Mountebank Blog

A long pause in blogging lately, and one not entirely motivated by laziness or busy-ness, although both did play a role.

I’ve always kept this blog using my own real name, and with my own institutional affiliation and (some degree of) personal identification right out in front. It was something I thought hard about when I started the blog, and I felt pretty strongly that I wanted this to be public and not anonymous. There are some great anonymous blogs out there, and some blogs which are great because they’re anonymous. But one of the reasons I wanted to do the blog was to make contacts with people, and I wanted to contact those people as myself–with my real name. So the blog has always been my own, and it’s on a website that I own and pay for.

I’ve always been aware that my blogging was public, and always felt that what I said here should only be what I was willing to say publicly. And that worked well for me, for a long time. Sometimes some people didn’t like what I said, but they were always willing to address it with me head-on, in the comments or by email, and often (not always) we came to some better understanding because of it. We each learned from the experience.

This blog has never had a huge audience, and that’s been OK, but I’ve valued the audience I’ve had, and I’ve valued the fact that I was always real, always honest here.

Something happened, recently, though.

I wrote a post (no need to try to find it. It’s not here anymore–it’s private now and only I can see it. It may stay that way forever. I may make it public again sometime, and if I do I’ll edit out this little parenthetical comment). It was a post that I thought about a lot. It was personal. It was reflective. I worked on it and I posted it because it said things that I wanted to say and to say publicly.

I had mixed feelings when I wrote it–some sadness and nostalgia, some hope and ambition, and some anger and resentment. I think all of those feelings came through in the post, and I won’t deny any of them. They were all justified.

There were also some judgments about another person in that post, and while those judgments were negative, they weren’t nasty, they weren’t rude or offensive, and they were certainly (in my eyes) fair and well-deserved. The person wasn’t named–but anyone who knew the person and who knew me would know who the person was.

As it turned out, though, there is one reader of this blog who posted a comment on my post. That comment was rude, was nasty and offensive. And it was posted anonymously. But the cute pseudonym the commenter used was transparent, as was the IP address from which the comment came, as was the particular style of rudeness, so I do know who that commenter is. But I won’t name that commenter, either. I deleted that comment, as I’m sure the commenter expected. But the commenter went farther–the commenter printed out my post and passed it to the person about whom I had made the negative judgments. I know the motives of that commenter. I know the character of that commenter, and what that commenter was trying to accomplish.

There weren’t any real consequences, I didn’t suffer in any real way. But it was a cowardly and devious attempt to hurt me, to use the blog to hurt me, and although the attempt failed, it shook me. It made me think twice about blogging anymore. And it did make me move the post in question out of the public area of the blog.

But as I’ve thought more about it recently, I’ve decided that there’s no real reason for me to stop the blogging enterprise. For whatever small public voice and tiny audience this blog has, I like having that. I’ve got more things to say, and I’m going to continue to say them.

This has never been the most active of blogs. But it’s not going to be a silent blog, either. I don’t think it needs to be.

And it will continue to be in my real name, and with my real thoughts and honest reactions.

I haven’t been doing much blog posting lately at all–for a reason that I’ll probably explain in a later post. But today’s date is one that I never fail to acknowledge on this blog–or anywhere. After 19 years, it’s still a sad anniversary, still hurts. It’s different every year, but the hurt is no less deep.

R.I.P. Scott Daniel Ugoretz.

February 24, 1964-October 28, 1988.

The big Nor’easter really had very little effect on us–it was a lot of rain, a little wind, not much more than that.

But what I like about it is the effect it had on at least one New York Times writer–bringing out his best poetic efforts!

Coming on a weekend, the storm had a relatively light impact on most residents. Many shops and restaurants that normally would have been open yesterday were shuttered, but without jobs or schools to attend, many people spent the day indoors with the Sunday papers, relaxing with music to go with the silken lash of rain hissing at the windows, dripping on a lazy afternoon.

The day was, in a way, like great theater: the drama of the approaching storm, the searching wind at the panes and rain dancing on the pavement, the smudged sky, the iron-gray day like a movie in black and white. The overcast was solid, great plates of corrugated iron fused from horizon to horizon, and the streets glistened in the rain: a metallic futureworld.

Thanks, Robert McFadden! “The silken lash of rain hissing at the windows.” I love it! 🙂

Light a candle, eat a latke (or six), enjoy your family.

Happy Chanuka!

Or Hannukah

Or Chanukah

Or

I keep reading, from people who should know better, that Saddam will be “hung” in the next few months. This is a long-standing irritant for me, in my cranky grammarian disguise.

People who are executed by hanging by the neck until they are dead are hanged. Pictures are hung on the wall…and sometimes people are hung, or well-hung, but that’s a bit of personal information that I don’t even really want to consider about Saddam.

Saddam will be hanged. Whether he’s hung or not.

At least that’s the way I always learned it…and we all know that I’m always grammatically correct, myself! 😉