Too many…. elephants in the room?  Usually one of those is enough… unless they’re baby elephants and you’re all “Aweeeee” and squeeeeing all over the place cause they’re so damn cute.

Too many…. skeletons in the closet?  You can never have enough.  Eventually they disintegrate and are dust in the wind. You’re welcome for the Kansas reference.

No, Friends…. I’m not talking elephants or skeletons.  I’m talking blog posts.  How many posts on one blog are too many posts on one blog in one day?  Honestly, with my attention-span-of-a-flea (it’s getting better) and my overabundance of apathy combined with too much misplaced empathy… more than two posts from a blog in one day gets to be too much.  Hell, even posts over 1000 words are pushing it – even when they are my own.

Excessive posting has nothing to do with subject either.  It could be about your cat puking on the couch and having to scrub it off (okay… that happened to me this morning) to  being the victim of crop dusting at the grocery store; the point is… I don’t know the authors of the blogs I read that well.  I’m not sure I want to know all of them that well.  I want to be able to, and like to, warm up to folks.  In fact, it’s what I need.

I like to lurk in the dark corner and observe and one or two posts a day, or even a week, allowing me to feel that I’m A) not intruding and B) I’ve not become witness to some horrible train-wreck-in-progress of someone’s life and have to stick around for the authorities to give my statement:

“Well you see Officer, I was just sitting here at my desk and my computer started to shake and rumble, you know…. like a tornado, but I’ve heard tell it sounds the same as a train.  Anyway… ‘Fore I knew it, there before me a HUGE pile of train cars appears and bodies were strewn left and right, limbs flying through the air, tears and mass hysteria.  People screaming and blathering on about “the horror”.  And well, I didn’t know where to begin, so I just called 9-1-1 instead and sat observing the carnage while waiting for you fine folks to show up.”

Folks, it’s not that I don’t care… well, okay, in a lot of cases, yeah, that’s exactly what it is… it’s that I am being forced to care and I don’t want to.  In fact, as soon as I can see that someone is, or has become, some sort of “Hot Mess“, I turn and run the other direction as fast as my Converse sneakers can take me.  Unfollow!  UNFOLLOW! Of course I just realized that since I usually have on a black hoodie… if I’m running from the scene I probably appear to have just robbed a 7-Eleven.  Well, wouldn’t that just put a cramp in my day.

Apparently searching for “Blackjack” only brings up Poker images…

Anyhoo.  I don’t think it’s just me who feels that excessive posting, even if it’s the author’s way of catharsis, releasing the emotional floodgates as it were, is akin to beating the audience with a blackjack and duct taping them to a hard chair in a dark room with a bare bulb swinging gently overhead and shouting, “You’re going to listen to me!  What I have to say is very important and you and everyone else I’ve got locked up in this facility is going to just sit there and listen!”

Straight-jackets, duct tape and authors giving “the crazy eyes” aside… the safety and relative comfort of my desk chair enables me to push back from the desk with an eyebrow raised and murmer, “Oh… I need to back away from that blog right now… That is way too involved for me.  Too much.  Too soon.”

Cutest Piglet EVER!

Friends, Readers…. I am not a completely cold and heartless person.  Show me a baby pig and I’ll be all over that squealing bundle of teeth and hooves like Honey Boo Boo on a Toddler Pageant tiara.  (Did you like how I got a reference to Honey Boo Boo AND a pig AND a tiara in here and I haven’t even watched the show… I’ve only seen clips.  The Learning Channel my ass.)

Here’s my point… you knew I’d get there eventually…. I do care about people.  (A lot of the time I care too much for the wrong people.)  In fact, many of those I do care about are people who’ve allowed me to warm up to them on my own time, and while there have been “Hot Mess” situations in all their lives (and mine) from time to time, I can handle them because I got to ease into getting to know them gently.

I enjoy getting to know people, listening to their stories, asking the occasional question, interacting.  I don’t enjoy being duct taped to a chair and forced to listen to every wrong thing that has happened to them in their life in the span of a day.  I have things to do.  I do!  I know I’m laid off right now, don’t give me that look.

http://www.markstivers.com/wordpress/?p=167

I am going to make a promise to you Friends and Readers that I will not post more than once or twice a day.  Chances are still really good at this point that I won’t even be posting daily.  I want the time you spend here reading the little insights/trivialities/musings/rantlings I come up with to be pleasant.  Hipster-coffee shop-playing-indie-rock kind of pleasant or, you know, whatever fits your “today I had such a pleasant visit with Sarah…. we talked about how the world is a big bowl of nuts” scenario.  So long as we’re in public somewhere because I don’t know you that well.