Voting with their index finger?

One of the wierd things about blogging - or any of the peculiar forms of electronic intimacy, from e-mail to porn sites, that characterizes our early 21st Century - is the completely unpredictable, almost random way that these "relationships" ebb and flow.

I was thinking about this because of the comments, or lack of same, for the four preceding posts below.

The Friday 5/29 post about American world policies and our domestic character? 22 comments, and a pretty lively discussion of the subject.

The Tuesday 6/2; the Screwtape letter to Randall Terry and his merry band of Christ Crackers? 14 comments, although the discussion was mostly between Sheerahkhan on the side of the angels versus the rest of us - sorry, Sheerah...

The Friday 6/5 killer-diller Forties music post? Even that one got 9 comments.

Saturday's adorable kids-and-Portland post?

Zero. Zip. Nada. As in, nadagoddam thing.

When I started this thing almost three years ago my audience was pretty tiny, and almost exclusively limited to those people I knew through international adoption ( especially the Yahoo group "ALT-DTC06"; Walternatives, Millicent from Different Dirt, Atomic Mama from the long-gone and sometime mourned Atomic-Ranch. Linda from the old Singing Bird of distant memory; Wzgirl, from Buttercup; and Red Sand from Spitting Wooden Nickels. Beeb from Moonbeam) and a couple of local Portland friends.

At the time I got few comments and almost none on the political posts. The feedback, when it came, was all for the domestick-y stuff; home improvement, kids, waiting for (and then living with) a little person from China.

Since autumn 2007 I've noticed a lot of changes. The old adoption group has nearly disappeared; Red Sand drops in pretty regularly, and I've heard from Wzgirl and Beeb once or twice over the past couple of months. On the other side, I gave the Different Dirt crew the Cut Direct after they disrespected my Little Miss. But Walternatives, Atomic Mama and Linda have decided to unblog themselves, and seldom leave the confines of Facebook. I've noticed that with their absence the home-and-family posts get very little reaction now. I wonder if I've helped contribute to their flight with a larger diet of posts about politics and war...I hope not; I miss them - Facebook is a dry pretzel stick of a connection after the banquet of images, ideas and opinions that was wordpress or blogger...

But into the space opened by the departure of the old aquaintences have come other ones, many old friends from the old Intel Dump: Al, Publius, srv, fasteddiez, sheerah, Charles (and I hope this finds you doing well, Charles!), basilbeast and (every so often) seydlitz - as well as newer friends like mike, and Lisa and Jim from Rangeragainstwar. This group is a lot more in tune with politics and things opinionated, and that, too, mitigates against the domestic stuff.

But I enjoy the domestic stuff...

So I hope that everyone is willing to bear with me. I enjoy interacting with you all, my electronic extended family, but I am too old and to cussed to reinvent myself, like Madonna. To say nothing of how I'd look in a bustier and heels. So even though the old adoption-mom-and-family crew has almost gone, I'm going to continue to resist making this into an "opinion" blog. There will be politics and opinion, but there'll be adorable-kid glurge and "Cool Things in North Portland", too.

Because, as the Peeper would say, that's what fifty-one-year-olds LIKE.