12-26-06 A Year Of Blogging
Today marks 366 days since I started this blog. Originally, I said that I started it because I had been putting all this sort of stuff into e-mails to people, and the e-mails were just too long. But that wasn't quite on the mark. This is more like catharsis for me. Spiritual puking, actually, and a large amount of mental masturbation. And the process of spouting all these musings and rationalizations has, quite certainly, been very enjoyable for me because I can "get it out of my system" with this output.
Back in my younger days, I effected a similar "sorting out" process by writing songs. The songwriting was mostly an emotional outlet, and it took three or four decades to get all that stuff out of my system. I tried writing a song a couple of years ago, and it was mildly enjoyable. But the need to outflow the emotional senses of things seems to have run its course.
Not so with the intellectual outflow, though. Every day, I see things or read things or see things on TV that basically screw with my own inner sense of how things ought to be. It's a comparison between the way things are, and the way things could be in a scene that was closer to ideal.
It isn't so much that I think I know a lot, or that I have any solutions to the problems facing us in this world, or even that I think I could be some sort of opinion leader. It's more along the lines of sensing that something's wrong, here and there, and this is my attempt to sort it out to some degree.
The things that I try to focus on are aspects, spins, and viewpoints that I think are uncomplicated but generally missed. Or, maybe just not focused on enough...
For instance, the president's inability to pronounce "nuclear".
This is the sort of thing that says to me, "Hey, there's something really out of whack here. This man graduated from Yale, and he can't pronounce 'nuclear' correctly? What's up with that?" I didn't graduate from any college at all, and I know how the word is pronounced. Just for this one thing, all by itself, George W. Bush is a national embarrassment of the first water.
Things like that will just nag at me...
I mean, why has no reporter asked the President of the United States why he can't pronounce that word correctly? He should have been called on it right after his honeymoon (the first 100 days in office). Someone should have stood up and asked, "Why, Mr. President, as a graduate of Yale, can you not pronounce the word 'nuclear' correctly?"
It's just a niggling little thing, but it indicates that something isn't quite right.
Before the internet, I wrote in notebooks. My first journal/diary was started when I was about seven. Over the years, I collected a lot of different sized notebooks full of my scrawled musings. It was a large pile, but all of it was lost in a fire in the early 1980's. Right around that point, I bought my first computer (a commodore 64), and my musings and journal/diary outflows changed over to digital files. There are a few notebooks that I filled during this transition, but not much on paper anymore. And I wonder about this, because of the ephemeral nature of such things.
Paper doesn't last too many years/decades before it starts to deteriorate. But at least the alteration of what's on that paper is difficult. With electronic media, however, nobody can ever know if what's written today has been altered by someone else, down the line. Indeed, a whole body of work can simply disappear when the media it's saved on either crashes or breaks or accidentally gets too close to a magnet...
So this is ephemeral. Every letter, every word, every sentence... it could all just disappear in an instant. It's not a permanent record. Quite often, I think that this may be a good thing... especially after blogging for a year.
Back in my younger days, I effected a similar "sorting out" process by writing songs. The songwriting was mostly an emotional outlet, and it took three or four decades to get all that stuff out of my system. I tried writing a song a couple of years ago, and it was mildly enjoyable. But the need to outflow the emotional senses of things seems to have run its course.
Not so with the intellectual outflow, though. Every day, I see things or read things or see things on TV that basically screw with my own inner sense of how things ought to be. It's a comparison between the way things are, and the way things could be in a scene that was closer to ideal.
It isn't so much that I think I know a lot, or that I have any solutions to the problems facing us in this world, or even that I think I could be some sort of opinion leader. It's more along the lines of sensing that something's wrong, here and there, and this is my attempt to sort it out to some degree.
The things that I try to focus on are aspects, spins, and viewpoints that I think are uncomplicated but generally missed. Or, maybe just not focused on enough...
For instance, the president's inability to pronounce "nuclear".
This is the sort of thing that says to me, "Hey, there's something really out of whack here. This man graduated from Yale, and he can't pronounce 'nuclear' correctly? What's up with that?" I didn't graduate from any college at all, and I know how the word is pronounced. Just for this one thing, all by itself, George W. Bush is a national embarrassment of the first water.
Things like that will just nag at me...
I mean, why has no reporter asked the President of the United States why he can't pronounce that word correctly? He should have been called on it right after his honeymoon (the first 100 days in office). Someone should have stood up and asked, "Why, Mr. President, as a graduate of Yale, can you not pronounce the word 'nuclear' correctly?"
It's just a niggling little thing, but it indicates that something isn't quite right.
Before the internet, I wrote in notebooks. My first journal/diary was started when I was about seven. Over the years, I collected a lot of different sized notebooks full of my scrawled musings. It was a large pile, but all of it was lost in a fire in the early 1980's. Right around that point, I bought my first computer (a commodore 64), and my musings and journal/diary outflows changed over to digital files. There are a few notebooks that I filled during this transition, but not much on paper anymore. And I wonder about this, because of the ephemeral nature of such things.
Paper doesn't last too many years/decades before it starts to deteriorate. But at least the alteration of what's on that paper is difficult. With electronic media, however, nobody can ever know if what's written today has been altered by someone else, down the line. Indeed, a whole body of work can simply disappear when the media it's saved on either crashes or breaks or accidentally gets too close to a magnet...
So this is ephemeral. Every letter, every word, every sentence... it could all just disappear in an instant. It's not a permanent record. Quite often, I think that this may be a good thing... especially after blogging for a year.
posted by Jeff Barnard at 8:45 AM
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