Green Oasis

This is the chronicle of one Mormon boy’s iconoclastic quest to remix and rectify his notions of truth, mind, myth, love, life, and transcendence.

To a large degree, this blog has been true to that initial vision. (How could it not with such a broad definition?) Yet the blog seems to gravitate to one word in that definition: Mormon. That albatross has hung around my neck long enough, but I can’t seem to free myself from it while I write here. This blog’s audience has been primarily interested in topics surrounding Mormonism. I need to be free from the constraint of being topical.

Hence a new blog is born. The new blog’s topic is a complete lack of topic, except whatever random things interest me. I define its success by its power to please me. I won’t be checking its stats or waiting for comments. I just want a place to say things.

I will write here when it seems appropriate. I don’t expect anyone to follow me there, but I thought it would be polite to tell you where things stand.

It’s been two years since I started this blog and consequently two years since I began my official journey to “remix and rectify [my] notions of truth, mind, myth, love, life, and transcendence”. It’s been good fun so far. Here’s to another year! May it bring us all a little closer to the truth.

I try to scan the spam comments that Akismet catches once a week just in case some ham snuck in (yes, I said “snuck”). I’ve recently been inundated from one or two IP addresses so I am now blocking them from using the comment form. If you experience any wonkiness, let me know.

My little experiment in reclaiming my time and focus got me thinking about the time I spend reading blogs. I’ve been a lot more productive in my non-blog life now that I’ve ignored 168 Mormon-related items in my feed reader in the last two weeks. I’m now also reconsidering many of the other blogs that I read.

To be fair, I also wondered what value I’m providing to the literally dozens of you who read my blog. I’m not sure my own blog would make the cut on my team anymore. It’s losing the focus that brought many of you here in the first place. This change in focus mirrors my own, so I won’t do anything to prevent that. C’est la vie.

I would also like the freedom to litter my blog with random thoughts and miscellany that would certainly be of little interest to you. I hesitate to decrease the signal-to-noise ratio because I respect you and your time. You should be doing better things with your life than wading through my stupid random thoughts.

So I’ve created a “Signal” feed which will only include the stuff that I’ve put time and thought into, stuff that I suspect might enrich your life. You can safely ignore the rest.

It’s funny the things you get famous for. More people have linked to my blog for this image of Bob from the movie Black Hole than anything else that I’ve done. I checked it out and (at least for me) my image was the first result for an image search for “bob black hole”.