I’ve spent three days working on my LINKS page. When I began blogging (22 years ago) we all had extensive links to other blogs, and to various sites of interest. That seems less common now, but I’m still in the old mindset. This is a problem.
There are a variety of components to this problem. The main one is that I can be interested in too many things. Being online can be like being on YouTube (Hank Green). So many topics! So many interesting topics! I think I want to see / watch / learn more about … all of them. I want more of this writer, this journalist, this presenter. Lately, this physicist (Carlo Rovelli).
I want to read all the blogs, especially the poetry blogs. Especially the blogs I used to read. I want to find, again, the friends I discovered online years ago. Now I discover Substack, with all its controversies and all those excellent writers I want to follow. This seems to be close to what the blogging community used to be, with comment threads and interconnections.
There are lots of blog-like “publications” on Substack. There, you subscribe, not follow. Reasonably enough, some writers request payment for their work. Even some poets! Mostly, though, I find more than enough to read without straining my budget. I can also read about philosophy and politics and artificial intelligence and physics and consciousness till I become . .. unconscious.
Which is the basic problem. I am old, I am not entirely well, I have very limited energy. Also limited discipline, which leads to unlimited expectations. Impossible expectations. Goals I cannot reach.
Check out that LINKS page. You will see my problem, and that page isn’t even done yet. I have more pages I follow that have not been added. I will be doing that over the next few weeks. Adding, or pruning; we shall see. Many links came from Dave Bonta at Via Negativa, who always has pointers to good reading. Others I found or resurrected myself, and then there’s Substack…
Nap time.
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