2008.12.14

New Westminster.  5 p.m. 

I'm sitting upstairs wondering what to write.

  

It is cold outside and my wife has fallen asleep in the chair nearby, in front of the warming fire place that is mantled with creative Santa figures. The small Christmas tree across from me is magazine beautiful. I'm listening to the time shifted broadcast of CBCRadio2's Gregory Charles' 'Secret' theme. This has been a delightful broadcast of music and curiosities. Right now he is talking about ancient philosophers who posited that the universe has a secret melody.  

This, my first blog, and me, a gassy jack stuck without words to write. I have always found it easier to castigate others for their inanity and stupidity than to step out into a word world  of my own verbalized thinking and, perhaps, ideology. And so I have been struggling to move my fingers across this keyboard.    

  

And it struck me that life seems to have taken me in full circle. As a child and young man I said little as I read my way through libraries and used book stores. At some point I entered an age of obstreperously whined opinion. And now, in the age of the blog, I am feeling mute. Muted.  Dumbed by the weight of the googolplex of history's worded ideas.  Funny.

  

I have mixed feelings about blogs/blogging.  Here's a partial list of why:

  

1. I've read enough to know that in humanity's literate history, everything that can be said already has been. That is not, of course, ever going to stop us from egoistically spewing words fraught with hoped for creativity and/or import and/or transformative angst. (And even all that has been said before!  But thank not the stars above, but himself that Shakespeare didn't let fear of repetition stop him from writing!) 

2. Nor will that truth(?) stop the quasi- and business-educated from thinking that humanity is significantly different from our forebears because we abide in a blu-toothed age of text messaged blogs.  Our general ignorance of the lessons great literature and history does not mean that their trite truths are now discountable because we can either google or wikinize them.

3.  And, while I'm not a big blog peruser, many of the blogs I have read degenerated quickly into largely illiterate personal attacks and other puerile silliness. How will this one fair?

  

4.  And with the microchipped/web-world we are as awash in words as we are in radio waves. Our words have become so rife that they now look like TV-snow or, perhaps, a flakes of ash falling from a forest fire stained sky.  

Blogs seem to be a component, along with text messaging and e.mail, of what might be the next significant evolutionary change to literate language and communication. Literate language is returning to orality, but one that is quirkily morphed from the written word. And it appears that I have taken the leap, and will be blogging myself to death, in this evolutionary step in human communications.  (It sounds like / looks like it is time to continue my communications studies.)  

Ah well. You can now see my hypocrisy.  I start by writing that I am dumb and unable to find words to write.  But now I have written a bunch, with more to come.  And more, and more, and more….  And, nothing new to say, to the world.  But, perhaps, just maybe, something new to me to explore and discover.

10:16 p.m. Good night.