I started this weblog, as we called them back then, on June 1, 2005. This is my 340th post or entry, and I'm still not sure what I'm doing here. Early on I had some notion that I might be following in the path of my hero, Michel de Montaigne, but except for my obvious lack of discipline that has not happened. These things I write, whatever they may be, are certainly not essays, and I rarely allow myself to be even as nearly honest as Montaigne insisted he was. He aspired to stand naked, so to speak, where I prefer to remain fully clothed, at least when I'm in public.
Still, it has been ten years now, and that is some kind of achievement. Not so surprising, however, for anyone who knows me at all well. I'm nothing if not a creature of habit. Once I've begun an activity, it's very difficult for me to abandon it. For example, a year or so ago I began doing the Sudoku puzzles in the daily newspaper every day after lunch, and now I feel the day is somehow incomplete when I don't solve that stupid puzzle. I keep saying I'm going to stop at some point, but I can't seem to do it. And so with this blog, I keep returning, even if all I seem to record just lately is my reading.
From time to time I have other thoughts. I rail against the enormities of the day and think to myself there's something I should write a blog about. But having vented my spleen out loud (if only in the presence of my long suffering spouse) I find I've generally expended all my pent up energy and no longer feel any compelling sense of outrage. I suspect as I've aged, my sense of outrage has actually dwindled. I think, oh well, what can one do? Most of the people supposedly in charge of things are not really all that bright, and the rest of us are helpless to do anything about them anyway. I'd probably be a lot better off if I just didn't read the papers or watch the news, but then as I've noted, I'm a creature of habit.
And so I note in passing that I've been writing here, keeping track of my stray thoughts and recreational reading, for a little more than ten years. I wondered what this blog would be when I started, and now I know. It's an incomplete and rather inaccurate record of my desultory thoughts and disorganized activities during the previous ten years of my life. And now it will become a further slightly habitual record of the next however many days and years that remain until for whatever reason I stop
1 comment:
Well, don't stop writing -- some of us like reading your stray thoughts and recreational reading reviews.
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