It's a New Year

. . . and a new day for What Powderfinger Said. My faithful readers, all half dozen of you, have doubtless noticed the absence of posts for the past couple of weeks. It was no accident. I just stopped doing blog posts while my two boys were in town for the holidays. I am now resuming the blog, but I'll employ a different approach going forward into 2013 and beyond, God willing. More on that in a few minutes.

I trust you didn't think there was anything wrong with me. Don't worry about the health of the blogmaster. He's fine (although he did experience a bout with the 24-hour bug, as did half his family, including grandchildren and son, who was cursed with the affliction on the airplane flight home to Florida.) No, I am fine for an old, overweight guy. No permanent health problems besiege me as I enter the new year. In one of the world's great marvels, my wife still loves me and consents to share my bed and roof. I am happily engaged--for pay even!--in doing work that I love: writing and editing history. All of my kids are doing well, and my grandkids continue to grow daily in smarts, good looks, and promise. I've found some measure of spiritual peace with the little church I attend now, a congregation of progressive Christians who love peace and justice and believe that God is still speaking to us today in myriad ways.

So on the personal level, everything's more than cool. (Or maybe that depends on who you ask.) Of course, on levels beyond that, there's a hell of a lot that's messed up. I cannot believe the continued idiocy of the people we've sent to Washington to govern us. If you're paying attention, you know that we just dodged one potential lethal bullet with the "cliff" business, and now we're locked and loaded for another vicious fight over extension of the debt limit, which, if you can remember back just three or four years ago was about as controversial as getting in out of the rain.

Of course war and killing still dominate the planet. Humankind has yet to figure out after almost countless millenia that war and killing never solve anything. What war and killing does is engender more of the same for the following generations. And of course with their innate and sluggish stupidity, humankind continues to fall for the same old lies about why war and killing is inevitable and necessary. 

It just makes one want to escape, which is easy for me since I have so many avenues: chess, music, my books, poetry. Hell, even blogging and TV, if it comes to that. But I can never really escape, because I cannot purge my mind of all the imbecility that seems to reign--outside my brain, I should add, but I cannot rule out the other possibility.

I haven't even gotten around to what I meant to say earlier about Powderfinger and where it's going. Well, it's not going anywhere is the bottom line. But unlike my friend Paul over at his excellent and brainy blog, I cannot maintain the daily pace anymore. It's too toxic for my mental peace because I cannot stop beating myself up if I miss a post. So, the sensible move is to scale back. Which is what I'm going to do. Look for Powderfinger 2-3 times a week from now on. Rest assured I'll be as feisty and insufferable as ever . . . and likely more long-winded. But I may even be more interesting since presumably I won't be scraping the basement of my brain for ideas so as to meet the daily grind.

So here's to the new year! May it witness the dawn of universal peace and justice. And if not, may God help me to inch both a little bit further along by calming my spirit and letting go of what I can.