Bloggus

Well, my resolution to write every (week)day lasted two days. I consider myself excused because I spent a great deal of yesterday talking. Talking is like a more dangerous form of writing. Every revision or retraction only makes your points less clear and your audience a little less enthralled. Its like the difference between cross-country and downhill skiing, I would imagine. I would imagine because I havent ever done downhill skiing. I'm also coming to grips with the fact that I may not really have that much to write about, every day. Judging from the writers and artists and musicians whose work I've always admired, I find myself wanting in a few areas. I am too young, or too old, or too white, or too rich, or too sheltered, or too lucky, or too sane. I have neither the experience from which to draw great lessons and sweeping observations, nor the youthfulness to impress others with possessing "wisdom beyond my years." I have never been oppressed, repressed, suppressed, supplanted, implanted, uprooted, overlooked, or underestimated. My only inner turmoil that fuels me is an unreasonable fear of meeting new people. The stuff of legend? Perhaps not. And so, rather than feel deprived or unqualified to write, I actually find myself in a liberating position. Nothing provides a better safety net in new endeavours then low expectations. I can continue to write, and feel that I have abundant reason to not need to write anything of quality, at least for the next twenty years or so. If this sounds to you like laziness, you may be right, but actually the pressure to hit one out of the park (another sports analogy from an area where I have little or no success) every time is like a monster underneath my bed. The only way to avoid risk, or failure, is to not start at all. So somewhere in between fear-born paralysis and dilusions of grandeur is this blog. (I'm noticing at this moment that my sentences tend to be very short and sound quite boring when read aloud. I'll be working on that in the future, but not in this sentence.) If you have any loftier expectations of me then I must politely insist that you cease reading at once, and visit your local library for a copy of "Lake Wobegon Days" by Garrison Keillor. In the meantime I'll be free to write whatever comes to mind, more as an excercise of wordplay then as any attempt to change minds or lives. Some day, when I'm older, wiser, more scarred and beat down, I'll attempt to write something a little longer than the entries you see here. I will be able to teach from my vast education and experience, with the humility of one who has been humiliated, and with a time tested wisdom. Any resemblance between the works of such a man and the text found here is purely coincidental.