My blog entries recently have been limited to the usual music posts: jazz prospecting, notices for Recycled Goods and F5. Posts like those happend 2-3 times a week, and involve writing that I do every day. The music writing takes up most of my time, and becomes even more consuming when a deadline approaches. Recycled is done for a month, and F5 is no more than a Thursday night special, but Jazz CG is looming -- not least because of the uncertainties surrounding its future. Or should I say my future? Even as I write this I'm also trying to listen to Available Jelly close enough to decide whether it's above or below the cusp of the Honorable Mentions list. One option might be to fall back and do nothing but music and try to do a better job of it, even though it's unlikely that anything I can do will be all that great. Reinforcing this is the fact that I do get some feedback from all sorts of people (producers and promoters as well as consumers) indicating that what I do on music is appreciated.

On the other hand, my big project for the year has been to write a book on political philosophy -- a subject I'm much more confident I understand and can make a genuine contribution to. This is something I've contemplated for over a decade, although it's taken several different outline twists along the way. Unfortunately, I have little concrete writing to show for my efforts, and at this moment it seems as far away as it did back in January when my new year's resolution was to finish it in 2006 or give up trying -- maybe look for a regular job or start some sort of business. I'm not sure whether the blog has helped or hurt -- many of my key ideas have shown up in one post or another, and the constant practice of writing every day may help me break through my blocks. But blogs are monsters, and this too could easily become an infinite time sink.

In any case, my last political post was back on Sept. 24, and that was merely a short citation of a Tony Karon piece. The day before I dumped out a set of notes on Ivor van Heerden's Katrina book. Back on the 20th and 21st I wrote items about torture. (Update: Sam Brownback, as well as the so-called GOP Heroes, put aside whatever principles any of us fancied they might have had and gave Bush what he wanted: most news reports described this as "the tools to fight terrorism," but a more apt name for the bill would have been The War Crimes Amnesty Act of 2006.) This left a three-day hole in September's Archives calendar. It probably didn't help that on Sept. 25 Billmon posted a notice that he was going to quit blogging -- at least for a while, as the time pressures were getting to him too. Over the last month I had narrowed down the number of blogs I was reading to not much more than Billmon and War in Context, so that seemed like a signal. (Update: after a few days the Foley scandal hit, then more dog wagging on Iran, then, well, the outrages keep on coming: "It would, in a totally perverse way, be carthartic (in both senses of the word) if the real October surprise turned out to be a tactical nuclear strike on Isfahan. At least the uncertainty would be gone. . . . And I could finally stop worrying about whether I'm being too paranoid.")

Actually, I've been thinking of lots of things to write about. Some are totally mundane, like three straight days of record-breaking heat after the trees here had started to change color. One is a weird local item: five camels broke loose from an "exotic animal farm" NW of Hutchinson, and four were killed in car accidents. Another local item is the astonishing amount of ink that the Wichita Eagle spent on the Rolling Stones concert last Sunday: I think there were at least five front page stories, maybe more, as well as continual fretting about whether they'd sell out 30,000 tickets, and extensive reports on accommodations, juice bar requirements, private restrooms, etc. But that's probably as much ink as those topics will get.

But there are things that will show up sooner or later. I've read five books on oil politics, and have a pile of quotes. That's going to be a very important issue over the next few decades -- the recent price reprieve and the announcement of a significant deep water field off the coast of Louisiana notwithstanding. I also have quotes from Larry Beinhart's Fog Facts -- the best book I've read about sorting fact from fantasy in the news. Also have a few other books to comment on. (One I read recently but didn't feature in the Recent Reading column was Frank Barnaby's ominously titled How to Build a Nuclear Bomb. Turns out that it's not much practical help, but more annoying is that Barnaby buys into the paranoid notion that terrorists are an inevitable, relentless plague -- that they are bound to do everything that can be done.) Other books are waiting in piles, and I have a rather long book survey in the works.

Also have movies to write about, and music things. What I don't seem to have is energy to tackle it all. Health issues and other distractions take their toll. So do longstanding projects that never quite get off the ground: figuring out a mail system is a big one -- nothing reduces my brain to jelly quite like trying to figure out whether sendmail or postfix should be my poison. The website work is mostly stalled -- although I did just pick up a set of PHP books in hopes they may help. The filing -- digital as well as physical -- is way behind. The sheer mess here has gotten to be debilitating. Still, I have no resolutions. I'll plod along, hopefully producing something of use. Not as often as I'd like, and neither expert nor monomaniacal enough to make it as a blogger -- I know there are dozens of people who read this and appreciate it, but I've never had any luck pieces here picked up elsewhere, or getting my stuff published by people who weren't already friends.

Just wanted to get some stuff off my chest. Back to work, now.