Maybe We Should Call it "Parole"

by Frank Turk

Back in 1997 or 1998, I got my first high-speed dial-up modem for my Giant-Sized Mac LC 500-series  -- a GlobalVillage Teleport Platinum modem with the blazing speed of 53200 BAUD, for which my wife paid something equal to a week's worth of groceries because she loves me.  My iPhone has better internet connectivity than that today, so don't let anyone say nothing has happened in the last 20 years -- but also, don't let them tell you that it was necessarily a good thing. Nevertheless, because of the Teleport Modem and the Big Mac, I learned that on the internet, someone was wrong.  At that time, it was at the MSNBC religion forums, and after a time I graduated from those forums to a place called CARM, and then I graduated to the ProsApologian chat channel where my native Southern Baptist intransigence met the battering ram of 21st century Calvinism, and then I opened up a blob blog at Blogger before its was ingested by Google and became a permanent part of the interwebs.

So in some sense, I am a permanent part of the interwebs.

That link is fantastic by the way -- like looking at an ancient episode of Doctor Who.  I pity you if you don't follow it.

I bring that up because over the course of the last 15 years (!?) of internet mayhem, I have, from time to time, taken a hiatus.  If this were respectable academia, it would have been called a sabbatical, but since we're not that kind of people, maybe we should call it parole -- for the internet and its clown car full of people who think we can't see that they are coming out of a sub-mini compact with red and white stripes, therefore we cannot see that they are clowns (word to the wise: if the red nose fits, wear it).

In the past, I have taken these breaks from my various perches in order to remind myself that, at the end of it, this is the internet and not, for example, my family or my local church.  It's the internet and not even the real world.  Not anything like the real world -- it really is a lot more like a comic book than anyone wants to openly admit.  It has side-effects that look like radioactive mutations and weird costumes which people invent for themselves to run around in and think of themselves as heroes -- when they are, instead, such a mix of comic and macabre that they make some adults laugh, but mostly they are scaring the children.

{sigh.}

All that to say that it's time for my next hiatus, for the sake of getting the right things back in order in my life.  I'm not hardly quitting writing, or from Twitter (as Twitter - but I won't be microblogging from Twitter) but I am on a very disciplined vacation from this blog and my other "serious" (heh, as if) blogs from today until such a time that the side effects of blogging are again funny and useful to me rather than discouraging, frustrating and scary.

I have no idea how long it will last, but if you need to get in touch with me for any reason except blogging, please do get back in touch with me at frank@iturk.com.

Play well with others.  Be in the Lord's house with the Lord's people on the Lord's day.  Remember that Jesus meant "you personally" when he said all those things.  Try to do something else once in a while, Like Ministry.

---