2B or not 2B

I was recently informed, to my discomfiture, that there are folks who read ExCathedra whom I never had any idea would even know of this rant-blog's existence, must less read it. And who know who I actually am.

I didn't like it.

Even though these supposed readers are far away, I have chosen anonymity for the perfectly rational reason that I need to make a living in a place where anything to the Right of the Democrat party line du jour is grounds for summary execution. For me to publicly espouse a position, say, on gay marriage that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton espoused for years...years...is now utterly beyond the pale.

I had assumed that not only my anonymous handle, but my Alexa ranking of 17 millionth+ in popularity would keep it well hidden away. Even though I have had 1.5 million pageviews, reaching a peak of about 135k in October 2014, I am quite sure --especially due to the very few comments I get-- that these are robotic trawlers, not people.

To give myself time to think over this revoltin' development, I temporarily turned it into an invitation-only blog for a little while. And invited no one to read it.

This brought into relief for me a sense I have had for some time now, that I am just uncreatively repeating myself. The rant, as a literary form, has definite limitations. And it's the very rare creature who does not eventually fall into repetition. Especially if you put your thoughts down in print --or pixels-- almost every day for several years.

If you've ever had the displeasure of reading the Koran, you'll know that in Islam, even God is a repetitious ranter. Ironic, no? Me and Allah as literary buddies.

I certainly never expected that today I would be writing my 4,607th post more than 8 years after I started. My initial resistant to doing a blog at all was the likelihood that I would make three or four entries and then get bored and leave it there, like countless others. I did not expect it to become addictive.

And like addictions of all kinds, the initial pleasure derived from the activity eventually devolves into a need to do it in order to avoid the discomfort of not doing it.

So, while I suspect I will keep it going for a while, I am plotting either a) retirement from the blog biz or b) starting a new one under a new title somewhere else deep in the blogosphere.

Or, I might just get over my current uncertainty and carry on.

After all, changing my mind is something I know I can do.

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Oh, and Happy St Patrick's Day to all your Hiberanians or Hibernians For A Day. Hibernia, by the way, is in deep trouble, along with the rest of Europe. Third Worlders invading and, of course, a priest is celebrating the death of his own people, along with the other secular bien-pensants.