I never followed his blog. I liked Lileks when he featured “can you believe this?” stuff, such as “The Gallery of Regrettable Food,” “Interior Desecrations,” and similar. He was a great humorist in those regards. I wish he had kept on going in those ways; I’m sure he would have had a lot of fun with the 1980s foods and fashions.
I went back to read a couple of weeks’ worth of “The Bleat” yesterday. I saw no mention of Trump, and little to nothing about politics at all.
First, it’s hard to just jump into reading it, but that was probably true 25 years ago, too. It’s stream-of-consciousness, and his writing assumes that the reader has been reading every day, and is familiar with all of his references to earlier posts.
A lot of it is (as I suppose it always was) just him chronicling his mundane, everyday life. Generally, what I saw in his writing is someone who is chewing on bitterness and disappointment. There were several times where he mentioned something really bad which had recently happened, but he was reticent to provide details (“I’ll tell you all about it soon”).
From what I could gather, he’s moving out of where he’s living now (which makes him unhappy), to a smaller/less desirable place (which also makes him unhappy). I take it that he has another partner or spouse now (he refers to “Current,” as “current girlfriend,” I guess), but nothing he writes about makes it sound like he’s enjoying anything at all.
He also mentioned that he spends several hours every day creating content for what he calls “Below the Fold” – the second half of his daily Bleat posts, which is scans of old articles and photos with his commentary. It feels like doing his web pages is his job now (I’m pretty sure that he was let go from the newspaper a while ago), and it’s all sort of joyless.
Maybe being sardonic when you’re young leads to being a joyless curmudgeon when you’re older.
He’s almost 70 years old. I used to read (and love) his writing about old cookbooks and clothing catalogs. It was so sharp, snarky and campy that I imagined him as a much younger gay man. It was a big surprise years ago that he was a straight conservative older than I am.
Exactly the same here. In fact I was just looking at the Gallery of Regrettable Foods yesterday and love his sense of humour. His commentary in the piece where “Aunt Jenny” is shilling for Spry shortening is hilarious! 
And there’s a lot there to make fun of, like husbands with expressions of delirious rapture when the wife serves them cake or pastry made with Spry, or Aunt Jenny repeatedly offering cooking advice to distraught newlywed housewives involving the benefits of Spry in improving their mediocre cooking!
As for Lileks himself, I know nothing of his politics and don’t really much care because it doesn’t interfere with the appreciation of his main website. There’s nothing remotely political there, and if he’s turned into a senile Trumpist jerk, well, at least I’m not sending him money, not even indirectly as the site has no advertising. It’s just unfortunate that his infrequent updates seem to have faded into virtually no updates at all.
This is not the same as Scott Adams and the Dilbert strip, where Adams turned into an extreme far-right Trumpist and lunatic and some of it started to seep into the comic which also started to become much less funny. That still doesn’t stop me from enjoying his early work from more innocent times.
So love of his life, mother of his gnat, she who paid the bills, is gone?
Well, I suppose little gnat must be pushing 30 by now. I hope she appreciates how he kept her safe from all these terrorist attacks we’ve had since 2001.
In the OP, from four months ago:
I hadn’t gone back to re-read the earlier part of the thread when I spent time reading his current Bleat posts, but what @teelabrown wrote lines up well with what I saw. He’s sad, bitter, and tired.
Based on what I saw, he’s still publishing stuff about old photos, ads, and articles on a nearly-daily basis; it just looks like he’s using his daily Bleat blog to contain it, or doing it on his Substack. It does seem like the galleries on his website – where many of us first encountered him – are rarely updated these days.
Ah, I didn’t reread the thread either.
Trieste spelled it wrong, it’s www.lileks.com