Another Day, Another Verbose Exploration of Nothing

Blogs used to be short and spontaneous. Still can be. I need to work on not being so damn serious.

This one's about done. Will expand on that later.

Spent the evening in my neighbor's garage assembling his new ping pong table and drinking beer from the kegerator. Lockdown, home of the Folsom Prison Brews. Pretty good stuff: Dark and heady with a rich nutty taste and just the slightest ale-like kickback. I actually like it better than the standard for local ales, Sierra Nevada, which comes out of Chico and I believe is distributed nationally.

Speakin' o' Chico, my mother was born there, because her parents eloped to there, because her father's family lived there, because her father's father had worked for Mrs. Bidwell and I guess they stuck around awhile after her death. It's through this connection that I'm only six degrees from Abraham Lincoln.

Says at Wikipedia that she knew John Muir. Well, I don't need that, I'm only two degrees from him thanks to my paternal grandfather, so nyah.

It's funny: This blog is now starved of interesting content in part because some of the good stuff gets said at Facebook, or in comments there, or in comments at other blogs, or even (surprisingly enough) in actual conversations with actual people. It's the latter that I wish to do more. Now, offline interaction is totally fair game for online content. Really needn't be mentioned in this context of already-said-can't-say-again. But words are still words, and somewhere along the line I developed an aversion to copying, so if I say something clever to someone, I really don't feel right repeating it here; and this is doubly true if I said it online somewhere. This is one reason why blogs (or mine anyway) are dying. Further, as blogs are to books, so Facebook and Twitter are to blogs. Ultimately, though we are all enabled for a form of self-publishing, in the end very few of us will contribute anything worth a damn. There will just be more words; and thanks to the impermanent nature of digital publication, those words won't last very long either.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, wot.

What blogs do I admire? These two, for starters. Why? Because he simply tells his truth. I stop myself from doing that. Most people do. Most blogs are purposely entertaining, or expand on a narrowly defined aspect of someone's life, or in some way or other obscure the real person underneath. Dr Zen is not obscuring. I am, because I must. I look to a day when I no longer need to. What that will require is yet to be discovered. May never happen. I've a sense that if I wrote truly and honestly about myself, I would create something ugly, and I don't want to create something ugly. So I remain vague like this, poised on the edge of changes that may never come. It's frustrating.

It's also why I keep blogging.

Zen, BTW, does not read this, because (he says) I am "an unrepentant racist". It would be enlightening to discover how this is so, but my breath I am not holding.