Letting Down the Blog, Holding Up the Sky

         So here we are, just 5 days into the new year and I’m already exhausted and overwhelmed by all the stupid little jobs I have to do to keep my proverbial sky from falling for all my worthy and important jobs that I really do want to support, but…  But not by having to spend all my time constantly dealing with a thousand stupid little jobs for each of them.  And that’s not to mention the sky falling on the larger world stage.  Sigh.  It doesn’t help that I’m struggling with a very unpleasant cold right now, so I’m not exactly at my most energetic and resilient.  Unfortunately, I’m not able to wiggle out of most of these jobs because I’ve made commitments, but something’s got to give, and right now it’s the blog.  I’d already been scaling back my posts a fair bit, and now I’m going to do so even further.

        No, I’m not quitting.  I do plan to continue posting with some frequency, albeit less regularly.  I do intend to do the April A to Z Challenge.  But on the days when posting just feels like one more oppressive chore, I’m simply going to skip it.

        To illustrate my general malaise, here’s a wood block illustration of Chicken Little starting the panic, “The sky is falling!  The sky is falling!”  I wouldn’t call this a particularly noteworthy or artistically pleasing block print, but the illustrator of this little pamphlet did a workmanlike-enough job with it.  The illustrator is not named in the version of the booklet I've posted here, but this may be a reprint or copy (pirated or otherwise) of a 1940 version by John Greene Chandler.  In any case, I must say that Henny Penny (or Hen Pen, as this version calls her) looks quite fearsome, though!

        You probably remember the moral of the story, which is that it’s all much ado about nothing, and the senseless panic leads to the manipulation and ultimate demise of the foolish fowl.  In this current time I think a certain amount of alarm is well-justified, although my own troubles are very minor indeed.  How about if I keep the lights on here at “Black and White: Words and Pictures” by promising to come back next post with more about the folklore of “the sky is falling” stories around the world?  I’m just not going to make any promises about how soon that “next time” might be.  And in the meantime, I’ll keep trying to hold up my corner of the sky.  If you hold up yours, maybe we’ll all be able to keep the whole thing from falling.

[Picture: Chicken Little and Hen Pen, wood engraving (by John Greene Chandler?) from Remarkable Story of Chicken Little by Degen, Estes & Co., between 1865-71 (Image from University of California Libraries).]