I logged into that Bloglines account that I’ve become afraid of; it passed the point where I could even mark everything read in a single 24 hour day, and I’ve been pretending that it didn’t exist; like you might do with that large, man-eating plant that you discover one morning out in the back garden.

Just close the door and back away, perhaps cry in the corner for a while, before you just go on with your life and pretend that you just never had a back garden with a big scary man-eating plant. I started a new garden with Google’s Reader, and only a couple dozen interesting sites on science, some skeptical sites, and some funny. What man-eating plant?

Well, I opened the door to the garden today, armed with a machete, a lighter and a couple gallons of ready-mixed napalm in a weed sprayer. Figuratively. Mostly.

I logged into my bloglines account and started un-subscribing from feeds. If it was too much meta-blogging and not enough content, it was burned off at the root. If it was amusing and current and I hadn’t seen the content on a dozen other sites, I considered copying the link over to the new garden. If it was self-important or name-dropping, it was chopped down to size with the rather sharp machete, and unsubscribed from Bloglines.

There’s some fruit to be found in among the brambles; I’d all but forgotten about gillianic tendencies, stereogum, hanzi smatter, 30something, and so many others. People I know personally are lost in the tangles, and I’ve left this too long. While I could export the full list of sites and import it into Google Reader, that wouldn’t be helping; that’d just be moving the problem elsewhere.

Half of the reason I stopped using Bloglines and reading things that interested me was a sense of guilt; guilt for not being more interested in the blogging about blogging. It’s just so BORING; I’ve done it for years, and I have to say, “Sliced bread is still way cooler than blogging as an industry.”

I’ll make it to the bottom of the overgrowth eventually… might take weeks, though.