Editorial Policy

I've always regarded the posts on this blog as a way of working out my thoughts on whatever junk is wandering through my head at the time. Dogma, ideology and a fixed programme isn't my thing. Today's idea is tomorrow's history. Some things have remained the same throughout my life, but a lot changes, and not just the music I listen to, the pictures I look at and the novels and textbooks I read. I am never going to read much about chemistry, nor sociology, nor economics, and Greys' Anatomy will be forever a closed book to me (the book, sadly I saw about one series of the TV show).

Every now and then I will get caught in a rabbit-hole, which happened recently (see previous post). I made the mistake of re-reading about the Situationists, a group of philosophers / artists / intellectuals, whose reputation has always been a mystery to me. Those rabbit-holes can take up a lot of time and produce nothing especially conclusive or enlightening.

So I'm not so sure I want to have any old random junk going round my head anymore. When I was working it was more or less unavoidable, as work was one giant junk-heap in itself.

Some of the stuff I've written is not junk. Anything on music, some of the recovery-related things are the diary entries they are, but there is other stuff I wouldn't want to repeat.

At this point a lot of bloggers will announce they are going on holiday. I don't want to do that. Blogs never come back from holidays.

Writing a blog post about something has its own value. I can be a lot more unconsidered in a hand-written journal than a blog that strangers might read. Scribbling down my immediate thoughts and feelings can let them out, never to return, but not always, and I might go on thinking and feeling roughly the same about whatever-it-was. Whereas working up something suitable for third-party consumption forces me to review what I'm thinking, recognise the cliches, the contradictions, the obviously silly stuff and generally produce something that seems reasonable. That does change the way I think. That's the value.

But a trip down a rabbit-hole generally does not have a lot of value, which is why we call it a 'rabbit-hole'.

I'm going to try to hold myself back from the rabbit-holes - looking back, I haven't done too badly this year.

I'm also going to avoid reading the news, especially first thing in the morning. It's just doomscrolling ("the act of spending an excessive amount of screen time devoted to the absorption of negative news") and it is doing me no good.

I'll let you know how that works out.