One hopes he’ll still troll here from time to time, too.

by laura—Mar 28, 10:03 AM

If he doesn’t, I’ll kick his ass.

by greg—Mar 28, 11:18 AM

You have to write something first.

by JH—Mar 30, 01:24 PM

I have written 7 posts this month, one of which got JAW all snitty! What more do you want?

by greg—Mar 30, 01:33 PM

Exactly, 7 this month. 7/30 – 7/31 tomorrow – is a poor ratio. A reluctance to rack up such spotty posting records was a major factor in me quitting in the first place.

by JH—Mar 30, 01:42 PM

It wouldn’t be so problematic for you if you would just get an RSS reader like the rest of the civilized world.

by greg—Mar 30, 01:58 PM

True, but it seems strange to get one now that my blog usage is going down – way down – for the first time in years.

by JH—Mar 30, 02:36 PM

That’s exactly the reason why: RSS lets you read every other blog but this one passively.

by greg—Mar 30, 03:54 PM

Anyhoo, you’re not the only one whose blog-consumption is way down. I think we must be on the downward slope of blogging’s initial novelty. I blame the White House teleprompter.

by greg—Mar 30, 06:46 PM

Increasingly I find I just don’t have much to say. Well, I do, but it’s almost always said 10x better by someone at obsidian wings, or crooked timber, or yglesias, or unfogged, and so on, and so on, so why not just link to them? And why bother at all if all you do is link?

The aforementioned blogs are also, not coincidentally, the guys who got in on the ground floor. They’ve been at it the longest, and it shows. Amateur hour is just about over, I think. Another consequence of the novelty wearing off.

by JH—Mar 31, 03:48 PM

Isn’t it post-Bush blues? I mean, consider how incredibly ghastly everything was for so long. Now, things are really bad, and the O admin is doing okay, but its biggest problem is that it will ultimately live up to this bumper sticker.

And if you’re like me and trying upend your political monomania, the question is, really, what’s next? I don’t have a good answer for that yet.

by greg—Mar 31, 05:13 PM

I don’t know if anyone else felt this way, but somewhere in early 2002 I used to read the news and start to feel reality shift around me. Like the underpinnings of the world I grew up in had disintegrated, and now the actual world I grew up in was slowly following. I still don’t have the slightest sense that Obama has arrested this process.

…the question is, really, what’s next?

Calmly wait for The End.

Oh, btw, is the mood really as apocalyptic in the US as it seems from afar? Despite the fact that Britain’s finance system is arguably even more fucked than the US’s, no one I’ve encountered really speaks about any kind of collapse. In academia it’s just a lot of pissing and moaning about how hard it is to get grants nowadays.

by JH—Mar 31, 06:45 PM

No, I don’t recall feeling that way then. I recall being angry and frustrated at how helpless I felt to make any difference. I remember being amazed at how easy it was to lie about so many things to so many people. The underpinnings of my world were being unscrewed then, but for reasons that had only marginally to do with political discourse. I was still trying to make some go of exceptionalism. Perhaps I am not the best

As for the apocalypse: Mostly, it’s the weather—we’ve had endless, giant storms. Economic apocalypse, though, has been slow to come to Iowa.

More later.

by greg—Mar 31, 10:06 PM

2002 was the year I took a medical leave and figured out I wanted to live in the West. It only took another four years to figure out how to do that.

I’m curious, now, though, about when I thought the underpinnings of the world I grew up in had shifted. In an odd way, I’d say that now is the closest I’ve come to that. Reagan is the first president I remember, and I was fairly certain as a kid that we were headed for a nuclear holocaust. In many ways that’s more likely now than it was then, but I don’t worry about it so much anymore.

by laura—Apr 6, 12:26 AM