Original Thought

Well, it's been awhile since this blog was more than just a link-o-rama, but I think the time has come (heh heh..come) to jump back into the habit of regularly presenting new material. Or at the very least, un-original thoughts set in an orginal context -- like quoting movies to your friends in "appropriate" situations, or carrying around your favorite sound bites on a Motorola Q and dropping them into conversation. What? No one's done that? It's called "original context" people and it's sweeping the nation.

I would set an arbitrary goal for myself, like say posting once a week at least, but we all know I can't hold myself to that, so let's just call it a rough guideline. My duties (heh heh...duties) at Tuesday's With Torii are less than a week away from intensifying, so the bar can't be set too high.

The urge to write has always been an elusive thing for me. I'm definitely not the first to say it, but often it's anxiety that is required to motivate. Or alcohol. Or tragedy. Some kind of intense emotional impetus where the catharsis of putting thought into ink or keystrokes becomes, if not necessary, soothing. Either that, or a lot of random crazy shit happens to you, and you just need to tell others to confirm that it is in fact unusual that all this stuff happens to you for some reason. For me personally, I have always looked at this site and TWT as more of an exercise in writing. Sure, catharsis has been a large part of the equation in the past (see The Purification -- actually, don't, it's depressing), but I genuinely enjoy the act of writing for the act itself, and the pipe dream that exists (WARNING: self-indulgence ahead) deep in the recesses of my mind that I might one day retire and try to write as a retirement gig. I'll probably end up just playing a lot of golf. And when all in your life is genuinely just...good...nay great(!)...the activation energy required to sit down at the computer and pound something out is just that much greater than the energy required to page through the Tivo list for something you might have missed last week. Plus, good news is just not that entertaining -- made up news is much better. Please flip to Fox News for verification.

Trickier yet is that entertainment value and the personal details of one's life are in humor disharmony. I don't care what you ate for breakfast or how many reps you did at the gym. That is, unless, something crazy happened WHILE you were eating breakfast, like your Alphabits spelling out sentences imploring you to kill your neighbors and family. Now THAT is m-fing interesting.

There is also a delicate balance here of personal revelation and relative anonymity. The fact is that a lot of your readers are people you know. So you can't reveal too much. For fear of reprisal, obviously. Seriously though, I don't want to get fired because I have a foul mouth, and try to push the limits of decency with strained metaphors induced by the comfortable cocoon of The Internets. And similarly, I don't need my friends and relatives to get fired because their most entertaining moments take place in the backwoods of northern Wisconsin, where only blaze-orange and camoflauged souls bear witness. Yes, even their souls are hunting fasionistas in Sconi. And most of them have never even heard of The Internets.

So sit back and relax, my friends and lovers, and enjoy/tolerate all that my defective brain has to offer...