Taking a Break

It's been a while since I've posted a Phlog.  I actually wrote one up a
couple of days ago, it was quite long.  It was about a camping/hiking
trip we took to Ramona Falls (Mt. Hood, Oregon).  But in the end it turned
out to be quite personal and depressing as it involves a family member 
who we have lost.  

I thought ... who do I think I am writing to?  These ghosts in the
machines that read phlogs, are they my friends?  Are they family? Do they
even know me?  Are they bots harvesting data for LLM training?  Are they
law enforcement agencies building profiles of everyone on the planet so
they know who is most likely to upset the status quo? 

I would like to think that gopherspace and the tiny niches of the 
internet I find myself in these days is closer to a village of like-
minded humans who have a heart and a soul.  Who would help me if they could
or at least read about our loss with compassion and not cold 
psychopathic calculation, adding to a database "ways to 'get at' this
person, should the need arise".

But I am also paranoid these days.  I keep people at (more than) arm's
length.  I don't get close, except to my wife, she is the only one I can
trust.

Yet, why have I written all these things and put them up on a server
where everyone can read?  My wife might ask "why don't you say this
stuff to me?", well I can answer that:

I do, in small parts, but to be honest any real volume of introspection
requires solitude and silence.  It requires me to be alone with my own
thoughts.  Bits and pieces of just about everything I've phlogged so
far have been in conversations but these long-form posts don't lend
themselves to a back-and-forth conversation, it's more of a one-way
brain dump, which only happens when I'm alone.

However, some brain dumps might be better just typed into a file, then
promptly deleted.  Not everything needs to be put out into the ether
for all to see, to use, to exploit, to misinterpret.

So, I may go a while before posting another phlog after this, in fact
I may never do it again, I don't know.  I feel no obligation to do
so nor do I feel like I need to maintain a schedule.   

.