This blog is on indefinite hiatus.
Additional note, Thursday 11/2: Thank you all, so much, for your comments and emails. Regular posting will probably resume here sometime after late December, with significant changes in intent and focus. (Read: less politics without cause, less involvement in others’ arguments.)
Along these lines: Wapsie, way down in comment number 52, poses a question that I thought deserved your attention. I repost it here for your convenience. I have an answer, of sorts, perhaps to be explored in 2007, perhaps not. But the question is worth asking even without an answer.
See you in January.
Beautiful dog.
I’ve had the thought that blogs are “over.”
It’s a question worth posing on every blog:
What has all the good writing, the confirmation that there is really Someone Intelligent and Caring out there, actually accomplished—besides making us feel a little better for a few minutes?
Be honest about that. Even with the really big-time blogs. What real, solid gains—for people other than the big bloggers themselves, who enjoy a quasi-celebrity and a quasi-legitimacy—have been made because of blogs?
I’m not posing the question to put this blog down. It’s thoughtful, it’s well-written. But Chris himself mentions doubt about the real utility of blogs among his reasons to go on hiatus.
I think it’s a doubt worth addressing.
What is this medium for, exactly?
Be happy Chris, Becky, Zeke and Thistle.
We’ll wait a month before starting the WeMissChrisClarke blog (a la Fafblog).
that is one noble dog.
take care, chris.
Thanks for the excellent writing, Chris. You enriched my internet life and I wish you well.
Happy trails.
Enjoy your extra time with your family and please give Zeke an extra ear scritch (or belly rub or whatever he likes best) from me. I’ll miss your writing. Take care.
Be well, my friend. Hope you’ll still come by and check out what the rest of us are up to every now and again.
Let us know when your book comes out.
Y mándame un postál de La Paz cuando estés allÃ, no?
Good luck and God bless (and you know I mean that in a very ecumenical and humanistic way). Please keep us up to date with occasional Zeke posts? Pretty please?
Ever since he visited me in a dream (and don’t believe that dogs don’t do astral projection) I’ve felt very attached to him. Give him a hug for me.
I come back from Illinois, and this is what I see?
No, though I’m very sad, I’m not at all surprised. I know you’re doing the right thing, even though the Internets will be less warm and less witty without you. And I know very well that I will have occasion to miss your expert troll-skewering. But even the most delightful troll-skewering is not good for the soul, finally, whereas Zeke and Becky and the desert certainly are.
what they said.
If this means that, after a rest, you can pour some of these creative energies into a book of some kind, then I don’t think anyone here would count this as any sort of a loss.
Be well.
There’s no love like the dog love, as DMX says. Don’t fear the burnout; just think of it as chrysalis time. (Or maybe not. Well, you know what I mean. “Transition from one larval stage to another” is probably a better analogy, without the implication that the upcoming time is time when you won’t be doing anything, but it doesn’t sound as good.)
Only lurked until now, but must say I’m both saddened and happy to see you take time out. I’ve told my 13 yr old Boxer Annie about Zeke—she sends her best wishes with mine.
vaya con dios
If you leave the blog field fallow, maybe some pretty flowers will grow on it.
Thank you for sharing your writings with us. Whether you resurface here or stay in the three-dimensional world, we’re lucky to have you around.
Cool runnings.
Warmest wishes to you and a gentle bear hug to Zeke, who has captured my heart with his dignity and grace.
vaya con dios
I agree with the sentiment, but how would you say this to an atheist? Personally, I like “Vaya con nada.”
Hi Chris,
I was down at the annual meeting of the Desert Protective Council last Sunday, in beautiful Anza-Borrego, and it was so fine, and I thought of you. I am pleased you have made your decision to take a hike away from the blog, because I realized too, sitting around the table with some old desert activist rats that the machine is just a machine, and what’s important is really old sand, and fresh scent of bighorn, and a cactus spine or two.
What I will miss most about your blog is that once in a while you got to me at such a deep level—such as your posts about your long departed lover J., and other more meditative, less-newsworthy posts. I don’t need for you to post news events or get in hassles with others who post news events, but I will be looking for your spirit on the pages of books, of magazines, in the EI Journal, wherever. Those writings of yours are best enjoyed, I think, under the stars, with the wind at my back around a campfire somewhere very dry and very beautiful. Have a really good fishing trip, amigo, and let Zeke throw in a line or two.
Love,
Jim
Well hey, thank you.
High places and dry places
Climb the ridge to soulsoar views
Thightremble down again then
Home to a creek running north
Where muchrubbed ears and
Pawed warmth awaits you
Zeke is softer than a keyboard
Becky too
The terrorists have won.
