep. People have been known to take offense. This is usually not my intent. Unless it is. If and when that is my intent, you will most certainly know it. You likely won’t even have to wait for the translation. But if you’re not sure, then best to presume I’m just playing. Or rambling incomprehensibly. Like I’m doing now. Yeah. Where was I?

Oh. When to take offense. Yeah. Rule Of Thumb: When in doubt, imagine a droll tone, and visualize me with a slight wry smile and a playfully mischievous twinkle in my otherwise bleary eyes.

Yeah. Don’t come between me and my coffee, and we’re sure to get along famously. Unless we don’t…

Hey, why do I keep adding caveats? Hm. I think this may be one of those pivotal moments, oft neglected by me, when one of those little smiley things is needed, so here’s one for the record:

:-p

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3:30 am

UPDATE 2: Collisions

A bit of top level outlining and other miscellany done now. *wipes brow*

Time to explain what this is about.

As many of my old e-pals are aware, I stopped blogging almost two years ago. Not by any conscious choice, but because the impetus just wasn’t there. I wasn’t satisfied with the blog’s structure, or with my style of using it, for that matter. Also, there was some infighting in the advocacy community at the time that really sucked the wind out of my sails. So here the blog sat, largely unattended. Meanwhile, my public web-presence was largely confined to Twitter and a few alternative sites.

Then, several months ago, I decided to mothball the blog altogether, closing it to the public until I could decide how to proceed, or if I wanted to resume blogging at all. My output was always thin, and my style too strident and/or combative. I had also been growing increasingly dissatisfied with the near-exclusive focus on autism, and on the ongoing insults & injuries faced by the autistic and disabled communities at the hands of organizations, professionals and society at large. My position has always been that anti-autistic prejudice and discrimination is just one expression of a much larger problem — indeed, THE big problem at the root of most injustice. Yes, our technology has certainly outpaced our wisdom as a species. But more fundamentally, our capacity to interfere in the lives of others, to wield power and force our will upon each other, has long exceeded the grasp of our various moralities, our ethics, our compassion. And with the advance of technology, the implications of this failure may well elude the grasp of our collective survival instinct.

Hardly a novel line of reasoning, I’ll grant you. But I’ve come to see the root cause of the potentially catastrophic challenges we face as being one-and-the-same with the root cause of nearly all injustice. And I, for one, am oh-so-tired of nipping trivially at the myriad leaves and branches of injustice, when I should be — as Thoreau would have it — attacking the root.

But the inevitable structure of my approach was daunting to behold. Forbidding. Nay, suffocating. So, the blog sat and waited … for … for … what?

A catalyst. In a form I would never have expected. A photon in the void. A seed dropped in the ocean. A carefree flutter of delicate wings on a distant world, a momentary flash of light and color, echoes, reflection upon reflection cascading through the jewels of Indra’s Net and rippling endlessly into space — and light-years away, galaxies collide…

But that’s another story.

Next up: Where Does It Go From Here?

I’ll let you know …

;-)

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6:00 am

UPDATE 3: In The Dark

The ultimate answer to the foregoing question is, of course, I Don’t Have A Clue.

I’ve managed to name what I think will serve well enough for my top-level categories, and assigned a smattering of topics for each. Some of the reconstruction of old threads will be pretty straightforward, but there will be a lot of linkrot. Incoming traffic from older blogs and such will find no branch to perch upon, the tree now cut to the ground. We’ll have to live with that, and hope those who need the old content will see easily enough where to look.

Maintenance will be a chore, clearing away the now inert artifacts of connections past, and putting new ones in their places. But most of that is pretty robotic work. Likewise, the aesthetics will require some elbow-grease, and a keener eye than I usually demand of myself. But I’m usually able to synthesize a modicum of artistic flair when the need arises.

The filling-in and fleshing-out of new top-level items, however, will be my nemesis. By far the most daunting and cumbersome of tasks. “BIAS!” will be crucial, a primer, a vocabulary and a unifying narrative, the spring from which all other streams are fed. Or so I have imagined. It may surprise me, but for right now, it just scares the hell out of me. As for the other categories, I expect to be weighed upon, but not crushed.

Having accepted that burden, all that will remain is to commit to a regular posting schedule — a bare minimum of, say, three posts per week, to begin with. And to that end, a regular writing schedule would probably be a Very Good Idea. That, I’m loathe to admit, is terra incognita to me. Never been there. Travel-guide, anyone?

Well, there it is, and so it goes. This, that, and the other.

And try to keep my mouth as foot-free as possible. For a change. ;-)

Next?

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