Photo: Joestpierrephoto.com via Flickr

It’s now been more than two weeks since my everyday blogging streak ended. That didn’t take   long, did it? Time to start a new streak. Not because I have anything particularly interesting to say, and not because I have to follow some rule. But maybe it’s because when I was consciously writing something in this space every day, it gave a sense of purpose to the early mornings. It helped me feel more on-target. And I enjoyed the practice of writing.

Maybe the practice is the most important part.

Anyway, let’s begin again, shall we? A great place to start a new streak would be to unpack those links I began saving here in anticipation of having a daily store of prompts. In a way, the very collecting of the links for later reminds me of how some animals start hoarding food for the long winter ahead, as Bradley Birzer reminds us in this paean to October:

Understood properly, October purges us of our follies and reminds us that death hovers just in front of us. It reminds us that we always stand in time, but at the very edge of eternity. Sometimes, we peer over the edge into the abyss, and sometimes we glimpse the glories of the heavenly realm. But, we always stand on the precipice of eternity, moments and steps away from true reality. Any moment and any step can lead to eternal glory or eternal damnation.

Take a break, idiot.

I know the cure: work less! Take a break! Stop doing things and do even fewer things than you think you ought to! Take a week! Take two! Stop all forms of work, go exercise and write, go learn how to do something entirely else. But each time I forget my own advice until I’m at this point, where I am now: basically useless.

Who needs fairy tales? 

Don’t be fooled about who needs fairy tales: every adult who has forgotten what real things are like, who has been a tad snappish lately, who has felt faith slip. Every one of them needs fairy tales—I do, certainly.

Hobgoblins of the extreme left: On “climate change”, “racism”…the whole lot.

It’s all part of the rich comedy of American political life, to be sure, but when the media, instead of reporting on that comedy, lends itself to the propaganda effort of the state by exaggerating the dangers that only the state is supposed to be able to save us from, we are well on our way to a much more serious danger than anything that either the climate or viruses can throw at us: that of a tyrannical one-party state.

Seven fears that kill your joy.