Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant

Regular Coverage Involves Subjecting the Host to Misery

Some of you may have noticed that I haven't been posting a lot of literary content lately. I promise to get back to the usual book news, reviews and other thrills that keep my three regular readers glued to the monitor, along with another staccato burst of audio blog entries, but until then, let me offer some reasons why:

1. During the weekend, I had an incredible experience that lasted twenty-four hours. It did not involve drugs or any out-of-the-ordinary debauchery, but it did involve lack of sleep. Just as bad I suspect, given that I didn't have a bite to eat during seventeen or so of those hours, save for a rat I found wandering underneath an ancient icebox located in a dingy basement that I escaped from, moments after the blindfold was removed.

2. In the past two weeks, I have been pretty darn happy and very pro-active in other parts of my life. If there's any downside to this, well, it's prevented me from engaging in this little web-based distraction. Your only hope for regular and focused blog content is a bona-fide state of misery and anger which causes an impromptu 4,000 word dirge on how lit blogs are organized into academic, non-academic, post-academic, pre-operative, pastoral, paint-by-numbers, postmodern, and OFF (i.e., outright fuckin' funny). Then again, who wants another manifesto about blogs that only a handful of people care about?

3. I believe I've been writing more and reading less. I read only one and a half books last week, as opposed to my usual two or three. That's clearly not enough stacked next to the amazing folks who can get through six books a week, have a full-time job, live life, and apparently amputate all four limbs from a random pedestrian in less time than most of us take to make a sandwich.

4. George Bush and his policies are bankrupt on almost every level.

4(a). Political discourse revives the same damn arguments. But it doesn't refrain me from expressing horror. Still, even with politics fired off in extreme bursts, it fits the same damn arguments.

4(b). John Kerry is a goddam bore and I've been spending way too much time trying to convince other people that they must vote for him. Frankly, it's a tough sell. I feel like a snake oil salesman or some guy on a used car lot named Bernie. I'd be able to sell shit-scented toilet paper better than this guy.

5. Because there is no way to modify the size of the little window in Movable Type, my eyes hurt after about 600 words of rambling about something. Factor in thinking under the radar of emolument, and you begin to realize how it's become next to impossible to post long magnificent entries like Sarah's.

So there you have it. I'm sure some of these things will change. But your only hope for regular coverage is to kill my friends, destroy what remains of my reputation, and otherwise make my life miserable. It's not going to happen, of course, because my head will keep popping up like a jack-in-the-box. But you can try.

I will, of course, try to maintain the blog under these conditions. But, dear readers, if I abstained from the truth, I wouldn't be able to keep up the grand echelons of blogging seen here.

Posted by DrMabuse at May 3, 2004 05:24 PM