I kid. Be happy, enjoy your family, re-charge. Thank you for some of the bestest writing on the intertubes. Come back anytime.
Hey, will you still be stopping by other blogs every now and then to eat our trolls? I can only hope.
Thanks for the words; for the reminder that language can also be used to build magical bridges between people. You’ve inspired me to hope.
You will most certainly be missed, and it’s quite understandable why you’d want to take a break.
I (and countless others) hope you feel refreshed enough to come out play again soon.
Take all the time you need.
Best Wishes.
Take good care, and write on! And if y’all ever find yourself in South Carolina…
I’ll miss your writing. Thanks for keeping up the blog so long.
Diablo or Mt. Hamilton. 2007. Let’s do it.
All the best, Chris. My blog crush will only grow stronger in your absence.
OK, he’s gone now, so we can talk about him behind his back. What’s your favourite post? This is mine;
http://faultline.org/index.php/site/comments/sciurus_niger/
Prenez vos mouchoirs, most definitely.
This is probably my favorite piece of writing on CRN, although I’m somewhat partial to this post as well.
I appreciate how much time and commitment it takes to keep up your blog and am grateful that you could give the gift of that time and energy to readers like me. I will miss your writing and I wish the best for you.
Bright Blessings
Life is to be lived. Ruffle Zeke’s fur for me. All the best, til you return, if you return.
Good to hear you’re taking time for yourself, Zeke and Becky. Hope the fishing is good.
We’re going to be at New Brighton tomorrow and Thursday night (don’t know if we can get a site for the weekend.) You’re all invited down for dinner Thursday if you’re free and inclined.
Indy (10.5 yr old Aussie) would love the company. Besides, Eric has yet to meet another Green here on the West Coast (they’re a dima dozen back home.) Oh, that reminds me, gotta fill out my absentee ballot (where I get to vote for local Greens who have a chance to actually win.)
Fly away!
yrs always,
B. Dagger Lee
OMG.. I can’t believe it. It’s Halloween night, 2006 and I just found this blog.
It’s the story of my life. A day late, and a dollar short.
I have sat here for hours reading the blogs. I have fallen head over heels in love with your animals and your stories. I crave more. But I understand why you’ve “gone fishin”.
Live, love, laugh, be happy my unmet friend.
We do not go fishing. Do you hear me?
My favorite is:
http://faultline.org/index.php/site/comments/benita_mora/
Take a good long break. The longer the better. Until you’re ready to post something that isn’t pretentious wndbag bullshit. What a self-important tool you are.
On behalf of all the sycophants, I would like to thank you for your courageous, constructive comment.
Having a bad day at work, are we? Nowhere else to go? Try here
Non-sycophant, who told you that you had to read Chris’ writing? If you don’t like it, don’t read it. And if you don’t like it, waiting until the occasion of his indefinite hiatus to announce your dislike is just plain rude. I was going to suggest you had been raised by wolves but in my experience canines have much better manners than you.
I will truly miss reading you.
Beautiful dog.
I’ve had the thought that blogs are “over.”
It’s a question worth posing on every blog:
What has all the good writing, the confirmation that there is really Someone Intelligent and Caring out there, actually accomplished—besides making us feel a little better for a few minutes?
Be honest about that. Even with the really big-time blogs. What real, solid gains—for people other than the big bloggers themselves, who enjoy a quasi-celebrity and a quasi-legitimacy—have been made because of blogs?
I’m not posing the question to put this blog down. It’s thoughtful, it’s well-written. But Chris himself mentions doubt about the real utility of blogs among his reasons to go on hiatus.
I think it’s a doubt worth addressing.
What is this medium for, exactly?
wapsie, my immediate response; on blogs like this, there is writing (essays, poetry) that very few of us would have seen otherwise, and which some of us will treasure for a long time. That in itself would justify their existence to me.
Apart from that - sharing perspectives and information that would otherwise also be hard to come by. With judicious filtering, blogs are an excellent complement to one’s news+opinion intake.
So I think the solid gains are to individuals, not so much to some Grand Cause, although Daily Kos readers would argue with that, I’m sure.
I’ll leave the question of “community” to someone else, as I am at heart a misanthrope, and would never join any community that would have me.
“What is this medium for, exactly?”
Does it have to be for anything? Does any outlet of expression have a defined or singular purpose? (Beside televangelism or hate radio, I mean - purpose clearly being to enrich blowhard fuckwads by spewing vile BS to the clueless.)
