Rushing to Join the Crowd

Rushing to join the crowd, I too have a blog. We'll see if it turns out to be anything, or if it becomes yet another stain of bit-rot on the digital landscape.

I used to be young and sentimental. I even wrote poetry. My friends all toughened me up by making fun of me, and I must have gotten the message. I stopped writing poetry first, and then I slowly stopped writing anything that did not directly affect my income. No personal letters (just Reach Out and Touch Someone), no diaries,I learned to write simply and directly, with simple, easy-to-read words. Faux-German. Rather than use a 5-syllable word, just link a lot of simple words together with hyphens (I tried without hyphens, and it looked like German!).

The digital age and the internet came upon us recently, and we have collectively been growing along with it, I suppose. We have all of these ways to communicate, but we find that we have not got a lot to say. I get 4 or 5 times forwarded emails with some joke or sentimental message, like a greeting card (Happy divorce-anniversary to the nicest loser I ever met...) that says it all and requires only the X to mark the spot where we used to sign our names.

However, maybe something has changed (other than the fact that we have all grown older). I seem to be getting more letters & emails from people trying to explain themselves. People who I thought all left for another planet seem to be popping out of the woodwork, explaining stuff and having feelings that they have to express in emails and blogs... I am not sure I am ready for them all to return from whence they came. My youth was not tragic, but, once they toughened me up, it was easy to leave behind, like the poetry. Recently, a friend of mine who had gone on a long sabbatical from Life came up with a blog to explain the past, and, in the process of reading his, I got the invite to start my own.

Poetry looks out of place in a blog. I won't do that just yet.