blog

In the beginning I have reasons to write this blog. Discipline is one. I want the rigour of writing every day, so set my aim at 365 posts from January 1 to December 31. So far, so good. This is post number 153. As often as I can I write my post on the day of the post, but have written four on a Saturday or Sunday after a busy week.

I want to improve my writing and believe I have, though ultimately that’s a judgment for others. I write in first person present tense for no other reason than discipline, consistency and immediacy. It’s not always easy. Sometimes I slip into the style of whatever book I’m reading on the day.

No themes consciously occupy me, though some dog’s testicles are obvious. I mind-map some posts, but often just start writing and wait to see what emerges. Seldom do I know where a post might end.

I’m sixty, and when the year begins, unemployed, an interesting situation at an interesting time of life, although all ages are interesting. Sixty interests me because youth is long gone. Being-as-young-as-you-feel is both cliché and nonsense. Middle age is gone too, depositing me in some limbo between middle-aged and old. I want to write about that.

I wonder am I writing for posterity. Do I want my children, and theirs, to read what I did, what I thought, at 60? And the blog now encompasses 27 places I have lived at, twenty-seven stages of my life, twenty-seven confessions and concessions about who I am or was.

Blogs sometimes evolve into other things, memoirs, novels. If I reread 365 pages on New Year’s Day 2013, will something bigger jump out and bite me?

I agonise about what to say and what, if anything, should be left unsaid. Should I name someone, bag someone, slander someone? Anyone who really wants to know my identity could figure it out, and hence the identities of my children certainly, my good woman possibly, and others mentioned along the way just maybe.

I write because I’m a wanker, a hopelessly self-absorbed egoist. The grand irony, the big paradox, is that while life is profoundly absurd in a meaningless world, trying to make sense of it is all we have. I have but one life to live, one life to explore, one life to be absorbed by.

A writing teacher long ago said that writers write either from imagination or experience. I knew immediately that imagination was out of the question for me. I have some, but it’s invested elsewhere.

So I continue to write, mostly exploring me, sometimes through the prism of other lives, and sometimes marvelling at those other lives. In the meantime …