Just Meandering: Come Along

By PLS

As many WhirledView visitors know, I like to hike or trek in remote, exotic or difficult (for me) places, but I like to walk around cities, too. This walking around on your own two feet can be a fairly low tech kind of sport, one reason I like it, though I’m often driven crazy by hiking companions who spend the whole day in beautiful country yakking about this or that brand of hiking poles or daypacks or—the mother of all trail talk—trekking boots.

Now hiking boots are important, and I put a lot of time into researching and testing whenever I have to buy a new pair. And then you never know, until you’ve walked up and down a few hills over more than a few miles, if you’ve made the right decision.

But when it’s fall and you’re in the heart of a grove of aspens at peak color, yellow verging on gold, and those sequin-like gold leaves are all atremble against a classic New Mexican sky of unsullied turquoise and your ears are being bombarded with a dissertation on the cushioning and/or absorbent qualities of this sock or that, the day begins to reek of futility. Shaddup, already!

The tech requirements and complications for committed walkers aren’t entirely negligible, of course. Especially when you get into backpacking or spending days and nights at high altitude. Comparison-shopping can make a serious difference in comfort and safety. And cost.

So, whether or not the chatter on the trail is appropriate, it turns out there’s a good amount of knowledge and expertise that goes into the simplest enjoyment of nature—even when you’re about to set out in your worn down old sneakers and everyday windbreaker. You look up and see clouds. Whatever the weatherman said last night, you know it’s going to rain. Or not. Or it’s just rained and you know a certain trail is going to be impossibly mucky along a crucial stretch until tomorrow. Etc.

I’m leading up to something here—and trying to get done before I go out for an Indian summer walk in the hills. Though the aspens at the higher altitudes have lost their leaves, the lowland cottonwoods are still golden and the sky is only slightly masked with a few very high streaks of cloud that may be closing in by the afternoon.

So here’s what I’m really getting at.

I was going to take a full sabbatical from the blog to work on my other writing because, I’ve discovered, I can’t do heavy political analysis and also keep my mind continuously on other sorts of wordwork. WhirledView took over my life, partly because I love thinking and talking about politics and international affairs, partly because I felt that political writing was something I should do as a concerned and reasonably well informed citizen. But it was driving me nuts—especially since, some days, I also felt guilty for going out and taking those walks in the hills.

In short, I had to find a better balance, and here it is. I’m not (for now) going to do the high tech, high altitude sort of political analysis that my WhirledView colleagues do so well. I’m just going to meander through the issues or news of the day—sharing thoughts and chuckles, raising questions, provoking reactions. For the past three years, thoughts like these generally resulted in my spending a whole day (or several) creating a substantive item. No more, for now. I don’t plan to be particularly outrageous or nasty, but I hope my bits will be fun to read.

In the process, I may refer to items from publications that are not be available for free on the web. I won’t apologize now or later. Responsible blogging of the web journalism variety still doesn’t bring in a living wage for most producers. For instance, although we have received much verbal support for our efforts, my colleagues and I fully subsidize WhirledView. Even if we decided to solicit a few ads, the income would be derisory, especially divided by three.

So who can afford to be a blogger? If you’re filthy rich, you can do anything you want. Wealthy publishers have kept The Nation alive for endless decades. If you’re an academic, you’ve got expertise and income enough for the good life, but you may not have much time for blogging and you may get flack from colleagues not bitten by the blog bug. What's more, I haven't heard of any academics earning promotion or tenure for their contributions to the blogosphere. Yet.

Of course, there are some blogs that hit the jackpot, but so far as I know they don’t do serious political analysis or deal with foreign relations. Sigh!

Hence, until the economics change, I deeply appreciate the fact that people can do serious (if often imperfect) journalism or political commentary and earn a decent living in the print media, the notorious MSM. Folks: we should be happy to buy newspapers, magazines and opinion journals of all stripes until the electronic media evolve a way to pay for dredging up and distributing the information and analysis we need to make smart political choices at home and abroad.

Enough! If I don’t stop writing, this beautiful day is going to get away from me.

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Comments

[Helmut]

Here's to meandering!