20190828.0430

As should be clear, I am not leaving off my efforts in this webspace quite yet. There will be an end to them in time, of course, as comes to all things; whether the blog ends because I end or because I do consolidate my writings into a single webspace, as I have said I might do, or because the infrastructures that support blogging, generally, come to their own conclusions (though I am like to end, myself, in such a circumstance), it will end. But that end is not now, or the now in which I write this--which will be a different now from when it is read, and by that now, things might have ended which have not yet while I write.
Such constructions of time are strange things, things the English I know is not well suited to treating. Whether a two-tense, three-tense, six-tense, ten-tense, or twelve-tense understanding applies, moving through time presents problems for discussion. There's a reason verb confusion is a staple joke in time-travel narratives, after all. Humor relies on commonalities of understanding, and confusion about how to describe motion in time relative to the time of utterance and performance is a commonplace, even among the audiences that tend to go in for time-travel narratives--who generally consider themselves more intelligent than the mean. (Whether they are correct, in the aggregate or individually, is another question, entirely.)
The time-travel available to me, and I presume to others (because I think things would be different were other options available to people), does not oblige people to think about strange permutations of verb tenses often. Time sweeps us along, not as boats borne ceaselessly back into the past, but rushing before its driving currents and often trying to anchor ourselves in some fixed point that we thought we saw but probably only glimpsed fleetingly and that offers no secure tying-off point. What is and what is hoped and what is thought once was are generally enough. Maybe there is a reference to another point within those. But the motion seems to go in one direction, though if as a river or as a flow within a broader ocean, the shores of which are seen only barely if at all, is no more clear than such seeing.
It is all a long-winded way of saying that I'm not quitting yet. Such long-windedness might be expected from someone who has several degrees in English language and literature; I have to have some way to justify to myself spending as long doing what I did as I did, some pretense that I know something or have something to say because I spent years in studying what many of the people where I live and have lived do as a matter of course, finding issues in that doing that I and a vanishingly few others might care about--but that does not help us to address our greater needs or others'.