Production is down

There are a couple of ways you can tell this blog hasn't exactly been one of my priorities this year.

First is the aching, lonely, abandoned feeling you've been experiencing deep in the pit of your stomach. The sense that something good is gone. That uneasy, anxiety-ridden, nagging feeling that asks, "Why can't he just give me my daily dose of humor, insight and wit I've relied on so dearly for the last ten years to get through my otherwise sad, mundane and ordinary day. Why?"

The other way to tell is the chart pictured here.

When I started blogging in 2009, you can see I just put up a couple of posts. I was getting my toes wet in the blogging waters of the interwebs. Then for the next five trips around the sun, I posted over 100 articles each year. Enthusiasm was high, people were commenting, I was confident I had something worth saying to fill up all those posts.

Of course, 2015 was the best year for this blog. Not for the quality ("quality", good one) of the posts, or the subject matter, but for the fact it was the year I beat out my close personal friend and fashion consultant Rich Siegel of Round Seventeen fame in my imaginary race to keep up with, and exceed, his prolific output of online articles.

Just pausing for a second to re-live the victory.

Ok, I'm back.

Apparently that was the year I peaked, because as you can see the following years took a precipitous drop in postings despite a slight upward tick last year. This year doesn't even average out to two postings a month. And I think I know why.

Besides being the least disciplined writer you know, every time I begin to write a post it becomes political in nature. No surprise given my complete revulsion and disdain for the unstable genius we have for liar-in-chief. But after a day of political posts on Facebook and the sewer that is now Twitter, it just seems difficult to add anything of meaning to the discussion that isn't already being covered a thousand different ways on other channels. And writing about anything else seems meaningless and a wasted effort, given the dire state of our country and our democracy.

I just light up a room don't I?

But writing is a muscle, and if you don't exercise it you lose it. And God knows I've lost enough muscle in my life. So I'm going to start thinking about maybe making the effort to perhaps begin posting a little more frequently if I think I have something worth talking about.

A grateful nation breathes a sigh of relief.

Admit it, you're feeling better already.

Here come da judge

I don't expect nor would I want everyone to agree with me on everything. But it does strike me odd when people disagree with me over nothing.

Here's the thing about social media: You have to be willing to suffer the slings and arrows of people who don't like what you're saying, posting or advocating.

Everyone has an opinion. And we know what opinions are like.

Nevertheless, I understand having a forum where everyone sees what you post is the price of admission for being able to post it. I get it.

I've never been thin skinned. After all, I'm in advertising. I have a superhuman tolerance for rejection of things I think are funny.

Plus I'm all over the interwebs with my little musings, things that strike me funny just because they do. Once in awhile they mean something more than face value. But most of the time they don't.

Yet for some reason, some people who should know better (was that a judgement? Sorry, you know how I hate that) make the decision to run their blood pressure up forty points, start calling me names and get all medieval on my ass for posting meaningless things.

Meaningless to me anyway.

The thing about it is, there's no hidden agenda to postings that just strike my funny bone. No political statement being made. Not even a lot to get angry about (another judgement, sorry about that).

But like ghosts, UFOs and truth on FOX News, sometimes people see things that aren't there. They start frothing at the mouth, hurling judgments about me, my work, my humor or my political leanings (BTW, I'm for whichever party likes bacon) based on something I just thought was funny.

They attach meaning where there is none.

Whatever. If you believe you're the arbiter of my taste, capabilities and standards, and if you see some deeper message in the crystals and think you're fighting the good fight by judging my talent, intellect, sensibilities and unloading on me with lots of exclamation points, have at it.

Or even better, be a little discerning, realize it's not worth the effort, say "There he goes again" to yourself, roll your eyes and move on.

It's not that I don't stand by what I post. I do. I stand by it and laugh.

Right turn

Despite what several people think, if I had to position myself on the political spectrum I'd say I'm a centerist Democrat. There are things that make sense to me, and instead of aligning these positions with a party affiliation, they should be labeled as "common sense."

I know, it's a quaint notion.

I come from a time of wildly liberal thought. And, in spite of the fact I closed down my junior high school for two days by organizing an anti-war protest with my friends Sandy and Mark, who belonged to the Young Socialist Alliance, and whose parents belonged to the Socialist Worker's Party, it's safe to say currently my views don't fall that far left on the spectrum.

Because they don't, they often run counter to my more liberal friends. But I think a lot of opinions - on both sides - are knee-jerk (or in the case of the right, just jerk - BAM! I'll be here all week) reactions fueled by emotion instead of reason.

The point I'm taking the long road making is while I've moved more to the center, I've noticed some of my friends have swung to the way far right. These are people I grew up with. We came from the same circumstances, environment and educational background. We all held the same positions on issues during the years we were in school together.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, they started posting things on Facebook revealing just how far right they've become in their thinking.

It's not just their opinions, which they're certainly entitled to, that disturbs me. It's their seemingly complete lack of compassion and empathy disguised as political opinion. It reflects a hardening towards less fortunate people that's as callus as it is unreasonable. Maybe they always felt this way. Maybe it's the way their parents felt. Maybe they just don't like to think. Or compromise. But the mindless vitriol that spews from them makes me mourn for their humanity. And it also makes me think maybe I never really knew them as well as I thought I did.

Despite how it sounds, I don't judge my friends on their political views. But I do judge those views. It's a fine distinction, but one nonetheless.

What I'm getting at is it just makes me sad. Sad some of my friends, some who I've known since elementary school, have become so hardened in their souls. It seems their true selves are being held captive somewhere in a deep, dark basement at Fox News, being forced to watch the insane, angry, petulant, hostile, aggressive, misinformed, manipulative ramblings of Hannity, Beck and O'Reilly 24 hours a day.

Mental waterboarding.

I'm for the death penalty. I support gay marriage. I don't believe guns should be outlawed. I believe a woman is the only one who should be making choices about her body. And I also believe in compassion for the less fortunate. This casual disregard, Fox News mentality, taking refuge behind comments like "Let 'em pull themselves up by their bootstraps." is all bullshit. You can't do it when you don't even have bootstraps.

There for the grace of God goes anyone who thinks otherwise (during the recession, I knew a lot of people who were one paycheck away from reconsidering their opinion on government assistance).

It's hard to believe Arizona once had a senator who wasn't an angry, old grandpa who traded his dignity and reputation by choosing a uniquely unqualified airhead to be his running mate. But it did. During his tenure, Barry Goldwater was referred to as Mr. Conservative. Today, because of some of the common sense views he arrived at later in life - like a woman's right to choose, accepting gays in the military (His quote was "they don't have to be straight, they just have to shoot straight") and not letting religion into politics - he's been denounced time and again by the right, with their philosophy that you have to think or behave a certain way to be a good and moral American.

If someone like Goldwater, who many consider father of the conservative movement, could eventually arrive at reasonable, common sense views on the issues, maybe my more conservative friends will too.