I'll understand if you skip the windy explanation.
I had three rules for this blog this whole year. I told myself I could reveal them on January 1.
The first was to post
every day if possible—not planning in advance.
The second was to be as
honest as possible. Not to contrive, even if what I was thinking made no sense.
The third, in part to achieve the second, was to never to address you, readers.
I liked the way that worked. But having told you that, I will say hi once. Today.
Hi.
I speculate sometimes on how many of you are out there. A handful of you make yourselves known. I mention this blog to very few people, so the statistics page confuses me a bit, standing almost perfectly steady at 30 hits every weekday (although there is a very real probability that one reader in particular refreshes the site fifteen times a day just to keep me guessing).
The days Ty's blog drives to this one, traffic more than doubles, and that spike always makes me chuckle.
So do your comments. Encouragement, participation, a remark from a friend who keeps reading here, the very occasional comments from someone who stumbled across the blog.
I like that I reach you. And that sometimes you wave back.
I've been thinking about whether or not to try to continue this blog. My goal was to post here for a year, and I've done that. I have exhausted my favorite poetry and skimmed a good bit of new stuff. I've hit a plateau with my photography (aside from the +/- button) and I want to get a bit more technical, less poetic, with rocks. Do you really want to sit through that? Does anyone out there really read the long poems?
I thought of the title for this post and then looked up the passage. Shakespeare was always too dense for my patience, but this is a nice chunk:
To be or not to be, that is the question;
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to — 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life,
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action
—from Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
For now, I've decided to continue with the outrageous fortune. In chapter IV.
My pick axe the only bodkin around.