The creative human mind has an innate need for expression, and to choose to broadcast the fruits of creation, via any medium, can provide satisfaction and release for the fermenters-of-thoughts, and delight to the appreciative recipients. Perhaps some social movements can be furthered by particularly convincing or moving expressions - perhaps not - even without such results, there is communication and art, even, and so much the better. Even a solitary curmudgeon like Rousseau needed to be heard, and so influenced the course of human thought down to this day. Even if no lasting philosophical truths emerge from blog-culture, some of us will have been inspired, in ways perhaps not so different from more traditional sources of inspiration, but perhaps with more immediacy and opportunities for feedback. It is this last that seemingly leads to imbroglio and teapot-tempestry - and it is not in the nature of many to stay above the fray, despite best intentions. The blessing and the curse of bloggery, one might say. To hold forth, to be heard, to be misunderstood, misunderestimated, misquoted, to be celebrated and to be reviled - these are the beauties and the burdens of free expression - long may it live!
“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.�
“Insults are the arguments employed by those who are in the wrong.�
“I may not be better than other people, but at least I’m different.â€?
Chris,
Chris, you owe your anonymous readers nothing. What this journal has cost you to write is obvious to any sentient observer. None of your readers has the right to urge you to continue opening your veins and pouring your spirit onto these pages for the pleasure you, a thinking and feeling man, have given us. I do thank you, though, for your generosity.
From childhood to my present age of seventy, I’ve been partial to Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, to swamps and marshes, to hardwood forests and water, rather than the dry lands you love. In contrast to your feeling for Joshua trees, I love the skunk cabbage and wintergreen that grow by springs flowing out the side of a northern hill, oak trees of all species, tamarack trees, and the birches and dogwoods that grew in groves where I grew up. (Skunk cabbage sprouts and blooms in the snow and generates its own heat.) I love to paddle a canoe up the creek that feeds a lake and pick watercress for supper. When I was a child, you could see in the tall grass the footprint of a log cabin that had long since melted into the soil, because the long-ago builders had brought roses and iris and myrtle that still surrounded the place their house had occupied.
You have made me think new thoughts about the desert, though. One might be partial, you have taught me, to both tamarack swamps and arid mountains. I have loved hearing word and seeing photographs of your dry-land garden of native plants; of Becky and Zeke; of your hikes and your unforgotten beloved and your mighty destruction of old concrete. You have made me care about a landscape foreign to me because you particularized it and enabled me to travel with you.
What is this blog medium for, one of your readers asks. One thing it has been for, without your personally intending such a result, something that matters deeply to me, is the education of my soul. As a naturalist and a land-lover and a caretaker, you have won me over to a larger responsibility than I had before I read your passionate words. Your journal has entertained me, but it has meant more to me than just a pleasant pastime. People take what they may from your work, and some of us you have subtly changed. Thank you for that.
Thank you, too, for telling me about your friend and companion on the trail into the Grand Canyon, as I recall, after her hip replacement. Thoughts of her and you gave me courage the past two months, as I recovered from an excruciating knee implant. Although I doubt I’ll ever descend the cliffs of the Grand Canyon, I can walk a mile in the park now.
All good wishes to you, wherever you go and whatever you choose to do, from Jane Thomas.
After reading wapsie’s question I had many of the same thoughts as Sara, Fred and Jane. I’m not as eloquent as they are, however.
Whether blogs are on their way “out” I can’t say. I’m not cool enough to know anything about trends of any kind. Any medium of expression has its life cycle, I suppose.
spyder hits on something that’s close to what I was thinking. The unique thing about blogs is the commentary, the exchange of views. Much more often than not I’m enriched or engaged (or both, and sometimes enraged) by reading the comments. After reading writing that affected me in some way I enjoy finding out something about how it affected others. spyder, for instance, regularly posts comments that prompt me to think about what I’ve just read in a different way. Many others here do the same and I really like that.
So that’s my 2 cent answer to wapsie’s question.
I’ll look forward to your return.
I still don’t trust most people over 30
I give over-30s the benefit of the doubt if they’re not wearing a suit, or if wearing one, look as though they’d rather not be. A trite and possibly unfair rule, but one that has largely served me well.
