The old adage "he who rests, rusts" is applicable to everything. I had a teacher who used to talk about "practicing life" as if 16-yr-old hormone-crazed high-school students understood, much less cared, what he meant. What he meant, I can see now, is that literally every aspect of our existence requires practice in order to improve, or even maintain, proficiency. From behaviors we wish to adopt to skills we wish to acquire, it all requires effort -- sometimes rewarding, enjoyable effort, sometimes pure slog work; frequently a mixture of both.
This is all a roundabout way of coming to the point that my ability to write has, I believe, begun to atrophy from disuse. The reasons are not difficult to discern. Now that I am no longer forced to produce significant amounts of relatively meaningless prose on a weekly basis by any educational establishment, I've taken the liberty of producing virtually nothing for the past year. Surely the world is no worse off for this, but I am worse off because, next to performing music, writing is one of the two things that I both enjoy and at which I seem to be decently skilled. So, here I am in the blogosphere for the umpteenth time, foisting my half-baked, obsessively scrutinized opinions and ramblings on an unsuspecting, already hopelessly cluttered, internet. This time I am determined to exercise at least a modicum of self-discipline and write something -- anything -- every day, in much the same what that our more industrious ancestors kept painstakingly detailed accounts of their day-to-day activities in diaries. Some people still keep diaries. A small subset even keep private diaries. I'm old enough to remember that the phenomenon of blogging grew out of the phenomenon of the online, public journal. No more than a decade ago, most of my friends had a livejournal. Some who fancied themselves societal outsiders had deadjournals. I was one of the latter, and I recently discovered to my horror that my angsty late-teen drivel is still stored in some remote corner of that website. I can't get rid of it, as I have long since forgotten the login information to both that site and the email address I used to set it up. I hope it doesn't make it into my obituary. I hope this doesn't make it into my obituary.
Those sites still exist for some reason, though much of their purpose has been ceded to Facebook/Twitter, where people who don't really want to write anything can post brief sobriquets and exquisitely capture the mood of the moment, and to more respectable blogging sites, like Blogger and Wordpress, where people like me can flood the marketplace of ideas with cheap, disposable, kitsch. I'm sorry. No I'm not. I need to maintain my technical skill at writing just in case I am one day struck with the kind of inspiration that makes it a skill worth having. I don't have it now. I probably never will. It's ok, most people don't, but I'll wait, and pray.
If my generation had any shame, we'd hide our externalized thoughts between two pieces of leather like our ancestors, perhaps to be discovered by a distant descendant or, for the extremely fortunate, an intrepid biographer. That instinct to hide our foolishness in privacy is gone, obliterated, absolutely extinguished by social media. It's so foreign to the contemporary mind that I'm embarrassed to even admit that I remember it, because it makes me feel like an antique. An old lady will bring me on PBS and inquire about the worth of a petulant gasbag that still ruminates about meaningless notions. Worthless, she will be told. I'm certainly not going to date myself any more by actually submitting to the shame I'm ashamed to remember. No, this exercise will be public. I'm sorry. No I'm not.
Anway, I'm going to make this go this time. I swear. I can't vouch for the content, but the form will be excellent.
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