I must confess the performance isn't that profound.

It gets this way sometimes. I get all keyed up about writing a lot of blog posts, and keeping all you lovely people entertained, and then something more substantial asserts itself on my schedule and I'm left with nothing but apologies for my patient electronic friends.

Welcome here my friends to the show that never ends.

You wanna hear something true? I kinda don't want to blog anymore. Well, that's not exactly accurate. What I mean is, I feel like I've lost the tether on this blogging thing. It's become something else, something still fun, something I still enjoy, but something I can't quite control, like a too-big dog leaping around and almost knocking me over from time to time.

And I have to remind myself too often that this is the least real thing in my life. The least substantial.

I want to give you a good blog to read. Something worth your time. But my sporadic posting seems to be usually silly and trivial. Maybe that's what you dig. If so, cool. But that's not what I dig. Blogging, for all its ephemeral quality, is still writing, and as a writer, I lose self-respect for creating nothing but silly and trivial material. Maybe I have an overinflated understanding of my importance. Most writers do.

A few weeks ago, one blogger I read from time to time was defending another blogger's reasoning for writing a theological book. (Apparently, if you're a blogger, most folks assume you have no business writing something so serious.) And the first guy said of himself and the second guy, "If you take blogging seriously, it's probably because you still harbor ambitions of being a writer." (I butchered that quote, so please don't chase it down.) But that stuck with me. Do I harbor such ambitions? Of course I do. Underneath all the cynicism and laziness, I want to write. And not just write, but REALLY write. I want to write good work. Work people can respect. Stories that make people want to write stories, just like the authors I read during my teenage years did for me.

I used to play sports competitively, back when I was in fightin' shape. And we'd practice for hours and hours. But we didn't half-heartedly run our sprints, or lazily walk through our drills. We were disciplined. We were serious. We were scared of the half-crazed Kentuckian with the whistle who'd scream at us if we slacked off, and would talk about how much he despised "lack-a-daisical" play.

Right now, I feel like whatever form of "writing" I'm doing here is a half-hearted sprint and a walked-through drill. And I can feel myself getting sloppier as a writer.

So for a while, I'm not going to post. I'll try to take care of the things I promised you, because I like sharing fun things. I have a slew of links I'll be dropping soon too. But I can't promise you a time frame because work has become a beyond-full-time headache, and my first duty is to the folks paying the bills.

But once I post the things I've been talking about, I may not post for a little while until I actually have something to say, and can say it well. So just put/leave me on your RSS feed or whatever you kids use.

I'm not going to give up on blogging for a little while yet. I like having people care what I say. It's an ego boost. But it's dawning me that i'm not going to do this forever. And I don't know how I feel about that.