I’m taking a vacation. Not physically (housebreakers take note). I’m going to mentally relax on the beach of Inconnectivity in the Offline Islands, and just allow my stress to drain away.
Outside of my blog and email, I’m really only active in two places – a bike forum and Facebook. The bike forum has been tedious of late – in the biking community there is now a philosophy that you “take the lane”, and ride in the right-wheel track of traffic (if not further left). Look, I’m all for everything ‘further left’, in everything but cycling. Given the roads I commute on and the distractions I see, I don’t see any logical gain for angering traffic and blocking its flow. In fact, my bike-blog readers will recall that the last time I tried this, I nearly got run over by the sheriffs department. So now I’m a “curb hugger” and other things on that site.
But the worst was on Facebook, where a distant association, in full roar over politics (and my use of a made-up word), ignored my explanation about how English is a language that permits (or at least accepts) the use of on-the-fly words to pepper otherwise dreary passages. Not only did he refuse to see that, he actually compared my communications to his retarded son, the grunts and warblings and so on.
That brought me to full stop. In his rage, he’s willing to use his son’s disability as a low-bar for insulting me? How is that different from telling a woman, “You are as ugly as my wife”? And to suddenly roll out your disabled son as a point-of-argument in a political bun-fight is stunningly insensitive to your own flesh-and-blood. How does this differ from the Carthaginian policy of sacrificing their children for godly favors?
So I thought about it on the drive in and decided it’s time for an internet break. I’ll take a few days off. Oh, I’ll be on my home site and perhaps one other (where I am anonymous) and I’ll check my email (where my non-political friends talk about trains and such). But otherwise, I’m on the beach for a few days, as long as it takes for those conversations to slip into the darkness beyond the bottom of the forum page.
And there’s plenty of room on this beach. So join me and we’ll read, or chat, or just watch the water in silence.
But no politics.