Dispensing with guilt

I just finished Andrew Sullivan's Why I Blog piece in the November Atlantic. And I watched his interview video called Your Brain on Blog that is attached to it. The guy is being driven by his blogging addiction. He says he gets a thousand emails a day. He says he can feel the collective breath of his audience waiting for his next every-20 minutes response. He said when he took some time to collect his thoughts his audience thought he was dead, fired, or muzzled.

That is nuts.

There was another Atlantic article in the July/August issue (yes, I do read other magazines and newspapers, and unlike Sarah Palin I can tell you the names). It was by Nicholas Carr and was called, Is Google Making Us Stupid? with a kicker above: What the Internet is doing to our brains. You may have seen it.

This whole project of mine is about telling stories, about combining new media with history, geography -- with trying to see what comes from walking in places not many people walk. Some of the writing needs and does try to employ journalistic standards - facts (such as they are) not opinions. Some doesn't and I've tried to label different approaches so as to not be misleading.

What happens here are pieces of a longer form. Maybe it will fall under a non-fiction heading. It may turn out to be more correctly labeled as creative non-fiction. Either of those are worth aspiring to. What it isn't is thoughts forced up from a mental stew every 20 minutes, cooked or not.

So if and when you visit here know that. You may want to actually look at some of the older posts, knowing how I'm working this. Or not. You might want to flit off somewhere with fresher roadkill.