It’s pretty difficult to write a post after a significant absence without writing primarily about why one has not been writing posts. Unfortunately, doing this tends to not be very interesting for the reader, because such a meta review of causality is, uh, boring.

I certainly can’t claim this post after a significant absence will be any different, yet the following exercise in explaining said absence might hold a sliver of resonance with those out there experiencing a similar list of factors leading to a similar lack of output these days.

So here goes a list of excuses (“factors,” if one is being kind) in response to the question:

Why the Hell hasn’t Scot written anything at Better Burque for such a long time?

• There’s a pandemic, which everybody is writing/thinking about and there is therefore no need for yet another essay about the pandemic.
• There’s a pandemic, which has led your humble blogger to get a full-time job requiring him to sit in front of a computer all day just like everybody else and writing about sitting in front of a computer all day is almost as boring as sitting in front of a computer all day.
• There’s a pandemic, and while the first few weeks were absolutely great in terms of walking/cycling around town, that greatness of quiet roads with greatly reduced traffic has now been replaced with somewhat reduced traffic populated with testosterone-crazed NASCAR wannabes who see “Mad Max” as utopian.
• There’s a pandemic and wearing a mask is essential, but is also essentially irritating, particularly when riding a bicycle, but not as irritating as seeing almost everyone else on the Bosque Path not wearing a mask.
• There’s a pandemic and all these excuses/factors have led me here:

• Yes, that’s a Zwift screenshot, dear readers, and there cannot possibly be anything more boring than reading accounts of pandemic-fueled indoor bike riding, regardless of all the excuses/factors leading up to this.
• Hold it, actually there is something even more boring that writing about Zwift: Writing about one’s cycling performance improvement via Zwift through explanation and discussion all about their Watts Per Kilogram and Functional Threshold Power scores.
• Because Better Burque cares so much about you, dear reader, it pledges to never, ever, ever post about Zwift or FTP. You’re welcome.
• There’s a pandemic and an election, which together very clearly result psychologically in one of two writerly conditions: A. The worst writer’s block ever; B. A complete inability to stop writing, regardless of how boring and repetitive the content.
• For evidence of this latter condition…yeah, I probably don’t need to show you examples; you’re seeing them over and over and over and over.
• There’s a pandemic, and getting back to the testosterone-fueled Mad Max disciples, everything concerning advocacy toward making if safer to walk/roll our NASCAR tracks streets just seems both hopeless and vacuous compared to the pandemic.
• I mean yes, 40,000 Americans die every year just because we can’t keep our roads safe, and that’s really outrageously stupid, but when over five times that many have died (and that’s not counting all the “excess deaths” numbers we are now expert in as part of our new lay-expertise as amateur epidemiologists) in just over six months from the pandemic, what’s another 40,000?
• Of course such callousness about an annual number of deaths roughly equal to the entire population of Farmington (pop. 44,000) is only less than criminally horrible because there’s a pandemic, but that doesn’t make it any easier to admit, especially in a blog that’s about transportation safety.
• There’s a pandemic.

I could add more excuses/factors, but they would be about…well, you know what they would be about. Maybe getting through the Election will help greatly, but who knows…what if getting through the Election takes as long as getting through the Pandemic?

Interestingly, pondering such a question isn’t doing much for my writer’s block.