Being a serial obsessive, it is not a surprise to me that I have spent years drilling down into my interest in beer. I've done this before. Somewhere in the house is my pre-internet map collection. I would pore over detailed maps I had mailed from all over the world as I followed the news on shortwave radio. Somewhere else is the hockey card collection, the 60's and 70s British sci-fi DVD and VHS collection, the soccer jersey collection and the who knows what else collection. For most of my adult life I have been fixated on something or other and usually more than one at one time. Heck, I have two banjos and play neither well.

But, like a summer camping weekend that gets you away from the computer, the break in the action as you get at Christmas it makes you think. Traffic at Facebook, Twitter and the hits to my blogs all dive as soon as Christmas Eve comes and only come up for air sometime around January 5. The break from thinking, planning, hatching schemes is the best part of the season. Time stands still because there really isn't much needing done - and not much needing escaping from. The information super highway sorta loses its point at times like this.

All this wondering about the cause of seasonal internet disinterest dissipates as soon as I cross reference the web stats to the human work week. All my writing, my beery activity - it's all just desk jockey day dream porn. Should this be a surprise? Should I feel badly that I contribute 0.000073% of the western world's productivity lost to surfing web sites? Not really but it does make you wonder. I used to say that if I didn't do this I would have learned Finnish (not to mention the banjo) by now but, if my activities at Christmas are any indication, the beer blog writing and reading and stuff are not a surrogate for long lost productive activity so much as a veneer over a deep and abiding commitment to unproductive inactivity. It's obvious. I haven't even been spending the time off in an armchair considering any new beer, reading any new beer books or even wandering off to pubs. It's not what I do. I wonder how much I really like this stuff at all.

The beery web we weave will pick up again I suppose. The hunt for another story about an off beat brewer. The thing I notice in that dubbel I haven't noticed before. But I don't mind that my obsession goes quiet at Christmas so that the more important things in life get a chance at my time - like naps, watching cartoons with the preschoolers or picking up the banjo... or the other one for that matter.