THE AWKWARD SILENCE

I've always been facinated by blogs where people post regularly for 
a long time and then suddenly stop. I tend to assume sudden death, 
but then often I find their author active somewhere else on the 
internet. Anyway my month's silence after a routine of roughly 
weekly posting has had me wondering why I suddenly went down the 
same path. But I haven't really found an answer.

In some ways it may have been that question that stopped me 
posting, because it inevitably leads to wondering about my reason 
for posting here in the first place, and I never did have a good 
answer for that either. My website, besides selling things, is 
basically about showing off, maybe mixed with some wilfull excuses 
for obsessiveness. But what's this gopherhole for? I don't really 
know. Yet the strange thing is that I've been spending time writing 
stuff for it instead of for my website.

Undo recently described his phlog as "mostly a therapy tool for me":
gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/undo/j135

Is this my therapy tool? No, I don't think so. All the time that I 
spend thinking to myself in silence (too much, I often wonder) is 
my therapy tool. The ideas that I post about here often come from 
that - manifested in penciled notes on little scraps of paper 
summarising either a general topic or one specific line of 
significance that I could later build a post around (indeed this 
post is one such example). This last month I've found that to work 
just as well as ever, without sharing any of it with the 
interweirdos of the world, or anyone else for that matter.

Really I think it might be pretty obvious why I'm posting here, but 
it's a reason that I simply don't like. I'm lonely. I mean 
yesterday my total human interaction was "G'day", "yes", "no", 
"thanks", "bye" (at this point, after sending thousands of parcels, 
my transactions at the small post office in a nearby country town 
have become pretty streamlined). Actually the day before I had 
pre-season training with the fire brigade (which I'm allowed to do 
without my third COVID-19 vaccination, even though I'm not allowed 
to actually attend fires or meetings _still_), so overall I did 
much more socialising than in a normal week just from that. But 
there are often weeks where I barely have any conversations with 
anyone.

Not that I really feel obviously wanting for the sorts of 
conversations that I do get, and this phlog doesn't really 
represent them much either. I guess I'm wanting for someone close 
who I could open up to on a more personal level. Indeed yesterday I 
sent an email from a third account/server to the last school friend 
who I was still occasionally in touch with, but seems to have gone 
quiet this year, which I initially attributed to issues with my 
email going to spam. They were really my only friend around my age 
still in contact, not to mention also a girl.

I'm not saying that this phlog is direct a substitute for friends 
or old sweethearts. Maybe I'd have them and still post here. 
Obviously I can not have them and still not post here for a time. 
But after posting here for three years now, I think I understand 
that it's just actioning some instinctive desire in the background 
for more social interaction. Whether that comes out because I'm not 
getting any real-life social interaction, or because what I do get 
just isn't fulfilling, there's a surplus desire there that powers 
my fingers towards this keyboard.

However here I'm not really socialising. It's the action of 
socialising, but it doesn't go anywhere except into the vacuume of 
cyberspace. I'm not sure that I even want to socialise that much 
more in a conventional two-way sense, but it's an instinctual thing 
nonetheless. So you give me a machine where I can enter all these 
words and they'll go off to people somewhere, and I do it, because 
I want to, but I don't know why. I'm searching here for something 
that I might not want, in a place where it can't be found. Like a 
bug flying against a light bulb.

But in spite of all that, I'm back, and I'll probably be back to my 
vague regular posting schedual, maybe. Also my recently-infrequent 
log-ins to Aussies.space combined with attempting to contact the 
old sweetheart inspired me to finally set up automatic retrieval of 
email from freet@aussies.space and my other rarely-checked 
non-forwarding email accunts (an extreme of anonymity paranoia 
prevented me from setting up email forwarding on my Aussies.space 
account) into my regular local mail directories. So now I'll 
probably see your emails quicker, even if I'm not posting to the 
phlog. Although given the tiny volume of emails I get here, that's 
almost an imaginary problem anyway.

 - The Free Thinker