Farwell To Takes

Well, it’s raining a whole lot, and today Kelly announced last week that she’s not going to host 7 Quick Takes anymore. This is an eminently reasonable decision, as there are only like five of us left, dragging ourselves to a Friday post some decades on. Honestly, I had no idea so many years had gone by. I raise my glass to her for persisting all this time, and for being such a great blogger and book writer and all-around marvelous person!

I think a suitable and fitting tribute to this glorious form that I have enjoyed so much would be to scrap it, just today, and say something about blogging in general, and why I keep coming back to it, even though the world has moved so swiftly by, setting up substacks here and there (…I myself have started one called “Demotivations With Anne” and posted nothing so far, just to see what all the fuss is about), and Patreons and conquering Instagram and TikTok empires. Blogging, in this new, chintzy age is a little bit like going out and killing a sheep and making parchment and grinding up powder to make ink and scrambling around trying to find something out of which to construct a pen. If you have to do it, it’s because you’re trying to cosplay going back to nature or something.

Add in, furthermore, the consideration that I generally blog even when I should be doing other more important tasks, like catching up on my backlog of email, or reading the Bible, or admonishing children to be less selfish and lazy. Some mornings, it feels like the height of self-indulgence, not even bothering to get out of bed, but lugging my enormous laptop onto a pillow and rambling on about something that doesn’t matter at all taken against the great sweep of human history. It feels like it because it most certainly is. In this case, the facts and my feelings most perfectly align.

And then one of my mean children pointed out to me that if I hadn’t spent all these years blogging, I could have written like a hundred books. Indeed, everyone else did write books–and does–one a year at least, while I keep doing Friday Takes and Three Things on Thursday and Two Things on Tuesday, wandering up the highways and byways of the internet looking for stuff to complain about. I mean, I have tried to write a couple of books. I started and abandoned a book about suffering. That was because there are thousands of books out there about suffering. And somehow, whenever I started in on the subject, I ended up going on and on and on about the Tower of Siloam, and the repentance of Manasseh. I have thousands of words on the subject, littering up my computer, but none of them are going anywhere. And I’ve fussed around trying to write an actual story, with characters and everything. But they all end up at their dining room tables, drinking bottles of wine and staring bitterly at the brick wall of a church. Always a church, no matter how many other places I try to take them. And I started and stopped writing about women. I wanted to do a series of brilliant (haha) sketches on how women really are–difficult, trying, sinful, exasperating women who haven’t changed the world, who haven’t done anything really, but who, nevertheless, do exist. I thought it would be fun to do The Annals of Christian Irony, beginning with Eve and going all the way up to the present day to Bruce Jenner. But none of them have never amounted to anything in the aftermath of the morning blog and the pile of laundry.

When I die, all anyone will be able to say is, “She was a pretty good blogger and always showed up for Friday Quick Takes.” And you know what, that’s fine. If I never write another book and God still lets me go to heaven, I will not be that disappointed. A little bit, of course, but not too much. After all, the internet is still here, and there are heaps and heaps of bad stuff to write about. See you on Sunday and go check out the very last takes!

Photo by Louise Lyshøj on Unsplash