Stumped – Blogger on a Short Leash

Sometimes
the Dowbrigade feels stumped for subjects to Blog on. It’s not that your
faithful correspondent lacks
for ideas, rants or motivation.  Rather, it is that so many fecund
fields are off-limits to our free-ranging interest.

We cannot blog about our place of full-time employment,
after an unfortunate incident last semester in which only our wicked wit
saved us from untimely termination. We had been observing a self-imposed
ban on blogging about our current class or individual students for years,
which has since been broadened to include anything even tangentially related
to the Institution that Cannot be Named.

We cannot blog about our part-time, consulting clients
either, as they have indicated a willingness to cancel our contracts if
their organizations are in any way associated with the Dowbrigade.  This
may be because many of their clients are government agencies.

We cannot blog about the intimate details of our married
life, as we know Norma Yvonne reads the Dowbrigade, and its a bad idea
to share a bed with one of your expository subjects. We cannot blog about
our very interesting brothers and sister, since some of them have sensitive
government jobs and, after all, we really want to be invited to Thanksgiving
Dinner at Grandma’s.

We cannot blog about drugs, except in the most clinical
and impersonal terms, on advice from our attorney. For the same reason, we
cannot blog about a number of our previous adventures and activities, at
least until the statute of limitations expires.  And for some actions,
there is no statute of limitations.

We cannot blog about sex, in any meaningful or anecdotal
way. See above reference to Norma Yvonne.

In fact, we cannot blog about women, since if experience
has taught us anything, it is that we understand less than nothing about the opposite
sex. That is, much of what we thought we understood about them has been proven disastrously wrong.

That pretty much leaves politics, sports and our cats.
Even there, we have to be careful.  If we wrote what we really think
about the political situation in this country, we would undoubtedly be
institutionalized, assassinated or exiled.

We are reduced to meta-blogging like this, and reprinting
amusing minutiae and telling details from the media pool in which we tread
water,
waiting for good fortune or bad to deliver us from this literary purgatory.