(Spoiler alert: it just keeps going.)

It’s been just over a week since I killed off my social media accounts (the ones I remembered anyway) and it’s been … fine. I already knew I spent way more time on both Twitter and Reddit than I should have. I’ve had some withdrawal symptoms, but they’re fading pretty fast. No, I’m not as plugged into the zeitgeist as much as I once was, but the zeitgeist never seemed to care much whether I was there or not. So I’m not seeing the downside. There are still plenty of places for me to go if I want to despair about the state of humanity. (I call it “going outside.”)

The dumbass in the White House has said something or tweeted something or done something stupid today. His enablers have done something evil. My congressman failed a Turing test again. These are all safe bets. Here’s how they affect me:

1. I don’t know what it is.
2. I can’t do anything that changes anything about it.

This was the list as it existed while I was still on social media:

1. I can’t do anything that changes anything about it.

It’s a subtle, but important, difference.

I’m compensating in a number of ways, but that’s not exactly new. I think that’s the story of my life since roughly, oh, I don’t know, 1968. I’ve dusted off the blog, obviously. I’ve sought out some of the survivors of the Great Blogging Outbreak of the late 1990s. Some are still around. And I’m finding others. And Carla is still on social media so I see pictures of cute kids and animals. Oh yeah, and family news. That, too.

This picture is why I’m going to keep the blog:

It’s kind of hard to tell, but that’s me about a year ago getting ready for the City of Florence Tree Lighting. I’m sitting in the cab of a Florence fire truck. It. Was. Awesome. I will never forget it. I’ll also probably never do it again because the process of getting my fat ass into the cab was this weird mash-up of raising the flag in Iwo Jima and the Hunny Tree scene in Winnie the Pooh. It took three of Florence’s Finest to get me in there. No one needs to go through that again.

I often joke that the purpose of my life is to serve as a cautionary tale to others. How can I fulfill my purpose without a place to tell the stories? So I’m keeping the blog. And — because I don’t want to post my email address for all the world to see — I’ll eventually get comments turned back on (once I get a minor spam-protection issue worked out). Being off social media has taught me that I never really cared that much if anyone saw what I wrote. I just wanted someplace to put it.

By the way, this year’s lighting is December 3 back at the Florence Government Center. No fire truck. I’ll post all my public Santa gigs before Thanksgiving.