Thank You

A little overwhelmed by the thought of trying to respond to all the comments; I want to answer each of them at length, which is impossible if I'm to pass my massage & pathology classes.

So, in order not invidiously to particularize, here, I will just say: even if mole goes the way of all talpidae, I won't just disappear -- the temptation of having an audience for my writing will never be one I'll be able to resist for long, for one thing, and for another, you all have my email address. And I am very attached to you all. (There are a few of you who generally respond to me by email, not by comment: one of you indicated that you thought this would put you into a different and less important category for me. It doesn't.)

I've thought long and hard about what Lori of Chatoyance said:

If one views these venues as a public form of private practice -- as a place where one does one's arpeggios and riffs, and shares in the community of others doing such -- then perhaps the practice is a bit stale and it will take pushing through.

Mole has been a practice journal, a place for occasional essays, and a stage for amateur poetry and drawing. The practice journal might have to go private -- there are patterns in it that aren't altogether healthy, which are exacerbated by its being public. The rest is bound to surface in one form or another. I have repeatedly said that I don't take my poetry or drawing seriously. There are good reasons for this, but it may be time to drop my (too much protested) amateur status and take one or both seriously. The immediate result of this would be, of course, a conspicuous drop in quality. If I go that way, here or elsewhere, I hope you'll bear with me. Sometimes, like a wasp caught in a sash window, you have to go backwards to go forwards.