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Fundraiser
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During the twelve years this Moon of Alabama blog is up we only once asked for financial contributions. That was eight years ago. The money received then payed for a decent laptop. That very laptop is still in daily use to produce the content for this blog.
But the laptop's life is coming to an end. So are my current abilities to carry the costs for running this blog. The hosting fees are fairly minor and the cost for a new laptop probably bearable. But I do lose a lot of necessary income due to the time spent researching and writing the daily post. This now necessitates to ask for compensation.
Carl Spitzweg – The Poor Poet – bigger
You can donate with a credit card through the PayPal button below.
More preferable though are direct payments. Transaction costs are less for direct bank-wire transfers, for cashing checks or simply cash. Please email me at MoonofA @ aol.com (discard the blanks) for the necessary contact data.
Thank you very much
b aka Bernhard
b-
The past 12 years… A good part of a lifetime. Does one recognize when one is being called, or does one just fall into it as into a vat of richly colored dye which slowly permeates one’s being and deepens into a permanence with the passage of time? How do we become who we become in this lifetime? What choices do we make and how do we respond to external forces? How are our values molded by the firm hands of time and experience? What brings us to take the actions, and make the sacrifices, that others don’t or won’t?
MoA has been one of my two primary regular touchstones over that span of time (The other being the radio program “Unwelcome Guests”) which have most helped me understand and mediate my experience of the external world.
While I don’t agree with everything you say (Who would? I certainly don’t agree with everything I have written ;-}), your ability to collect, digest, organize and summarize vast amounts of often contradictory information and disinformation into a coherent narrative has grown over the years to the point where it is now practically unparalleled. Putting one’s thoughts and analyses out for the world to see on a near-daily basis is risky business that goes beyond bravery. Your hospitality in sharing the limelight with the contributions of other barmates further makes this joint a special place.
While it has always been common for one to feel close to a favorite author or infatuated with a favorite artist, it is only in modern times that one can so easily read someone else’s daily scratchings and musings. I have never met you, have only a brief one line description of you from a mutual acquaintance, and yet for over a decade you have shared your thoughts with me at my desk, spoke to me while I was in bed, and even — at times — embarrassing to admit, accompanied me to the loo! Despite this, the virtuality of web interaction is such that I have only the faintest outline of the person behind the argument — something I find quite frustrating at times. I imagine you sitting at your desk, swamped by the geo-political happenings of the day or exhausted from exhaustive research, taking a break by feeding a handful of tasty nuts to your squirrel friends through the open window, your favorite heirloom teacup and saucer at hand, and perhaps an old cherished model crane serving as a paperweight. I have often wondered how you could devote so much time to this endeavor and still provide for a roof over your head and victuals in your belly. Perhaps I now have my answer.
I miss many of the old-time regulars who added so much to the joy of reading this blog, but new posters seem to regularly appear with much to contribute. As an old timer, I have had to learn the delicate art of facilely skimming the seas of comments from the regular overgrowth of dross and repetition: such is the exhuberant ecology of the unculled blog. Over the years, I, for various personal reasons, have diminished my own contribution to the project and have become just another lurker, taking it far too much for granted that this cherished daily fix will magically be there forever. And yet nothing in life lasts forever without change. As the favorite quote, derived from Rabbi Hillel, and ascribed to personages as varied as George Romney the Elder, John Lewis, JFK and Mikail Gorbachev, goes, “If not me, who? If not now, when?”
Like Ivan Illich and perhaps too many others here, I have stubbornly skated the materialist razor’s edge of life between the virtiginous peril of precarity and the relatively safer level lowland plains of subsisdence, balancing a scarcity of “stuff” with a surfeit of warm intellectual, emotional and spiritual currents of conviviality to bathe in. But even the lowliest of us, as am I, can scrounge or conjure up something delectable when an unforeseen guest arrives in hunger at one’s dinner table. I will contact you next week about a direct donation.
P.S. Although you are unaware of it, several years ago, you and this blog helped in a small way to save my life in a very difficult time; paying back that pricelss contribution is the least I can do.
Posted by: Malooga | Sep 23 2016 7:26 utc | 50
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