This is not a blog post.

Journal excerpt:  I think about returning to blogging, so here are some to save for the time when I feel that it is right to start posting again:

Sometimes, frankly, I just feel a little silly about blogging.  Strangely enough, such afflictions rarely affect my commitment to writing privately for an hour each day, in the latest edition of a long-growing stack of notebooks in various shapes and colors.  I tell my deepest secrets to no one, I pine within the lives of invisible ghosts.  Such seems perfectly natural, but I tell you that every time I blog I can’t help but being drawn into the circles of others who also do, and this is always a soaring euphoria - connection with others! O kindred soul! Where have you been, my friend, my love?  How have I missed you all this time?  I vow to never cease,  to live even for this and this alone for within this is the pulse of something too great to name.  

You can see, by now, where this is going.  Eventually, in certain settings, the soul’s most earnest songs begin to wear the cheap and tawdry rags of desperation.  One can’t help but notice the way that so many other writers are doing the same.  Blog.  Ugly word, it begins to sound a bit like the sort of uncouth act that might be performed in the back alley off the 56th block of Broadway in any city in these states.  One can’t help but notice the veiled desperation in the words of others.  Social networks read like the classified ads of the not-yet-loved.  Read this, they always say.  Here is something profound, so many tend to offer, but not without this:  link to me, subscribe to this.  Follow me.  Read me, read me.  Love me. Here’s my handle, here’s my twitter, here’s my Facebook page.  A body grows exhausted just thinking about all the clicks to come.  Is this our world now? There’s a tendency to want to run away, and I tend, on at least a yearly basis, to succumb to this.   This is despite the fact that the very world that I am scorning here has led me to kinship with souls for whom I dearly care, and with whom I may never have connected otherwise.  

It’s disgusting, really, but I guess its only as abhorrent as many of our most basic functions, which are after all, the ultimate denominators of our common humanity.   So, for whatever this is worth, I tend to return, and such is one of the many conundrums of living as a human among others.  One is always dying to give oneself away.  So here I go again.  Look at me.  Is anyone still reading?  I don’t care, really.  I’m writing anyway, and that is - once and forever - enough.  Forget I ever asked.  I’ve got to get back to work.  

Photo courtesy of  Trisha Weir on Flickr under a Creative Commons license