Happy winter break, friend. May this be a time of regeneration and warmth for you.
per blogging: obviously, I’m still for it. i think that blogs won’t, of themselves, “split the world open,” (nothing does, of -itself-) but they may cause some individuals to do so (in a good way, I mean), and that’s enough of itself. i have found the exercise tremendously valuable in many ways; i have made friends, (online and off) learned one hell of a lot, laughed, cried, hurled…you know. and gotten quite a bit of writing done myself.
that said, burnout is burnout, and one needs to honor it. and it must be said that while there are many treasures to be found online, there’s also just an awful lot of shit to wade through, inevitably; occasionally one simply needs to rinse off.
there’s probably also something to be said for biting the bullet and writing (and publishing) the book; maybe i’ll finally learn that lesson one of these days as well.
I can’t speak for CC, but given the context, I’m gonna tentatively interpret “politics without cause” as “picking one’s battles, not getting caught up in needless drama.”
which is a fine idea, yes.
I’ve been blogging for a decade so I have some historical perspective, which I wrote about here:
http://tommangan.net/twoheeldrive/archives/2006_11.html#003202
I understand the sense of futility, and I have only one example of blogs “accomplishing anything” in the real world (and I’ll set aside my issues with that term for now). As most of what I want to mention occurred via a since-deleted blog I’ll have to rely more on memory than I would like to, but:
In early January 2005, Democracy for Virginia reported that a bill was being introduced in the Virginia State Legislature that would criminalize as a Class I misdemeanor failure to report “fetal death,” including miscarriages, to state authorities within 12 hours.
You can imagine all the horrible implications of such a law, and I probably don’t need to mention that the state delegator who sponsored HB1677 was a Republican. That isn’t what interested me about this.
What interested me was that the post was picked up by infertility blogger Getupgrrl at Chez Miscarriage (now sadly offline), and simply by presenting the bill not as a pro-choice/pro-life issue (which is how I suspect Representative Cosgrove had hoped it would be portrayed), but as a vicious kick in the gut to infertile women in Virginia, she was able to mobilize hundreds of women to write letters and send emails in protest of the proposed measure, and those women included pro-life Republicans. In fact, as I recall it, her first three or four commenters were women who announced themselves with disclaimers like, “Hi Getupgrrl, delurking to tell you that as a staunch Republican I am outraged by this bill and am sending a letter . . .” etc.
That’s simply impossible to imagine happening, that kind of unity, if someone from Feministing had written about it. But these women identified with Getupgrrl personally, beyond their political differences, and so they were willing to listen (or read, rather), without the knee-jerk reactions, without the automatic defensiveness, without going “but what about the bayyyyy-by?”
So I saw something happen just because a woman who’d acquired a sizeable enough readership to do something, urged people to do something, and they did it. The bill was withdrawn.
Getupgrrl wasn’t an overtly political blogger. She never wrote about Bush or elections that I can recall. But she was always pro-woman, and she always found ways to get across that the personal is political, even to those who’d normally resist that idea. This was just the best example of her doing that that I can remember.
Blogs can help accomplish change, I believe. But there’s an awful lot of drama and minutiae to avoid to do that, and just personally I suck at avoiding drama and minutiae. Normally I wallow in it.
Isn’t it obvious what they’re good for? I’m in it for the money. And the groupies. And the awe-struck look of respect and amazement when someone asks what you do, and you proudly reply, “I’m a blogger.” I screwed up and failed to capitalize on that decade when any no-talent hack could learn three chords, grow his hair down to his ass, and become a rock star, so I jumped avidly on this new, glorious opportunity to win fame and love and riches without actually having to do anything.
OK, I probably lied a little bit in that last comment.
Good “fishin’” to you “guys”!
Glad you’re “back”, but also that you take time off for your “people”!
Most probably will be here when you decide to return, but have/spend some good time with your “people”!
I’ll see you in the new year…
Peace.
Chris, Enjoy the time with your family, especially Zeke who looks like a Really Fine Dog.
I’ll be glad when you return but that’s selfish.Relax and enjoy - should be cool enough for really long treks in the mountains.What do I know? I’m a Southern Hemisphere person.
Thanks for the writing.Seeya.
Best of everything to you.
Take care. Do what you have to do and we’ll be seeing you if you decide to return.
It’s the end of Post Mbodernism? That’s good, right?
I will miss you.
=v= Last night I dreamt that I was reading new entries on this blog.
I think my reading here had fallen off a bit, lately, because I could sense that the joy of it was getting muddy and trodden down for you. The writing still marvellous, as ever—I don’t think you’re capable of un-marvellous writing—but the light wasn’t quite right, there were shadows falling in the wrong places.
I realize I’m irresponsible, but I think the only compelling reason to blog is to have a good time, and that the time to quit is when it stops being fun. So quit for now. And come up to Portland, sometime, and let me buy you a beer.