Boy – I’ve been waiting for this day!
It’s the day after the day after the election, and that means we’re finally done. No more polls or pundits; no more political ads!
Normalcy can return to the Montana political sphere as we stop biting one another’s throats and once again start talking about the issues.
Yeah…right.
For my part, I’m not going to talk about any issues…or even read about them, if I can help it.
You see, as we approach the holiday season we also get into the slow times. There’s not much happening besides boring legislative posturing for the upcoming session.
I’m not interested in the upcoming session at all, in fact. Maybe I will be in two months, but only if I stop paying attention to all the bullshit now.
Believe me, there’s gonna be a lot of bullshit, most especially on the national level.
So I’m going to stop paying attention, or at least try to. It’ll be nice to not ‘waste’ so many hours each day chasing the tail of ‘the news.’ Still, I'm not sure what else I'll do.
I see Don Pogreba over at Montana Post has much the same idea.
On my end, I’ve even deleted my Facebook account so I don’t have to see anything there. Takes a month for the damn thing to get deleted, but yesterday was the day. Yeah, I’ve been thinking about taking a break for awhile.
When it comes to Twitter, don’t expect to see me there at all.
For this site, I think I’ll still throw up the Open Post Fridays so people can voice their thoughts or ask questions. I don’t think there’ll be that many comments, though, so those might end too.
A big reason is that so few visit this site anyways. Sometimes I come across political types from around the state, and they’ll mention that they read my site or that it gets noticed more than I think.
I’m just not seeing it.
I’ve gotten 25,000 unique visitors over the past month and 118,000 page views on this site. Around 800 different people check the site out each day.
Over two-thirds come for the articles I wrote years ago, however…articles that don’t have anything to do with our current Montana political discussion. Things like celebrities or UFOs or writing tips or any number of disparate, historical stories that I’ve been putting up for over 5 years now.
In fact, if I had to make an educated guess about how many people actually read the new articles that appear on this site, I’d say just 60-80 people on average, with some of the particularly ‘juicy’ articles getting 150 to 200 people.
Nope, it ain’t a lot to write home about.
So I can guarantee that this site will be very slow for the next 7-8 weeks, and maybe longer than that.
Now, I can’t lie – the occasional post besides Fridays may appear, but don’t expect much. We’ll be going from around 20 posts each month down to 4 or 5…though I might put a few things up on the Writing Blog.
And so it is.
You’ll still have Reptile Dysfunction informing you about Missoula issues, as well as Flathead Memo giving you some ideas from up there. The Montana Free Press is starting up again ahead of the legislature, and Missoula Current continues to put out stories the newspapers don’t.
When it comes to the news, there’s plenty of options to choose from.
So stay informed…or just get away from it all if you so choose. The second course appeals to me.
Thanks!