Regular readers know that I struggle to manage my time, and in keeping with that, whenever I file a comment, or answer an e-mail, with anything more than a "thanks for writing" or "you got that right," I try to turn it into a separate post. And so it is that I pull out my evasive response to Randy’s good-faith question:
Brad,
with the vacations on the sand, dining at the CCC and writing an article each week where do you find time to maintain a blog?
Kidding aside, what is a typical day like for you?
Lousy. In fact, not a day goes by that I don’t consider chucking the blog entirely, but I simply don’t have time for it. No sane person with even rudimentary time-management skills would ever start one.
But wait… I’m not supposed to be frank about such things. I’ve always tried to hold to the ethic that Hemingway wrote of in The Sun Also Rises:
"Come on down-stairs and have a drink."
"Aren’t you working?"
"No," I said. We went down the stairs to the café on the ground floor. I had discovered that was the best way to get rid of friends. Once you had a drink all you had to say was: "Well, I’ve got to get back and get off some cables," and it was done. It is very important to discover graceful exits like that in the newspaper business, where it is such an important part of the ethics that you should never seem to be working. Anyway, we went down-stairs to the bar and had a whiskey and soda. Cohn looked at the bottles in bins around the wall. "This is a good place," he said.
"There’s a lot of liquor," I agreed.
"Listen, Jake," he leaned forward on the bar. "Don’t you ever get the feeling that all your life is going by and you’re not taking advantage of it? Do you realize you’ve lived nearly half the time you have to live already?"
"Yes, every once in a while."
"Do you know that in about thirty-five years more we’ll be dead?"
"What the hell, Robert," I said. "What the hell."
"I’m serious."
"It’s one thing I don’t worry about," I said.
"You ought to."
So I hope you’ll excuse me now, but I have to go get off some cables…
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Brad, your micro-management of this blog is a ridiculous waste of time.
I suggest that you let the readers be self-policing. Let each reader grade each post on a 1-7 scale with an option to choose “inappropriate.” You should review any post that is judged “inappropriate” or which scores less than an average of “3.”
Also, I think that each reader should have the option to not to even see the posts of any particular poster.
Well, RTH, that’s a very interesting idea, and I think that…
…oh, wait — I have to go get off some cables…
Seriously, though, I WISH this blog had the technical sophistication to do something like give each reader “the option to not even see the posts of any particular poster” — not that I fully understand the appeal of that particular idea, but I get the drift…
What I’d REALLY like would be to allow posts only by fully registered, fully identified, personally accountable readers. In other words, once you had set forth your bona fides once, your comments would automatically post. But this blog’s software is so VERY far from being able to do that, and thus far I haven’t had time even to THINK about packing up and moving to another platform. For that matter, I’m not sure what platforms there are out there that would offer what I’m looking for, because I haven’t had the time to shop. Seems to me like it would be a simple enough thing, technologically. Lots of Web sites have registration. The nice thing about what I’m thinking of is that you wouldn’t have to register to read — just to post comments.
Thanks for posting 11 paragraphs of Hemingway, Brad. We bloggers need to see how words can do their job with surgical precision.
Did I ever tell you of the time I had lunch with Mary Hemingway (wife number four, the one who survived him)?
It was in the dining room of a hotel in Memphis. She had a bloody Mary, I had that Dutch beer that comes in the green bottles. It is good when it is cold and the weather is hot. This one was very good. We spoke of fishing and of writing, but we were careful not to speak too much of either.