It might be over: I'm starting to bore myself.
It's not as if I don't care anymore. Quite the contrary. I worry, I read, I puzzle over everything that's going on, now as much as ever. But I'm not sure there's much gained by writing it down. Other than the momentary relief derived from the pleasure of words, this sort of blog is, compared to my previous one, useless. I don't think I have anything to say that isn't being said elsewhere, and generally better. Simply linking, as I've done a few times of late, to something I find provocative, is hardly a value-added proposition.
Recreation for a couple of trolls. I guess that's something, and I'm glad to have provided amusement to guys who clearly need it. But it's beginning to seem like self-indulgence. Mine, not theirs. To act as if mundane thoughts deserve to be shared is seriously to overestimate oneself. Surgeonsblog was different: I'm proud of some of the things I wrote, and I'm certain I provided information and insight and even inspiration over there. If I say so myself, some of it was fresh and original and, maybe more than randomly, well-written. This here thing: altogether different. Exactly as useful whether it was written or not; cosmically as important were it read, or not.
So why bother? I have no answer. And absent an answer, there's an answer.
Admittedly I'm a little downer than usual. Looking around and seeing nothing but fear, hatred, and pain in the world (and idiocy in Congress) will do that, at least to me. Worrying about the future, narrow and wide, does it, too.
If honesty were required (the nice thing about blogging is that it isn't), I'd confess that the last year or so has made me see myself as a failure. I worked hard in a hard job, did it pretty well. But I allowed myself to burn out too young. I was never profligate with money, keep cars till they stop running, wear the same clothes beyond useful life, have a cheap watch. Avoided the dotcom boom/bust, never did fancy tax-shelters, by most standards have been very conservative with my money. Having managed some of it myself, I came recently to believe -- following a tenet of my surgical practice that if there were others who can do a thing better than I, I should defer to them -- that it would be wise to let professionals handle it all. The new guy to whom I turned it over, I checked out for a year. Gave him some, kicked the tires, as it were. I was impressed. And then "we" rode the crash to the bottom and beyond.
The worst thing about it is feeling constrained about helping people close to me that until now we were able to do, happily. I've let people down.
I wrote something like this a while back and didn't post it. I must be feeling even sorrier for myself now. But at some level there's clarity in that. This has been an indulgence of some kind, which, like self-pity, is unworthy.
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