Looking For The Next Best Thing

I began blogging 4 years and eight months ago on July 29, 2005 just before I made the strange and fateful decision to move to New Orleans after nearly 30 years in the Bay Area, and three weeks before Katrina.

With my engagement with Katrina (and a few other storms) that blog, which was intended as a sort of exploration of my new life, became a two year long exploration of what it was like to live in the aftermath of catastrophe (physical, emotional, and relational) in the new world order of George Dubya Bush's Amerikkka. I also stated a couple of other sort of specialty blogs for the purpose of branching out with the things I had to say: Butting Heads for long form, usually contentious, rants. George Washington's Cousin for political and religious pontification.

After two years of writing at SpeakLo I closed out that blog and began Quicksilver Amusements (by the way... some of those first pieces at QA are really good, and you should go read them, or even read them again.

It's now been two and a half years since I started this blog and lately (as most of you have noticed and noted) I seem to have lost momentum. With SpeakLo I had a drive that developed of its own accord and gave me something to relate to. In the early days of QA, I had new life and love to write about and I was experiencing things with whole new vibrant eyes; a way of seeing that I had not experienced for quite some time. Now, I simply find it difficult to grab hold of something in the general sphere of things to snag my hand on and wrestle with til dawn. It seems that when I do find those things, I have reason to put them in other places, instead of putting them here. I've even re-started SpeakLo with some pieces on sound and music that interest me and that seem to be appropriately in residence at that location instead of here.

So I've decided to start again... again.

For the next few months I'll be winding down this blog and winding up on some other formats, with the intention of making a full out relaunch in some completely new format on the fifth anniversary of my original blog. I haven't exactly figured out how I'm going to do it, or what I'm going to focus on, but I expect it to have a certain level of continuity that these other blogs have not had for quite some time.

In particular, I'm going to be writing on "spiritual matters" at the Bleeding Daylight, political thoughts and pontfications at Washington's Cousin and business, aesthetic, and practical concerns back at the renewed SpeakLo. Between now and summertime, I hope to find a voice and a process that can bring a bit more cohesion to these ramblings, but considering the fact that I have spent the better part of 55 years trying to accomplish something along those lines would indicate that I may be reaching for something that is truly beyond my grasp... We'll see.

I'll keep you posted here, on facebook and on Twitter and I hope you'll either contact me there, or leave comments here (and at the other blogs) to perhaps help guide my direction as I struggle to find the voice that speaks what I really want to communicate from my soul.