Journaling
Every once in a while I will look back over my blog stories for one reason or another. I have now been doing this under the Old Lone Ranger monicker since early 2019 when my son Thomas told me I should do it. That is three years and seven months or about 1,300 days. My blogging software feeds me all sorts of statistics that I generally ignore since I am not doing this commercially and refuse to let pride of readership statistics govern my mindset, but I do note that I have now published 1,430 stories with an average length of 1,400 words for a total of almost 2 million words. In the old days they used to pay copywriters a nickel per word, so that means all that was worth $100,000, but if we assume that was 1930’s dollars, that would be worth $8 million. Keep dreaming, Rich. Trying to value one’s words that get put into some form of prose is a mugs game and not worthy of the art. I have long since decided that I write to write and will probably always write (whether on the current schedule of 1,400 words per day or some other routine).
The possibility of sorting and doing something with my 1,430 stories is intimidating to me. I have them loosely categorized, but that was for reader convenience and is a very undisciplined way for me to keep mental track of whether I am biasing my writing too much in one direction (like, politically). It also strikes me that some of the pieces I think are great get little notice while others that are mere ditties to me seem to resonate more than I thought. Go figure.
I have several friends who keep telling me that I should do something with my writing more than what I am doing, which is putting it out there in the ozone for whomever chooses to read it to do so. It is always a little surprising to me when I hear that people I didn’t expect are reading my stories, but since the universe giveth and taketh away with equal ease, I am also surprised that some people I thought would read my stories really don’t care to. Some people like movies and others don’t. I do. Some people are addicted to TV series and I am less so. Increasingly, people listen to favorite podcasts and I don’t think I have ever done so. It is therefore not surprising that some people, even those I count as friends or family, just don’t have or don’t make the time to read my blog. Maybe they are simply not readers or maybe they find my musings pedestrian or even politically offensive. Either way, I force myself not to care much even though I do always get a tinge of feel good when I find someone liked a particular piece.
Modern man is all about communication like ancient man was all about survival. To prosper in today’s world you really must be a very skilled communicator. Some of that is about getting thoughts from your brain out into the world in some form, and some of that is about the technology medium or platform that gets used to broadcast your message. I never took a course on Marshall McLuhan, but I have certainly heard that The Medium is the Message more times than I can recount. I’ve even tried to figure out what that means, but he is simply too much a communications philosopher for me to understand well. I am guessing that he would say that Donald Trump perfected and then destroyed Twitter as a medium. I guess by extension, I would have to add that Twitter seems now to be destroying Elon Musk (he did liquidate $7 Billion more Tesla stock to prepare for the possibility that he will lose his court battle over fucking with Twitter as he has). Zuckerberg created the social network and took it to such an extreme that he changed our society, our form of governance and maybe our world. Marshall McLuhan must be smiling in his grave for having figured out that the medium is far more powerful than the message itself at times.
Well, blogging is the dodo bird of communications evolution. It is probably the orangutan of the evolutionary tree. But I don’t really care, since I am not really blogging. I happen to use a blog as my medium, but with all due respect to McLuhan, my medium is not my message. The mere fact that I have power statistics and a dashboard to manipulate my audience and choose not to use or do any of that should tell you a lot about how I view the medium. I am constantly amazed when I hear that such and such a seventeen-year-old influencer earned eight figures per year blogging and tweeting and instagramming their life and brain waves to their followers. I find that embarrassing for humankind. Are we not so confident in our own instincts that we need to follow others? I guess it is the human condition and that we are more sheep than shepherd taken as a whole, but this is one shepherd that likes putting his thoughts out there, but isn’t that intent on gathering a flock to follow him. Take it or leave it, I say.
In fact, I have decided that I am not a blogger at all. I am a lazy journaler. Journaling is something that we are all told that we should do from an early age. We sometimes call it a diary, but it is all journaling nonetheless. Journaling is the recordation of our lives and times. It is considered by mental health professionals as a great way to stay sane. It is called by some a ritual of one’s insights. I, for one, always avoided the suggestion of journaling. Maybe I just don’t like being told to do things that are supposed to be good for me. But here I am with 1,300 days of my life committed to record, available on the internet in perpetuity and for posterity. I hate to admit it, but I have been journaling for those 1,300 days and here’s the rub, I think it has been and is very good for my mental health. It has also honed my writing skill to what is probably the best it can be (admitting that I am no William Shakespeare or Norman Mailer).
I have made a point over the years of claiming that I am less a writer than a storyteller. That is true and I stick to the definition of myself in that manner. And the thing about storytelling and storytellers is that they tell their best stories about themselves and those things that they know best. I think it is hilarious when people say they are not writing autobiographically. Bullshit, it’s unavoidable. the secret to good writing is probably to make it not SEEM like it’s autobiographical when it really is. Watching the Mario Puzo character interact with the Francis Ford Coppola character in The Offer, you see it so clearly. Puzo’s job was to write the autobiography of an Italian-American kid growing up in the shadow of NYC Mafia neighborhood governance. Coppola’s job was to make that more interesting, which he does by adding the realism of human emotion to the story. The scene that shows it best is when Michael Corleone is told to take the cannolis and leave the gun, but HOW he leaves the gun is what creates the real message to the audience. The storyteller just got supercharged, but it is still all just an autobiography, a journal if you will.
I will continue my journaling and I will continue to try to make my stories more and more entertaining in the process, but for those who want to stay as far away from my life as possible, it is probably best for you not to read my stories because sooner or later you will find yourself exactly where you do not want to be and where I have no choice but to take you.