re: blogging
I can't say for sure why I started blogging, or what exactly the reason was when I went on extended hiatus from the blog, but I do know that once I had stopped I eventually began to feel disconnected from some of my good friends. It took me a little while to realize that these two things were related. So I started blogging again, and I feel in some small way that I am in closer touch now with some good friends, many of whom are scattered far and wide. I also feel like I need to be able to say with some clarity what I think about certain things. Not the usual bloggy stuff, no news of the day sorts of things, but big questions. I don't need to provide big answers, in fact I hope to be concise, perhaps even pithy. But most of these questions are things that I think about often and that I have talked about often with all the folks who read the blog. So the blog, in my mind, is sort of an imagined conversation with people I like talking to, about things I like talking about. Bully for me! What sorts of questions? Well, the sort of questions that when you put them all together might constitute a worldview of sorts: life, happiness, death, meaning, age, memory, God, morality, all kinds of shit. The blog is also sort of an interweb filing cabinet, where I keep certain things that I don't necessarily need around all the time, but that I would like to have a look at again someday, when I've forgotten it, so that I might suddenly remember something I'd forgotten entirely. This represents something of a change for me, one that has come with age. I used to be basically indifferent to the past, even at times antagonistic to anything that smacked of nostalgia--I was, I told myself, the sort of person who looked forward, at least until the point when the future became a frightening empty canvas, and then I tried to focus on the present. But recently I've come to realize, for myself, that memory is an ephemeral thing and I should not take the past for granted. So I've started trying to remember some things. It is tricky business. But I find it worth the effort. And the blog will help with that someday I think.
