I Resolve To Know Even Less Than I Do Now

Long time, no real blog. And it's not like I've been saving up a big manifesto to lay on you guys with lots of bullets, charts and such. Just a bit of vacation and the mindlessness that so sweetly accompanies it.

Speaking of mindlessness and vacations, I have an early New Year's Resolution. I know...what can be more interesting to hear about than someone else's Resolutions? But wait, this kinda applies to this whole blog thing. The idea is this: news/politics moratorium. Yeah, I know, not a new idea of any sort, but I'm gonna give it my own shot.

Here are the rules:

• No visits to any news sites (except for the NYTimes, but only to get to the crosswords page). This rule was helped by letting our ABQ Journal subscription expire.
  
• No visits to any politics sites like Daily Kos..not even to Tom Tomorrow to read the comic)
• No viewing of any TV news. To be honest, this is damn easy as I stopped watching TV News years ago. (btw, I did happen across KOB news a few days back and have you ever noticed that Carla Aragon reads the news like she's talking to someone with a traumatic brain injury? A really bad one? One that involves feeding tubes and little more than blinks of recognition?)
• And here's the toughest one of all: No watching "The Daily Show" or "Colbert Report". Fortunately the timing of those shows here in the Mountain Time Zone has always made it impossible for me to watch that days' show during work days...but with two weeks of vacation the temptation to watch late at night will be up there with the jones to keep pushing that button on a morphine drip.
  

Like most of it, I suck at keeping New Year's Resolutions. Like many of us, I've considered a "news/politics moratorium" off and on for years. The chance for any medium/long-term success here is exceedingly small. Still, this does bring up a small bloggin' question: just what the Hell will I write about now? Nobody, including me, wants to read someone Babblin' about NOT keeping up with the news. That would be like a Harlequin romance in which all the characters just sit at a tavern and drink beer all night. Like a Tom Clancy novel with sweeping detente between Us and Them than extends to the point of disbanding the CIA and KGB. Like even more boring than Burque Babble usually is.

On the other hand, I've always liked that Ken Russell stab at mainstream film "Altered States". You know, the one where William Hurt gets into isolation tanks and goes vaguely back in evolutionary time for reasons that never make any sense. Maybe a successful news/politics moratorium could be like that.

Maybe things could happen around me like Pete Domenici dying, Heather Wilson being appointed to fill out the term, a special election being held between Marty Chavez (who would switch parties) and Don Schrader, and Schrader would win when at the last second Marty would be caught with a farm animal in the back seat of his Hummer in the parking lot at Billy's Long Bar. And I would have missed the whole thing.

Nah, these Resolutions are never that great, even when you keep to them for any length of time. But I'm gonna give it a shot. As to what I blog about here, readers can probably look forward to lots of poorly mimicked Thoreau, mundanely contemplated philosophy that illustrates how empty your humble blogmaster's head is. And not empty in some sort of advanced Buddhist/Taoist sort of way. Just plain empty.

So you've got that to look forward to. Now, I've got to put my bathing suit on and get into that isolation tank.