We now return you to your regularly scheduled curmudgeon...

Approaching this blog again after such a long absence is rather daunting. 

As any of you who have followed my tribulations of late will realize, it's been a bad winter. For me, anyway. I haven't felt like blogging, so I haven't. For the last three months. I like short, fragmentary sentences. Like this. I really do. Honest.

I'm getting back into it, obviously. Here I sit at my keyboard, hoping inspiration will hit me and I'll be able to wow my dozen or so regular readers with my keen sense of political reality and my rapier-like wit. Well, I can dream, can't I?

By this time it should be apparent that I'm struggling a bit. I am faced with that old question: What the hell do I write about? You might think that I had accumulated topics of interest while I was busy enforcing my enforced silence, but you'd be wrong. In that cavernous void that is my mind, wherein I compose my thoughts before I commit them to the typewritten word (no, I don't actually use a typewriter) there are precious few new topics on hand. Most of what I find there are old issues that have been done to death, issues upon which I really have nothing to add, issues upon which I have continued to heap nothing until the nothing is so high my thoughts appear lofty. I am hesitant to do that again.

For example, there's gun control; a topic that both I and the nation have done to death but that no one seems to be tiring of. In the political world, it was generally accepted that following Sandy Hook this subject would burn brightly in the public square for a while, but would soon run out of fuel (as it had so often in the past) and politicians could go back to taking soft money from the NRA and doing nothing about what the public actually wanted. That isn't happening now; the fire is still burning. Maybe that's because the NRA keeps throwing fuel on it. I think people are finally waking up to the fact that that the NRA is no longer primarily concerned with the rights, the needs, the desires of its membership; that it has become a bunch of lobbyists for the firearms industry and is doing their will. But all this has been said before, time and time again, and adding my voice to such a discordant cacophony will not help.

(Extra points to me for using a redundant tautology. No extra point for that one, though.)

Another example: gay rights. I'm not sure I have the credentials to speak about gay rights, not being gay myself. That hasn't stopped me in the past, but in  reviewing my blog archives I find that I haven't often spoken on this topic. I did once comment on California's Proposition 8 (at the center of much of the current controversy) as a constitutional issue, but beyond making a general statement of support for gay rights I have been mostly silent. Again, as I am not gay myself I'm not sure how much relevance my comments would have; all I can do is reaffirm my support of gay rights and say that I stand with them in their struggle (damn, that sounded condescending) and since I just did that... (I have changed my Facebook profile pic to one of those nifty "=" thingies; a pathetically small gesture, I'll admit, but a sincere one.)

I could always talk about Congress' inability to get anything done, and this is something that hasn't yet been talked to death (it still hasn't died). I could talk about how the Republican effort to oppose and/or veto literally everything has completely stalled government and turned the democratic process into a grotesque parody of what the Founding Fathers intended, that this isn't helped by the unwillingness on both sides (but honestly I see it more from the Right) to give up enough to reach a compromise on any issue, that our fates are being determined by ideologues who are more concerned with serving their ideologies then they are in serving the public (a situation far from ideal), but I don't see any way to get a joke out if this so I'm not gonna.

There's always the "fiscal cliff;" I could do an article about having gone over it, a sort of "view from the bottom" thing. The problem with that is that we're still falling, and we won't know how badly we've injured ourselves until we actually hit those jagged rocks we've been promised. So that one will have to wait.

Then, of course there's a trick I've used in the past to get around writer's block; just to sit at the keyboard and type free-form in the hope that something coherent and article-like might come out of it.

No, that'll never work...

The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.