There are times when I think that it would be best to sometimes cut myself off from the world and go live on a square of land somewhere with my wife and dogs and try to grow and hunt all my own food. For a variety of reasons, this past month has been one of those times, which is pretty much the major reason I haven’t posted anything here for over thirty days now.

I’m not the type of person to rant (okay, sometimes I do), but just in case I’m looking at my site about five years down the road and wonder what my problem was, here are just a few of the things that made me want to get off the grid…

  • Pet Food Recall – Fortunately we feed both of our dogs Canidae (which I highly recommend), but the fact that such a high-scale food contamination got through the system makes me think that the FDA doesn’t have very good controls in place. In the past couple days, they’ve expanded their probe and it seems that contaminated gluten may have made it into human food as well. Whee!
  • Virginia Tech Shooting – Anytime a shooting takes place, it bums me out, but as someone who works on a University campus, this one hit home a little closer. The news coverage (and how much attention was given to the murderers tapes) made me ill and hate our broadcast media even more. At least I rarely watch television.
  • The Omnivore’s Dilemma – I’ll write more about this when I’m done reading it (which should be soon), but I will say that it’s the most enlightening (not always in a good way) book that I’ve read in some time. It’s already started to make me think even more about what I eat (when I already thought I ate well to begin with).
  • Kurt Vonnegut Jr. RIP – I think I can safely say that Vonnegut was one of my favorite authors. There are others at the top of the list that I love for different reasons, but there was something about how Vonnegut captured the joy and absurdity of the human condition that really made him unique. One of the only writer/musician/artist deaths that has truly made me really sad.

There are plenty of other things that haven’t exactly added to me wanting to embrace the world, but at the same time I haven’t exactly coiled up into a ball and been unproductive either. As has been the case for large parts of the past year, I’ve been working on music when I get the chance, and I’m closing in on review number 2000 over in my music review section. To celebrate, I’m doing some things over there that are kind of fun (including giving away music and putting up mixes for download), so please do check that out.

I’ll end this with one of my favorite Vonnegut quotes, and I will be back in less than a month.

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’” – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.