forest

Some time in the 1990s I start writing film reviews. Without seeing the films. Every Thursday for years I consult the papers for movie reviews, and I review the reviews, sometimes up to four opinions on the one film. And so I précis a film’s merits or otherwise in half a dozen lines. The original reviewer’s initials after each précis tell me whose opinion I’m noting.

Ostensibly this ever-expanding document is the place to go to see if a movie is worth bringing home when I go to a video rental outlet, but I never consult it beforehand. Was there any point to this endless chronicling of the movies of the day?

Looking back, I see no motivation beyond the need to write something, anything, regularly. I write creative, funny, acerbic or flattering summaries. I review movies in haiku, trying to catch the essence of each.

As December moves through the days, and now with only four posts to write before my contract with myself is met, I keep asking myself what this blog has been about. Is it just a need to write, something, anything, regularly? Certainly the imposed discipline to write each day achieves that, albeit that it has grown to be a chore.

The original blog about being unemployed at sixty became something else: exactly what, I have no idea. I may keep to the daily discipline, but no other discipline applies. I write about anything that comes to mind on any day. If themes emerge, they are accidental, unintended, fortuitous.

I am sure only that like everything I write, I’m looking for the essence of something, each paragraph, each day, and over the course of a year. The essence of what, though? How to write a good paragraph? Good writing itself? What it is to be me? What it is to exist—what a life is about? Has it been to prove that Seinfeld is right—it’s all about nothing.

What this blog amounts to escapes me because it’s trees and forest stuff. I’ve been planting trees—366 of them—but what sort of forest they constitute is a mystery to me. All I see is today’s tree.

I intend reading my blog, in toto, sometime after March, to see what sort of forest I have here. Some ragged thing replete with vines and sycophants, maybe. Not serried rows of pines, I hope.

A native thing would be nice—some rugged ironbarks, some lemon-scented, white-trunked beauties reaching into clear sky, and plenty of mallee scrub too.

    

Rock on.