de-woot
I'm here because sometimes one just needs to unplug, disconnect from the system for a second in order to get one's bearings. So, I come here. What does that oxymoron mean, that I'm trying to “unplug” and so I come to my (networked) journal space? How private is this place? It can't be too private as the writer for a national news outlet found a linked site of mine and left a comment, at least, if I'm to believe the professed authorship of a comment to one of my posts which I do because of the issues raised by the author of that post. But what does it mean to want to “unplug” in the meditative space of (semi-public) writing? I mean, I know this is not going into my offline journal. It's going to dreamyskies.
The title of this piece is something I remember hearing my brother say in the late 80s. The nearest I can come to its meaning in a single word is “decamp.” Its spirit places it in semantic kinship with “blow this joint,” though that phrase fails to capture the speaker's contempt for the current milieu and suggest the excitement | fulfillment | fun promised by the alternate location. I needed to de-woot from intermittent interconnection that surfing allows and spend time thinking about myself and my writing, which is a large part of what triggered the snark in me when I wrote “The Virtues of a Second Blog.”
But here I am, at the end of another day, no deeper into my research than I was when the day began, too tired, even, to document my breakfast with Amy, the colloquium regarding race and community, any of the substantive (or insubstantial) ideas that occupied me today.