And another beginning…

I think it took some time for me to get over myself. Well, I’m still in process, but I’ve made progress.  When we are infants and need something we cry, and are subsequently fed, burped, or put to bed.  Crying, then, worked.  Writing, for me, is like crying: it solves the problem.  I haven’t written a new post here in so long because I’ve labeled the personal blog as ‘an unhealthy medium of self-promotion, self-revision, and self-catharsis displayed publicly so as to convince the writer (falsely) that some intimate interpersonal connection and mutual vulnerability exists between he and his readers, all the while accelerating the already inevitable plunge of the post-modern mind into incurable solipsism.”  But it can’t be only that, right? You probably have a blog yourself and you see value in sharing the more intimate or eccentric moments of your day and thought-life with your friends and family and anyone else who may stumble upon your words.  Writing solves the problem.  Your words may encourage; they may inspire; and, if nothing else, they tell the world of you–really the only thing any of us have to tell the world about (everything else is already written and collected in the non-fiction section).  Stories are what we have and I think, at the end of our lives, they will be what really matter to us.  Blogging (I wish there were another word) is a way for us to collect, share, and secure our stories.

I have often wished I could have met my grandpa Hank.  He may have journals and letters I have yet to discover, but I know nothing of his experience, his mind, his eyes.  Writing into this screen with terrible looking blue buttons and sliders and underlined strings of letters de-romanticizes writing, but at least it keeps it so that it may be found again.  Everyone should blog, then, to preserve their story in exactly the way they want it preserved.  I just hope we choose to continue to be genuine (edit less), learn reverence for language (try commas occasionally), reveal ourselves with prudence (I don’t care about anything you twitter), and write.

I thought of starting a weekly something that explores the etymology of words we use everyday.  I thought maybe on wednesday on your lunch-break you could learn that the word wednesday comes from a mystic named Odin.  But this isn’t helpful.  So, I’ll do what I did when I was traveling and I’ll write my stories.  They’ll be less exciting and maybe they won’t sound like stories all the time, but I have to keep doing this because I think it’s good and I believe writing solves the problem, or at least presents it to us so that we can deal with it.

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~ by Nicholas Kramer on February 3, 2010.