Volume 1 Episode 11
So, I haven’t written in a while. For those of you who are following along, the last post was (is) a bit of a cheese grater for the emotions. I was (am) a bit spent emotionally form it. That particular post was a long time coming. I had walked a friend of mine through that story a couple of weeks prior to writing it, and I went into a shell to recover after just talking through it. This time, I commited it to paper, and to you, and well, I needed to just be away from this for a time. Well, a month slipped away. I should not go that long between writing, but I did, let’s move on.
I’ve had a number of smaller thoughts/issues/concerns that I was hoping would come together into something that I would be able to write about. I guess I should explain that. Up to this point, from the beginning of the blog, I would get an idea, and then mull it over, and then, the brilliant prose (sarcasm) you’ve been reading would appear. Well, the ideas were showing up, but after the mulling, they would just sort of fall away. They weren’t writing themselves…So here I am now, in front of the keyboard, working it out, so to speak.
One of the ideas was brought about from a conversation I had with someone that I enjoy an occasional political discussion. For context, the crisis in Egypt was just beginning to boil up again, and my friend stated that he had read many comments from Egypt that sounded remarkable similar to what many were saying here, with respect to the economic conditions. There, they were rioting (pre-revolution?) here, we have institutional gridlock. He asked for my reaction to that. My knee jerk reaction was that we had become too lazy here to actually have a protest, or a revolution, or even participation in the political process. That conversation stuck with me for several days, and I really re-formed my opinion, upon reflection. I really believe that we have become far too self-important. Revolutions are for other people, I have a tweet to send, or a status to update, or a blog to write… Mitch Albom, a columnist for the Detroit Free Press wrote about this far better than I could in a column you can read here.
I have had this happen to me a couple of times, where I am mulling a blog post, and in my coursing about the internet, I come across someone who has shared similar thoughts or feelings better than I could. It usually leads to me moving on to another topic. I guess if one wishes to write something topical, one should not wait to mull, or compose.
I think that this speaks to a larger issue with me. I’ve never really had to work at something. I’ve either known how to do something, or I didn’t…it either came to me more or less naturally, or I avoided it. I remember when I was a kid, I convinced my parents to enroll me in guitar lessons through our local parks and recreation department. I never learned how to play, because I didn’t want to practice in order to learn…I wanted to be a guitar hero. Scales, notes chords, those were for people who wanted to be musicians. I wanted to be Pete Townsend. It’s another of the things that this blog should be doing for me; forcing me to work on something that does and doesn’t come easily all the time. Here’s to me keeping writing.
