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Since I started posting at this site again a couple months ago, it seems, a bunch of you have made it a habit to visit it regularly. Even on days I don’t tweet out links to fresh content, this site gets way more visitors than there are members of my family, and that feels awesome. If as many people as show up here every day were showing up nightly to some real-life location to hear me spew my nonsense, I would probably go on doing it forever, just for the joy of the performance.
But back in March, when I promised daily posts for the length of the quarantine, I made a series of major miscalculations.
Among them: 1) I estimated the amount of time it would take to churn out blog posts based on the amount of time it took at times in my life when I spent all of every weekday in front of a computer. I don’t do that any more, so I’m not constantly cuing up blog fodder. It’s easy to write about a Wikipedia rabbit-hole you’ve fallen down when you’re falling down three Wikipedia rabbit-holes a day. But you can’t force your way down that hole when you’re busy chasing around a toddler every morning.
2) Like a lot of Americans around my age, I am — or at least have been to date — generally spoiled by the historical circumstances of my lifetime. I did not at all consider the possibility that there’d be no clear end to the pandemic in sight by the middle of May. In my head, I figured, “Donald Trump or no, this is still the U.S. of A. in 2020; everything will be back to normal in a few weeks.” Remember, as of late March, they were still saying they might get in a full 162-game MLB season. Seems silly in retrospect.
3) I wildly underestimated both how many hours my wife would need to work during this time and how physically and mentally taxing childcare would prove without the many, many resources upon which I previously relied, namely my parents and my in-laws and playgrounds and zoos and museums and libraries and classes and bookstores.
I enjoy keeping this site active and I love that there are people out there apparently eager to read it, but I’ve got a couple of big, overwhelmingly positive life changes coming my way by the start of September and a bunch of shit I need to get together before they happen.
Also, if this is the new normal — and I really hope it isn’t — then I can’t keep letting the writing I do here prevent me from pursuing more difficult (and, ideally, more professionally viable) forms of writing. This is fun and some people seem to appreciate it, but it seems unlikely I’ll ever have another daily blogging job, so blogging daily feels like a poor way to move forward with my writing career.
As ridiculous as it sounds, I feel bad about bailing on a commitment I made to post something every day until baseball returns, but I feel worse about the current state of my kitchen floor. So from this point forward, I’ve got to dial it back. My aim is to still make two posts every week: One about a sandwich, and one about something else.
If you’ve been coming here regularly, thank you so much, and please do keep coming — just maybe not so regularly. If you are a fan of my writing, understand that my goal in slowing down here is to provide you with way more of it elsewhere, in some less complicated future.
Whatever you can give us is a gift. You don’t owe us anything. I’ll take what I can get.
Looking forward to reading you in a different context, whatever that may be. Best of luck with what lies ahead