I'm Coming Up 2018-W10

In retrospect, my 2017 tally of blog posts — one — is at least unimpressive, and possibly embarrassing in the face of unfulfilled promises I made to post more regularly. But now, as they say, I have nowhere to go but up. Besides, how relevant are blog posts any more? Blogging per se seems a little old school when set alongside the Instagram/Twitter-verse that sucks all of the internet oxygen these days.

I am an Insta-virgin (ha!, what a great product that would be), but do have a Twitter account gathering dust, a remnant of my tour as a web-dev boot camper. A personal goal: never tweet again, leaving my total tweet history comfortably in the single- or low double-digit range. As an "old",  I engage the internet rather differently than those Millennials.

I sit on the train to work and watch the youngsters, necks bent, scrolling past endless feeds of #word-barf and #pic-porn on their phone and I roll my eyes... Figuratively, if not literally. In contrast, I read articles. (When I'm not otherwise occupied by looking out the window.) Sometimes news of the day, sometimes so-called "long reads", and sometimes brief essays not unlike this here.

Shortly after the train pulls out of the last stop before mine, I will have put the phone in my pocket in advance of deboarding and walking from the platform into the building. At least once a week, a Millennial oaf — eyes glued to their phone (no prize for guessing that) —walks into me and mutters their typical "sorry" out the side of their mouth. One day I will hear it when I'm just not in a mood for a lame apology from a phone-enthralled mook. I'm not sure how that moment will go, but the telling of it could make for a future blog post.

A post that is sure to be read by no more than three Millennials. All of my personal acquaintance.

Anyway, with the exception of their walk-swipe-bump-sorry.notsorry bullshit I like Millennials just fine; they are not destined to ruin civilization as we know it. Although they will probably over-photograph it.

And speaking of photographs, here comes a painting. Finally! It turns out that the paucity of posts is down to this: me and painting were on a break...

• I was seeing other hobbies
• My painting group has hiatused itself to near extinction
• what I will refer to as socio-political distractions not otherwise specified 

That last item furnishes the model for my return to painting, a continuation of the Banshee series which is explained here. I sheepishly admit I had to look up what banshee number was next.

Banshee XI

I felt rusty and not so confident as I went into and through the process of painting this one, but I like it okay. Same story as I sat down to write this post. No idea what I'd write about, but in the end I'm okay with how it turned out. Thanks to all that mild enjoyment, I now aim to ramp up momentum and get through eleven more paintings and postings before July 4th. Yowza!

Thanks for stopping by